The last barrel

What do environmental extremists in Seattle, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the Obama administration in the U.S., have in common? They are all wedded to iron-clad ideologies, to which they appear willing to adhere at any cost, no matter how disruptive.

Irresponsible in Seattle. We put a photo of the Polar Pioneer semisubmersible, sitting in Seattle’s harbor, on the front cover of this issue, to show support for Shell on the re-starting of its Arctic drilling campaign, offshore Alaska. But it also illustrates the sheer lunacy of extremist environmentalists and their anti-oil-and-gas ideology. In Seattle, they turned out in droves on May 14, when the Polar Pioneer docked at port Terminal 5. Environmental protestors in kayaks and other vessels tried to impede the rig’s progress toward the dock, but the big semi persevered.

During the rig’s month-long stay, to make Arctic preparations and take on supplies, Mayor Ed Murray tried various ways to force it out of port, including a novel interpretation that said seasonal moorage of a drilling rig and tugboats wasn’t consistent with the site’s use as a cargo terminal under the port’s lease with Foss Maritime (Shell’s port contractor). In the end, Murray and the city council did not prevail, mostly because the city and port are separate entities with separately elected leaders. Murray is one of the most radical mayors in the entire U.S., who, on the basis of climate change, is anti-oil and gas.

Meanwhile, the protesters hired a barge, dubbed Solar Pioneer, and moored it in the harbor, right over top of the Alki Seacrest Diving Park. This became their month-long platform for daily protests. They proceeded to anchor the barge by dropping a couple of 2,000-to-4,000-lb concrete mooring blocks, attached to steel cables. Unfortunately, the blocks and cables damaged the diving park’s marine environment.

So, once the protesters left the harbor on June 15, when the rig left for Alaska, the Seattle branch of Global Underwater Explorers enlisted funding help from Shell, Foss Maritime and even the barge’s owner, and conducted a $10,000 clean-up of the damage left behind by the protesters, recovering and disposing of all the concrete blocks and steel cables. This is out-of-control ideology—the protesters were so intent on stopping Shell, that they damaged a piece of the environment that they supposedly are protecting. Yet, they didn’t care enough to help clean up the mess they caused.

The hypocrisy doesn’t stop there—those kayaks that the protesters utilized are made from oil-based materials. Also, Greenpeace utilized several powerboats in the Seattle harbor that have engines requiring oil products. Last, but not least, a Greenpeace spokeswoman flew all the way from Washington, D.C., to be on hand to protest the Polar Pioneer’s arrival. Of course, jetliners burn fuel derived from oil.

Putin’s retro goal. Russian President Vladimir Putin poses a great threat to European stability. Judging by his actions of the last couple of years, it has become obvious that, at a minimum, he intends to re-assemble the old Soviet Union, and re-acquiring Ukraine is just the first step. At a maximum, Putin may want to re-assemble the old Warsaw Pact of Central and Eastern European nations, under Russian domination.

The reason for doing these things is simple—Putin is an old KGB man, who liked the way the world ran, when the USSR reigned supreme over the eastern half of Europe, from 1945 to about 1989. His ideology is one of Russian supremacy, and he wants it restored.

There are significant energy consequences to Putin’s aggressive stance. Right now, Russia controls 30% of all of Europe’s natural gas supply. The more territory that Putin gobbles up, the more control that he will exert. Sure, he could shut down the pipelines tomorrow and crash Europe’s economy, but he might crash Russia’s finances, too, due to lack of gas sales income. But his ideology is more about physical control of other people. And if he gobbles up former Soviet republics and other Eastern European nations, he will destroy the fledgling, independent E&P sectors of these countries, and return them to Russian control.

This potential scenario is validated by last month’s U.S. decision, by the war-averse Obama White House, to send 250 tanks, armored vehicles and other military equipment, plus troops, and spread them among six former Soviet bloc nations, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland.

Obama’s faulty vision. One other out-of-control ideology is that of the Obama White House. At a June 30 press briefing, Obama said that for the last 18 months of his presidency, “My instructions to my team, and my instructions to myself, have always been that we are going to squeeze every last ounce of progress that we can make.”

The word, “progress,” is code language for imposing a punitive, leftist agenda. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (now a Republican presidential candidate) has the perfect quote that describes Obama’s rigid adherence to far-left ideology—“he lives in his own world, and not in our world.”

His agenda has ranged from refusing to allow the Keystone XL Pipeline to move forward, to using the EPA to impose a series of emissions rulemaking and other costly environmental compliance items on oil and gas companies. Also fitting into his ideology was the recent statement by the heads-of-state at the G7 summit, that fossil fuel usage should be eliminated by 2100. In contrast, API has estimated that if all of Obama’s proposed regulatory constraints are adopted, it could cost 830,000 jobs and shrink the U.S. economy by $133 billion/year.

Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court slowed down Mr. Obama and the EPA, at least briefly, refusing to uphold a recent EPA rule that limited emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal-fired power plants. The court said that EPA had failed to consider the compliance costs when making its ruling. 

About the Authors

Kurt Abraham

World Oil

Kurt Abraham kurt.abraham@worldoil.com