Somebody's Lying about Oil Profits...

In Santa Rosa's Press Democrat (4/29/06 pA8) is an article written by J. Loven under an Associated Press byline, entitled "Bush opposes tax on oil profits." Loven writes, "President Bush said Friday that taxing enormous oil industry profits is not the way to calm Americans' anxieties about pain at the gas pump, and that his 'inclinations and instincts' are that major oil companies are not intentionally overcharging drivers."

Now this is a bit hard to swallow seeing as oil profits have risen dramatically--one figure touts a 75% increase in the last year or so. This is a figure that runs into the billions of dollars, and it is not showing signs of tapering off. Terence O'Hara, writing for theWashington Post (8/28/05; P D01), says, "By most familiar comparisons, the $9.92 billion profit earned by Exxon Mobil Corp. in just three months is almost unimaginable. "

So, where does this $9.2 billion come from? I decided to check out the websites of these companies, and ran across the ConocoPhillips.com site: www.conocophillips.com/newsroom/other_resources/energyanswers/oil_profits.htmOn this site is an explanation of where your gas money goes, along with a cute graphic that is produced by the US Dept. of Energy. It is misleading, and I will show you why.

Let's use the figures on the graphic, and let us also assume a $3.10 price for gasoline at the pump. Of this $3.10 cost, the 58% crude oil cost=$1.80. The 20% federal, state, and local taxes=$0.62. The 8% marketing and distribution cost=$0.25. The 15% refining cost=$0.46. The grand total of these percentages=$3.13. Right away, I thought something was wrong. The oil companies do not sell at a $0.03/gallon loss, not if they hope to post record profits. Reading the graphic a bit more carefully, I see that those percentages total 101%, due to rounding off the figures. This accounts for the 3 cent difference, but is the least of the problems with this graphic.

Looking again at the ConocoPhillips website, I read that they make a profit of $0.09 a gallon. It is not surprising that this figure is nowhere included in the graphic. If I use their statistics, a base price of $3.10/gallon at the pump, I come up with a figure that shows a loss of 3 cents a gallon, yet the company is able to pull 9 cents a gallon profit from every transaction. From which category listed in the graphic does this money come from? The US Department of Energy has deliberately obscured the graph in two ways. Checking the figures, I discovered another serious error in math.

At 9 cents a gallon, it would take the sale of over 9 billion gallons of gas to equal $1 billion in profit, and the figures show profits larger by an order of magnitude. A profit of $9.2 billion, posted by Exxon/Mobile at approximately the same percentage of profit, would require the sale of 100 billion gallons of gas, oil, and other petroleum products in a three-month period. This is, of course, impossible. At the turn of the 20th century, the world only had 3-4 trillion gallons of oil anywhere. It has taken us 100+ years to go through the first trillion. This tells me someone is lying about the source of the oil profits, and US Department of Energy is complicit.

Marijuana as medicine...

As a cancer survivor, I used marijuana in the course of my treatment. Mind you, this was back in the late 1980's, when the hysteria over marijuana was much worse than it is today. My doctors were concerned that I was smoking anything at all, and prescribed Marinol for me. But it didn't work well, and I found that by taking half the prescribed amount of Marinol, and smoking a little marijuana, I could keep the nausea at bay. By a little, I mean less than a gram a day--consider that one cigarette weighs about a gram.

In any case, it was instrumental to my recovery. I gained weight, and was able to drag myself to the chemotherapy treatments time after time. This was no small feat, and there is something almost pathological about voluntarily checking yourself in for a treatment that will result in such severe symptoms for a week or two afterwards. Then, one day I woke up feeling good, and I knew that it would be time for another cycle of treatment. It was demoralizing to say the least. But I am alive today to tell the tale, and my tale today is the negative press reports about medical marijuana, evidenced in the headlines one reads in the newspaper daily.

My objection is simple--no distinction is made between marijuana that is produced for profit by those who choose to live outside the law, and marijuana that is produced for medical purposes. Both are referred to in the newspaper as Pot, and are designed to conjure up a public image that equates illegal use with compassionate, medical use. Typical headlines, often on the same page, will read Pot Club raided by Feds alongside Huge Pot Farm Busted--$1 million in plants seized. When I have queried our local newspaper about this issue, I have been told that "pot" is a lot shorter than "marijuana," so that is the reason why this is done. Hogwash.

When people are arrested for drunkeness or prescription-drug abuse, we do not read that they were arrested for "booze" (which is shorter than alcohol) or "downers" (which might be construed as pejorative). But it is considered perfectly fine to slam sick people, equating their marijuana use with garden-variety drug abuse. One reason for this is the fact that sick people are too busy trying to get well to take issue with small matters that are not life threatening. Another is the fact that medical users are politically marginalized. There are not enough of them to make a difference at the polls, and public perception of the problems they face are shaped by the newspapers, which in turn make no distinction between illegal use and legal, medical use. A vicious circle, that.

The stupidity of this position is further illustrated by looking at the statistics that highlight the harm done by various drugs, prescription and otherwise. Alcohol is involved in more auto accidents and violent crimes than all other substances taken together. In addition, prescription drug abuse accounts for more problems than all other drugs combined, save alcohol. But the leader in all health problems associated with drugs is tobacco, which is of course legal. The hysteria surrounding marijuana is cultural, and there are those who maintain that even compassionate use is a slippery slope. After all, what good can come from legalizing another harmful drug?

The fact of the matter is that marijuana use is prevalent, and our prisons are overcrowded with those arrested for the use or production of marijuana. Tobacco and alcohol may cause more problems, but tobacco and alcohol financed the American revolutionary war. Marijuana did not.

What are Conservatives conserving?

An editorial by New York Times columnist John Tierney, published 4/25/06 in Santa Rosa's Press Democrat is as ingenuous a piece of work as I have seen in quite a while. Entitled "Cheer up, Earth Day is over," it not only embodies what is wrong with this nation and its forgetful population, but also perpetuates serious error in its misguided point of view.

A quote from the third paragraph reads, "Most air pollutants have declined sharply in recent decades, and the amount of forest lands hasn't been shrinking at all--it's been fairly stable since 1920 and has actually grown in the last decade." As to the air pollution, I will not venture to say that it has increased, though I can scarcely say how that was accomplished.

However, to say that the amount of forest land in the U.S. has remained stable since 1920 is utter nonsense. In the early 80's I worked in the the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and I can offer photographic proof of this lie, as well as point out that in 1983 one hundred million board feet of timber was taken out of this national forest. In addition, since the 1970's the amount of replanting done to restore a huge amount of clear-cut areas has resulted in little more than a token effort. Not only is Tierney incorrect in his conclusions, but his wrongheaded attitude spreads a feel-good myth in the vain hope of countering the reasonable assumption that we simply do not practice conservation.

Lastly, his assertion that the U.S. "dropped out" from participating in the Kyoto Protocols was that it "couldn't get proper credit for the new growth in its forests," is a misleading and naive viewpoint. Don't forget our president's assertion that there is no global warming, his inability to reconcile reasonable environmental goals with the corporations that fund his administration, and the simple fact that less than 25% of all timber taken out of forests in the last 30 years has been replanted. Not much to credit, but it was a plausible (barely) excuse for the U.S. to pull out of a conference that it did not support.