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Sometimes Oil Men Should Just Shut Up

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  January 9th, 2009 at 05:59 PM  | 

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Sometimes oil men and energy executives are a big disappointment.

When times are good, they talk a good game about being free marketeers, “Just get out of our way; drill, baby, drill!”

But when Washington starts passing out free money, they’re fighting like pigs at a trough for their more-than-fair share.

You can bet, when they start suggesting government policy, they have an angle.

Item: T. Boone Pickens, he of the Pickens Plan to convert our vehicle fleet to compressed natural gas, and the Great Plains to one big wind farm. From the Houston Chronicle, Jan. 6:

[The Pickens Plan] would require spending about $1 trillion on building thousands of wind power turbines from the Texas Panhandle to North Dakota and another $200 billion to run transmission lines to major cities. Billions more would be spent helping owners of large vehicle fleets buy natural gas-fueled vehicles. …

“The government-heavy Pickens Plan was a bad deal back in the $140 oil, easy-credit days, and it is far worse now,” said Robert Bradley, founder and chairman of the Houston-based Institute for Energy Research, a free-market think tank. “Ratepayers and taxpayers should just say no to billionaire Boone.”

Pickens acknowledged his plan is a step back from the free market ideology he has embraced for so long.

“The free market is fine, but waiting on the free market sometimes can be disastrous,” he said. “I think you’re at a point where you have to act, and we have the resources here to solve the problem in a way that could be cheaper.” [emphasis mine]

Oh, shut up, Boone.

Then there’s this from ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson (H/T Rush):

In a speech today in Washington, Mr. Tillerson said that he much prefers a carbon tax—rather than a cap-and-trade scheme—if the government takes steps to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.

“My greatest concern is that policy makers will attempt to mandate or ordain solutions that are doomed to fail,” Mr. Tillerson said, reports Dow Jones Newswires. “A carbon tax would be a more direct and transparent approach,” he said.

Endorsing a tax on your primary product? XOM doesn’t take positions like this for altruistic reasons; in fact, none of the majors do. I’m just guessing now – but I’d bet that they see that BP and Shell have them outflanked on cap-and-trade: somebody has to make the markets, after all, and who better than the companies that have already thrown in the towel on AGW. They already have massive trading operations in place for crude oil, natural gas and other energy commodities; carbon credits will be just one more market for them.

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  • http://www.fredmaidment.com Fred Maidment

    I’ve been waiting for his people to get back with me on an answer to one simple question I asked months before his first Congressional hearing:

    “Why don’t you just do it already?”

    The simple answer is, of course, that wind energy is terribly expensive and inefficient.

    I took a long look at wind energy a few months back and discovered that in most states (especially those where wind is abundant), electricity is so cheap that a wind turbine would take decades to earn back the investment in a free, unfettered market.

    And that’s without the cost of ongoing maintenance.

    Pickens doesn’t want to save our economy and promote energy independence. He was just first in-line for a bailout.

    Recommended.

  • Kenny Solomon

    In the name of all that is American, PLEASE do not even remotely give in to Algore and the abject maniacs on the left side of the fence.

  • Robert A. Hahn
      ?My greatest concern is that policy makers will attempt to mandate or ordain solutions that are doomed to fail,? Mr. Tillerson said, reports Dow Jones Newswires. ?A carbon tax would be a more direct and transparent approach,? he said.

    It is possible that Mr. Tillerson is simply trying to get the best he can out of bad situation. Let me paraphrase what he says here to illustrate what I think he means:

    Ignorant voters in the United States have just empowered a bunch of even more ignorant, but very arrogant, do-gooders who believe that they know how to micro-manage entire economies. Given the chance, these do-gooders will attempt to specify all uses of energy right down to what sort of light bulbs the citizens may use (we know this because the do-gooders have already taken this particular step).

    Given that these do-gooders are now in possession of virtually all the levers of government, the best we can possibly hope for is that we can persuade them to confine their meddling to raising the price of energy, while permitting individual actors in the economy to make the actual choices of which measures to take in what order so as to maximize efficiency in the face of the higher price.

    Our alternative is to watch the do-gooders pour perfectly good money — and a lot of it — into flower-powered cars and rubber made from plants other than rubber trees.

    He might be right.