Big Oil Forgot To Bring Its Wallet To Dinner, Wants Taxpayers To Get This One
Petroleum companies in Texas are asking for $12 billion in federal funds to support the construction of a 60-mile coastal concrete wall that, among its other functions, will protect the region’s largest petrochemical facilities from rising sea levels and destructive storm waves.
This raises a couple of questions:
• Since the consumption of fossil fuels is the proximate cause of the problem, why is someone else charged with correcting it?
• Doesn’t this become even more clear when we consider that oil exploration is the wealthiest industry that has ever existed in the history of humankind?
Then we need to ask how they got so intensely rich. The answer is that they and their massive legal teams have staved off the efforts of our civilization to make them clean up their own mess, i.e., they’ve been able to externalize the environmental costs of extracting, transporting, refining crude, then distributing and burning gasoline and diesel. Right now, they’re using our atmosphere as their sewer; this can’t continue indefinitely.
Craig,
You have a very distorted way of looking at things.
The sea wall has nothing to do with “rising sea levels” it’s about the dramatic increase of human habitation along a coast line which has always been battered by hurricanes.
But you are not alone. It notice mush of the leftist media is indignant that the;
“City of Port Arthur, where oil refineries and chemical plants quite literally tower over neighborhoods filled mostly with poor and working-class communities of color, and where toxic spills and explosions are a fact of life. Some of the companies directly benefiting from the project include Chevron, DuPont, and Phillips 66.”
Oh, those evil Oil companies moving into and ruining those happy communities so oppressively!
Except that didn’t really happen, did it? In truth, the residents moved to Port Arthur and built homes to be close to the oil refineries which provided employment and business opportunities.
Just as the oil refineries provide prosperity and wealth for every American. The huge expansion of both the facilities and expansion of secondary industry , including enormously expanded population is the problem.
The was no problem when the 60 mile coast was occupied by a couple of thousand fishermen an ranchers, but now there are hundreds of thousands of residents and a huge expanding national asset based on the coast.
The oil industry is America’s largest and most valuable taxpayer. Naturally the government(s) has no option but to fund the wall to protect such a valuable asset and all the taxpayers living in the region.
The oil industry could pay for the wall, and then tax deduct the cost, (which is the same result). Or oil companies could simply increase the cost to consumers, or move to another location in Mexico or Canada.
None of these options would be popular.
Finger pointing is all very well, but when you have no real alternative, it’s just whining.