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Dancing with the Devil: government versus the environment
Posted by civil truth on June 16th, 2008
Todays Wall Street Journal features a fascinating article by Mary Anastasia O’Grady that brought to my attention for the first time the two-faced game that government plays with environmentalism with regards to natural resources development.
In her article, titled Why Brazil Isn’t Ashamed to Exploit Its Oil, the author provides a number of examples to defend the following thesis:
I have another theory. And mine fits the pattern of resource development – or lack thereof – all over the Western Hemisphere. It comes down to this: Where government has the property right, restrictions on development tend to be low. But when the private sector is the owner, environmental concerns blossom.
Or to put it another way, when natural resources are in the hands of private companies, the national government teams with environmental organizations and local governmental agencies to block development of the resources.
When governmental agencies hold a controlling financial interest, or at least a substantial financial interest, then they override environmental concerns in favor of aggressively developing the resource.
In other words, no surprise – give government a big enough piece of the revenue pie for its own purposes, then blocks to development on environmental grounds conveniently disappear.
In support of her thesis, the author cites Brazil’s Petrobras’ eager embrace of offshore drilling to exploit it’s newly discovered oil reserves, noting the the Brazilian government has a 58% controlling stake in Petrobras’s voting shares and 32% of its total shares. She continues,
This means that some of Petrobras profits go straight to the government’s bottom line, giving the politicians more money to spend on bribing their constituents.
In the U.S., Congress doesn’t have nearly such a vested interest in a successful oil industry. What good are corporate profits if they go to shareholders, pensioners and employees? Congress has even been denied the windfall profits tax. For American politicians there is a much greater incentive to respond to the concentrated power of the special interest group known as the “greens.”
Continuing to follow the money, the author relates the curious timeline as to how approximately one year after selling its last government-owned share in British Petroleum to private investors, members of the Socialist Party for the first time began to attack BP for alleged environmental and human-right violations. These folks evidently had no problem with the policies so long as they were profiting from them.
Finally, the author contasts the lack of environmental concerns regarding aggressive state-run mining operations in Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba with the political obstruction of mining development in El Salvador by private interests.
* * * * * * * * * * *
The irony, then, as my title suggests, is that environmental groups who utilize governmental agencies to obstruct private natural resources development in the U.S. are striking a Faustian bargain in the process that they may well regret in the not-so-distant future once they get their way with the government taking a more controlling hand in development under the illusion that this will advance the cause of environmentalism.
Rather, as we have repeated seen in virtually every other nation where governments run the oil and mining operations, once the government gains control and recognizes these resources as revenue sources, the environmental movement will get shoved under the bus in favor of exploitation of these resources for the interests of the ruling elite.
The windfall profits tax was just a warning shot, one that the environmental groups did not see, just as they refuse to see the environmental consequences of other government run operations. (They also don’t see the documented history of how government mismanages natural resources when they are in charge of the companies – which the author did not discuss)
In particular, should the Democrats gain control of the Congress and the Executive Branch, the rejoicing of the environmentalists will soon turn into sorrow and the anger of betrayal – and they will have no one to blame but themselves as they are bound and gagged and consigned to perdition.
Unfortunately, the rest of us in the U.S. will also pay the price of their folly – or rather our folly if enough of us are deluded enough to vote them into power.
June 17th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Just excellent. I hope more people read this post and ponder what you’re saying. We have choices to make NOW, and not later when this could come true. Looking at how other nations deal with these things can give us warnings. As with looking at history…sadly, liberal governments refuse to do either.
June 17th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
I am amazed Bubba closed off the federal lands he did, what with all the potential profits, er, taxes available from exploration and drilling. Musta figured Hillarious was gonna get the envirowhacko vote and it was worth the smaller fed theft. Besides, the longer the feds wait to open up our natural resources, the higher they can tax the companies out of business.
June 19th, 2008 at 8:04 am
EXACTLY. I don’t believe for two seconds the GOP is truly on board with this stuff; they have too much to loose or gain depending upon how one looks at it. Several yrs ago the GOP was against state side drilling; they claimed doing so wasn’t a long term solution but rather a quick fix….hmm…now all the sudden they change the tune when it becomes politically correct to do so.
I’ve looked into this and it is not long term. NO one has bothered to truly delve into what truly needs to happen in order to end this horrible cycle of oil dependence. Why? Because there is little money to be made on the alternatives, for all sides of the political spectrum.
June 19th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Raven, I basically agree that both parties have been largely asleep at the switch. However, one of the characteristics of representative government is that the system favors muddling-through approaches, which protects us from ill-conceived totalitarian dictats, but also acts against rational long-term planning when short-term benefits are relatively minimal.
Unfortunately, our energy policies have been stuck on drifting with the status quo because there hasn’t been sustained price pressure to force the government to lower the political barriers to energy development. It’s been easier to outsource the “dirty” business overseas so that we can maintain our environmental “virtue” while we’ve procured other nations as “prostitutes” to service our energy needs.
However, now that we’re seeing the strongest price pressures in modern energy history, at this juncture, the Democrats only want to make matters worse, while the Republicans at least are responding to a new reality. We’ll have to see if they move beyond pandering and reflex reaction to develop a genuine long-term policy, but even their pandering is better than the Democrats’ idiocy.