Tar Sand
Tarred and Feathered. Exxon/Murdoch/Cheney...at it again.
It is said those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And, in my experience, to report on it…again and again…as if the failures of the past offer no instruction at all.
That thought slapped me sober while thinking about tar sands and, moments later, when running across this story on Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney and their forays into the sticky boondoggle of tar sands’ predecessor—oil shale.
Three decades ago, when just a cub reporter—my first day on the job—I landed smack dab in the middle of a multi-billion dollar story with global consequences—politically, environmentally and economically. If nothing else, both tar sands and oil shale have that much in common.
Unfortunately, the oil shale story was much too complex for an inexperienced reporter fresh off the turnip truck from Tomball, Texas. Had I recognized what was happening at the time, and had I known the history of the situation, perhaps I could have saved taxpayers billions. This story still haunts me. To this day, it is the main reason I stuck with it…and became a reporter. Here is the “doomed to repeat it” part—Americans are walking headlong into a disaster just like the one I walked into thirty years ago.
The tar sands story is just the current, disastrous and all-too familiar sequel…the elusive pot of black gold at the end of a make-believe rainbow.
It’s important to explain that two U.S. Presidents had the insight and foresight to want more than to simply kiss the rings of tyrants in order to get enough oil to keep America moving. Still, they did not know enough to spot the imposters among an array of alternatives.
Jimmy Carter was one, Harry Truman the other.
Back in the 1970s, then-President Carter tried to tackle the energy crisis—a crisis that remains with us today. Toward that end, he formed the Synthetic Fuels Organization. Both Mr. Truman and Mr. Carter understood that if the world was to ever live in peace, we had to turn off the spigot on foreign oil…too much carrot for oil companies to take advantage of…too much stick (subsidies, wars) for the people.
f In Mr. Carter’s case, he was forced into a corner. Americans needed gasoline to fuel their cars and the country. In the days and months following the Arab Oil Embargo, Americans sat fuming for hours in long lines waiting for the privilege of buying a few gallons of gasoline.
Mr. Carter, and the oil-dependent nation he led, was being punished...just as we are today.
During Carter’s presidency, the world economy had been wrecked twice in less than ten years by OPEC’s political retaliation. Once it happened after America supplied massive amounts of arms to Israel, making it possible for Israel to win the 1973 Arab/Israeli war. OPEC’s “ministers,” pissed off by America’s assistance, cut oil supplies to zero. That was the first “oil crisis” of the 70’s. Another crisis occurred six years later, in 1979, a direct result of the fall of America’s longstanding buddy, the Shah of Iran.
Mr. Carter’s far-reaching goal was to pry OPEC ministers’ retaliatory hands away from America’s increasingly exposed neck. Desperate, and willing to give anyone with a new idea billions, the Western Colorado oil shale boom began full-stop.
Tar sand and oil shale are both boondoggles. Both extract little oil clean enough to use, both take huge amounts of energy to get to it, and both tar sands and oil shale tear up the landscape and ham the water supply. Most importantly of all, both tar sands and oil shale offered bogus hope of avoiding political entanglement with foreign oil.
Into this complex, persistent mess—with nothing more than a fresh reporter’s pad and a pencil behind my ear—some hard lessons were learned.
Chapter two of my book called “ The Unsanitary Napkin,” is about the oil shale boom and miserable bust that followed. Yes, you have a different decade, but just substitute the words “oil shale” for “tar sands”….it’s the same people trying to pull the same boondoggle on the same oil hungry people.
