http://www.thedailylight.com/articles/2008/08/28/opinion/doc48b5be61cd6ea770866527.txtTo the Editor,
After reading John Tabor’s Aug. 20 letter entitled appropriately “Dr. Strange Barton or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Exxon Mobil,” I would like to take this opportunity to respond in kind.
Let me begin with the issue of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and its effect on gas prices. First of all, this is a very small part of Barack Obama’s energy plan. It is simply a quick fix to help get us through an exceptionally rough time. Obama himself noted this is not a long-term solution and has never framed it that way and, in my letter, neither did I. As far as its relationship to refinery capacity, the only oil Obama intends to withdraw from the Strategic Reserve is light sweet crude, which has lower sulfur concentration and is, therefore, easier to refine than heavy crude, which constitutes a large percentage of all oil produced. This light sweet crude will have a much lower impact on refining capacity than open-market heavy crude. Again, this is not a perfect plan and hardly a centerpiece of the Obama energy plan, so it seems odd that Mr. Tabor decided to spend an entire paragraph in his letter harping about nine words from mine. Also, nobody’s saying “supply and demand” doesn’t have an impact on oil prices, it’s just not the only impact or even the main impact. Just today, the dollar increased in value, shortly thereafter, the price of oil saw its largest drop since 2004. The “law of supply and demand” is not so simple as Mr. Tabor claims.
The argument that we would have more refineries if Democrats had not blocked Joe Barton’s bill is blatantly false since Barton’s bill, HR 3893, was passed by the House on Oct. 7, 2005, and was referred to the Senate, where it failed to even gain the support of all Republicans in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a committee comprised of 10 Republicans, seven Democrats and one independent. So, let’s look at the timeline since the last refinery was built in 1976. In those 32 years, we have had a Republican president for 20 of them. We have had a Republican Congress for 12 of them. We have simultaneously had a Republican Congress and a Republican president for six of them, during which HR 3893 was passed and subsequently died in the Senate. Does Mr. Tabor really expect the people of Ellis County to believe that during all of this time, an oil company, had they wanted to, could not get a refinery permit approved? If this is the case, this is more a sign of the impotence of Republican governance than the obstructionism of the Democrats.
What Mr. Tabor hasn’t told you is the number of refinery permit applications received by the EPA since 1976. This answer is one. It was approved in March of 2005 and has yet to be built.
The fact is industry consolidation is limiting competition among oil refineries. The largest five oil refiners in the United States – Exxon Mobil, Conoco Phillips, BP, Valero and Royal Dutch Shell – control more than 56 percent of the oil refining capacity in this country. The top 10 control 83 percent. Ten years ago, these top five controlled only about a third and the top 10 controlled just over half. This has led the major oil companies to exploit their strong market position to intentionally restrict refining capacity. They do this by driving smaller, independent refiners out of business. A congressional investigation uncovered internal memos written by the major oil companies plotting this very strategy and giving self-congratulations on their accomplishment. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, as far back as March 2001, found that oil companies had intentionally withheld supplies of gasoline from the market to drive up prices. A May 2004 U.S. Governmental Accountability Office report found that mergers in the oil industry directly led to higher prices. Simply put, oil companies have intentionally reduced refining capacity. It’s not George Bush’s EPA or a Democratic Congress. The only ones limiting the oil companies’ ability to build refineries are, in fact, the oil companies themselves. That being said, I’m not here to vilify the oil companies. They are simply acting in the best interest of their shareholders, as any corporation does.
Mr. Tabor notes that Exxon Mobil, whom I never mentioned in my original letter, pays a whopping 23 percent tax rate. To put this in perspective, this is lower than the tax rate for individuals making $33,000 a year. That’s right, a $138 billion dollar company pays a lower tax rate than a worker making less than $16/hour. At the same time, oil companies are enjoying $15-$35 billion in tax subsidies funded by the taxes paid by that same $16/hour worker. All of this while the White House projects the next president will be saddled with a $490 billion deficit. We’re not going to pay for that deficit by cutting the 23 percent tax rate the oil companies are paying, as John McCain proposes. In fact, we’ll increase it. While John McCain wants to cut taxes for these wealthy corporations, Barack Obama wants to cut taxes for that $16/hour worker, to the tune of $500 per person and $1,000 per working family.
Mr. Tabor claims that 73 percent of Americans are for increased offshore drilling. Mr. Tabor’s number comes from a June 2008 CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll that surveyed a mere 500 people, meaning 365 people in the poll favored offshore drilling. Does Mr. Tabor actually believe the will of 365 people should be imposed on a country of 300 million? Also, it would seem that it is Mr. Tabor who wants to “have it both ways” as he simultaneously decries “our so-called national media,” yet points to research completed by that same national media.
Notice, Mr. Tabor’s letter did not address HR 6515 and the 68 million acres, half of it offshore, already leased to the oil companies. Nobody’s debating we should drill for oil, but shouldn’t we encourage the oil companies to explore what they already have rights to before we hand them over millions of acres more? Shouldn’t we impose a timeline to prevent oil companies from hoarding these supplies with a “use it or lose it” approach that will allow smaller, more nimble companies to come in and bring this oil to market if the larger companies are unable to? Sure, once we have exhausted these supplies over the next few decades, we should act to find new sources, but wouldn’t the better course of action be to use those decades to reduce reliance on oil altogether? Do we really want to invest billions to continue a habit that is killing us economically? Do we really want to continue down a road that only serves to deepen our dependence on an increasingly brutally priced resource?
Mr. Tabor is correct in that none of us could drive down the street without the oil companies. I suppose we owe them a thank you, but then, the oil executives couldn’t have their private helicopters, yachts, mansions, billion-dollar bonuses and political influence unless we drive down the street using their oil. So, Mr. Tabor, you tell me who owes who?
I’m always for research over rhetoric, so I invite everyone to do as Mr. Tabor says and check out the policies on johnmccain.com and barackobama.com. On energy, you’ll find much of McCain’s emphasis is on increased drilling, while the only mention of advancing wind, hydro and solar is to maintain existing funding of those programs until he can permanently end that funding. He is offering nothing new. This is not surprising, since he voted against renewable energy initiatives time and again, including the largest investment in renewable energy in American history, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, citing tax breaks for the oil companies, yet he failed to vote when a proposal to strip those tax breaks came up for a vote in the Senate. This brings me to Mr. Tabor’s statement about the five-week vacation Congress is currently on. Let me remind Mr. Tabor that Mr. McCain is currently enjoying an almost five-month vacation from the Senate. Since April 8, McCain has missed 103 consecutive floor votes, including several energy-related issues. Even for a presidential candidate, that’s exorbitant.
In closing, I’ve found a disturbing trend among letters written by Mr. Tabor in that he tends to marginalize those who disagree with him as the extreme left or some sort of secular anti-capitalist commie. I’m of the opinion that the majority of Americans don’t fall into these over-generalized left and right, black and white categories. This type of divisive labeling generally occurs when a person knows they can’t win an argument on policies or issues and resorts to personal attacks, innuendo and character assassinations. Let me be clear, Mr. Tabor does not know me, but those that do would find his charges of “anti-capitalist” laughable and inform him that he would be hard-pressed to marginalize me into any neat box. In my life, I have supported, campaigned for and voted for a variety of candidates that include Republicans such as Trent Lott, Thad Cochran, George W. Bush and even John McCain, but I’ve also supported Democrats like John Kerry and David T. Harris. I look past these broad ranging ideologies and support and vote for the best choice for my state and my country. As we stand at the fulcrum of the failed policies of the past eight years and the innovative promise of the future, that choice is Barack Obama.
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