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Six Degrees of Petroleum-Based Products

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Michael Winship

A confession: I don't drive.

The reasons are several. For one, with diminished sight in one eye, my peripheral vision and depth perception are terrible. To me, parallel parking is a skill on the level of heart-lung transplant surgery or Manolete executing a perfect veronica in the bullring.

In high school, I barely graduated from driver ed. The instructor sold insurance on the side, so his motives for passing me may have been suspect. At one point, I do recall him opening the door and hurling himself onto the street. And that was during the written exam. Bada-bum.

It's not as inconvenient as you might think. Because I live in Manhattan, with a population squeezed into less than 24 square miles and an extensive mass transit system, getting from Point A to Points B-Z without a car is relatively easy. Plus, friends, family and colleagues who drive have been tolerant and I make an excellent shotgun qua navigator.

So as a concerned citizen, passenger and consumer of gasoline and other petroleum-based products, I feel qualified to opine on the subject of oil.

This week, it occurred to me that current events and oil are sort of like that game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." That's the parlor game that was hip and happening a couple of years ago, in which you take any Hollywood actor and see how many movies it takes to get to Mr. Bacon, the star of "Footloose."

Jimmy Cagney? Jimmy Cagney was in "Ragtime" with Elizabeth McGovern. Elizabeth McGovern was in "She's Having a Baby" -- with Kevin Bacon. And so on.

Iraq? Easy. Maybe it's overly simplistic to say that the Iraqi war was about oil, but certainly much of the wrangling over Iraq's draft constitution is. The Sunni Muslims are worried about getting, as Marilyn Monroe says in "Some Like It Hot," "the fuzzy end of the lollipop."

With the main oilfields in the Kurdish north and Shiite south, the Sunnis -- who live in central and western Iraq -- stew that anything less than a strong central government will keep them from getting a piece of the action. Insurgents noted this concern Monday by lobbing two rockets at the Oil Ministry in Baghdad.

Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez? (I'm increasingly convinced that "The 700 Club" refers to the number of brain cells poor old Pat has left.) Venezuela is the world's fifth largest exporter of oil. The United States buys half of that output. When you fill your tank at a Citgo station, you're paying a fully owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela.

Chavez is employing oil as a social lubricant, using its revenues to fund slum reclamation, land reform, schools and clinics. He's also utilizing it as a weapon, selling cheap oil to Castro, funding left-wingers in other South American countries, threatening to throw foreign oil companies out of the country for non-payment of taxes, even warning that he could cut the flow completely if sufficiently irked. The White House and its pals ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, et al., are unhappy with him.

Hurricane Katrina? Its potential devastation briefly sent the already vertiginous price of crude to $70.80 a barrel. About 35 percent of our domestic oil output comes from the Gulf of Mexico, about two million barrels a day. According to the Associated Press, "The federal Minerals Management Service said Monday that 92 percent of the region's oil output was shut-in, with more than 3 million barrels of production lost since Friday."

Not to mention whatever harm has been done to offshore platforms, refineries, pipelines and the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the largest oil terminal in the country -- the only one that can handle the big supertankers. By comparison, between last September and February 2005, damage from Hurricane Ivan led to the loss of 44 million barrels.

So in times like these, with oil so prevalent an issue in the news and recognizing that it's a finite and polluting resource -- we burn more than 250 million gallons of gas every day -- you'd think our fearless leaders would be worrying.

Wrong, Kerosene Breath. On August 8, the President signed a $12.3 billion energy bill with lots of industry perks but damn little for oil price reduction, energy conservation or pollution control.

Just before Congress passed the legislation, the Environmental Protection Agency delayed the release of its annual report on fuel economy. According to the New York Times, "The contents of the report show that loopholes in American fuel economy regulations have allowed automakers to produce cars and trucks that are significantly less fuel-efficient, on average, than they were in the late 1980's...

"Leaps in engine technology over the last couple of decades have been mostly used to make cars faster, not more fuel-efficient, and the rise of sport utility vehicles and S.U.V.-like pickup trucks has actually sapped efficiency. The average 2004 model car or truck got 20.8 miles per gallon, about 6 percent less than the 22.1 m.p.g. of the average new vehicle sold in the late 1980's, according to the report."

Despite those revelations, on August 23, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a plan to "reform" the government's Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program for light trucks -- "expected to save 10 billion gallons of gasoline in the years to come." Light trucks include pick-ups, SUV's and minivans -- the gas gluttons.

However, the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, 10 billion gallons is less than a month's worth of gas saved over 15 years. "Closing existing loopholes-including requiring light trucks to meet today's car standard of 27.5 mpg within five model years-could reduce 11 billion gallons of gasoline in one year alone, 2015, saving consumers $14 billion. Closing the fuel economy gap between cars and light trucks would cut fuel costs for truck buyers by at least 25 percent."

California and other states, including New York, have proposed regulations that would increase efficiency, save money and cut carbon monoxide emissions by as much as 30 percent. But as the Center for American Progress discovered, buried on page 150 of the CAFE program is this little gem: "[A] state may not impose a legal requirement relating to fuel economy, whether by statute, regulation or otherwise, that conflicts with this rule. A state law that seeks to reduce motor vehicle carbon dioxide emissions is both expressly and impliedly preempted."

The plan is rife with loopholes and the car companies always have shown themselves adept at gaming the system. For example, under the proposed regs, the Times reported, "Ford could add less than an inch to the dimensions of its Explorer Sport Trac and move it from a class with a fuel target of 24.5 m.p.g. to one with 23.3 in 2011 models."

We have between now and April to lodge our objections. In the meantime, winter is on its way and with it, a huge bump in heating oil and gas heat prices.

This is a game we can no longer afford to play.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.