Oil lobby: Masters of the obvious

Photo: Azza-bazoo/Flickr

Brian Merchant is one of my favorite writers over at Treehugger and put up a gem of a post yesterday titled "Oil Industry Warns: If Climate Bill Passes, US Refining Will Fall. Duh." in reaction to the American Petroleum Institute's (API) hysterical press release warning that U.S. refining production would drop by a quarter by 2030 if the Waxman-Markey climate change bill is passed. Here's the meat of Brian's post:

 

First off, listening to what the API has to say about anything having to do with energy, oil, and/or climate change is like listening to a tobacco company doctor talk about how safe smoking is. It's like listening to Karl Rove talk about how great the Bush Presidency was. The API is not interested in what's best for the environment and society's collective health, they exist to protect the bottom line of its corporate backers. They want to sell more gas and oil at the highest price they can. That's it.

 

But more importantly, as Brian so succinctly points out, a drop in refining is a good thing. It's what a good climate change bill would/will do- we need to be burning less gas and oil, not more, or even the same as are now.

 

Fossil fuels are an addiction that we need to eventually wean ourselves from entirely. This will destroy the gas and oil refining industry. As it should.

 

The Waxman-Markey bill will result in less gas and oil being sold in our country. That is a big threat to the API, so they're going to do and say anything necessary to derail the bill.

 

Like point out the very obvious fact that a bill meant to reduce our use of fossil fuels will, gasp, reduce our use of fossil fuels. Insert scary music and cries of "they took our jobs!!!!".

 

Swing over to Brian's Treehugger post and give it a read.

 

[Bloomberg] via [Treehugger]