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Obama Again Calls for an End to Tax Breaks for Oil Companies
Voice of America
U.S. President Barack Obama is renewing his call to end $4 billion tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are generating billion-dollar profits amid rising gas prices.

During his weekly address Saturday, Obama said the tax giveaways are neither right, nor smart, and they should be stopped.

The president has been urging Congress to act on his request, but opposition Republicans say his plan would cost Americans jobs.

In the Republican weekly address, Congressman James Lankford said by the president's own admission, ending subsides for big oil companies would not have an immediate impact on gas prices.

(30 April 2011)

Chris Martenson on Business News Network (video)
Chris Martenson, Business News Network
The coming energy crunch
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VIDEO AT ORIGINAL

As the price of oil climbs higher, many officials and policymakers have been quick to say the rise is transitory. But Chris Martenson, author of “The Crash Course” tells BNN that those assurances are misplaced and that we’ve entered a new era of higher energy prices.

“Now we are getting in the period of more difficult and more expensive oil and unfortunately not quite enough to support the lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to,” Martenson says.

Martenson says investors should take note and begin moving their investments from things like stocks and bonds to real assets.

“Ultimately real wealth is solid investments that we have in tangible things on the production side,” he says. “I believe the pendulum has swung very far from things into paper and pendulum is about to swing back to things again.”
(28 April 2011)

Nice presentation by Post Carbon Fellow Chris Martenson. Suggested by EB contributor Holger Hieronimi. -BA

The oil company gusher
Robert Reich, Christian Science Monitor
Exxon-Mobil’s first quarter earnings of $10.7 billion are up 69 percent from last year. That’s the most profit the company has earned since the third quarter of 2008 — perhaps not coincidentally, around the time when gas prices last reached the lofty $4 a gallon.

This gusher is an embarrassment for an industry seeking to keep its $4 billion annual tax subsidy from the U.S. government, at a time when we’re cutting social programs to reduce the budget deficit.

It’s specially embarrassing when Americans are paying through their noses at the pump.

Exxon-Mobil’s Vice President asks that we look past the “inevitable headlines” and remember the company’s investments in renewable energy.

What investments, exactly? Last time I looked Exxon-Mobil was devoting a smaller percentage of its earnings to renewables than most other oil companies, including the errant BP.

In point of fact, no oil company is investing much in renewables — precisely because they’ve got such money gusher going from oil. Those other oil companies also had a banner first quarter, compounding the industry’s embarrassment about its $4 billion a year welfare check.

American Petroleum Industry CEO Jack Gerard claims the gusher is due to the “growing strength in our economy.”

Baloney.
(29 April 2011)

The Oil War at Home
William S. Becker, Huffington Post
Whom should we blame for high gasoline prices? The president? Oil companies? Price gougers? Protestors in the Arab Spring? People who drive Hummers?

The answer to that question is one of the first serious issues of the 2011 presidential campaign. (Sorry, Trump. Sorry, Birthers.) It's an issue that could -- and perhaps should -- become an oil war at home, politically speaking.

The issue is heating up because gas prices affect us all, whether we're buying fuel, food or consumer goods. Rising gas prices threaten our recovery from the recession and our ability to put Americans back to work.

To anticipate how the price of oil might unfold as a campaign issue, we can look to California in 2006. One of the initiatives on California's ballot that year was Proposition 87 to establish a new tax on petroleum extracted from the state's oil fields. The tax would have raised $400 million annually to fund alternative energy programs, with the goal of cutting the state's oil consumption 25 percent over 10 years.
(30 April 2011)