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Telephone Surveys
Sep. 10th, 2011 04:38 pmThe oil industry has a new phone "survey" asking for your support of the pipeline they want to build across the Canadian border.
The first question gets you by asking if you think the price of gas is too high. Most people agree that it is. I answered no because we've already hit peak oil production, and we're not going to see cheap gas ever again. The fuel efficiency we mandate for our vehicles is laughable in my opinion. We could have had 80 mpg cars by now if the corporate teat-suckers hadn't killed all the bills in government that raised efficiencies small increments over time.
The next question is whether or not we need to lower unemployment. Of course we do. That takes zero amount of effort to get agreement on. So now most people are agreeing their way through the answers. Even though we would agree that there needs to be a solution to that problem, we certainly disagree on the way to achieve the solution.
What ensues is a glowing description of this massive project to run miles of huge pipelines from the northern part of the continent to the southern part to send oil to be refined into gasoline. Think of the thousands of jobs that will create. Can we indicate your support of this project?
I say no. The oil industry enjoyed record revenues last year. Exxon/Mobil had $380 billion, Shell $368 billion, BP $297 billion, PetroChina $221 billion, Total SA $212 billion, Chevron $204 billion, and ConocoPhilips $198 billion. All but ConocoPhillips are in top ten companies by revenue for last year. Six out of the top ten companies with the highest revenues are oil companies. Their total revenue for those top industry earners was $1,870 billion dollars. If you make $100,000 a year, that's 18.7 million times more than you make. For comparison, the national debt of the USA is at $14,693 trillion today.
Neither Exxon nor Chevron paid any taxes last year. They can find another way to get oil from one place to another without a pipeline that could cause environmental havoc. The oil industry is as good at extracting money from our wallets as it is petroleum from the ground.
The first question gets you by asking if you think the price of gas is too high. Most people agree that it is. I answered no because we've already hit peak oil production, and we're not going to see cheap gas ever again. The fuel efficiency we mandate for our vehicles is laughable in my opinion. We could have had 80 mpg cars by now if the corporate teat-suckers hadn't killed all the bills in government that raised efficiencies small increments over time.
The next question is whether or not we need to lower unemployment. Of course we do. That takes zero amount of effort to get agreement on. So now most people are agreeing their way through the answers. Even though we would agree that there needs to be a solution to that problem, we certainly disagree on the way to achieve the solution.
What ensues is a glowing description of this massive project to run miles of huge pipelines from the northern part of the continent to the southern part to send oil to be refined into gasoline. Think of the thousands of jobs that will create. Can we indicate your support of this project?
I say no. The oil industry enjoyed record revenues last year. Exxon/Mobil had $380 billion, Shell $368 billion, BP $297 billion, PetroChina $221 billion, Total SA $212 billion, Chevron $204 billion, and ConocoPhilips $198 billion. All but ConocoPhillips are in top ten companies by revenue for last year. Six out of the top ten companies with the highest revenues are oil companies. Their total revenue for those top industry earners was $1,870 billion dollars. If you make $100,000 a year, that's 18.7 million times more than you make. For comparison, the national debt of the USA is at $14,693 trillion today.
Neither Exxon nor Chevron paid any taxes last year. They can find another way to get oil from one place to another without a pipeline that could cause environmental havoc. The oil industry is as good at extracting money from our wallets as it is petroleum from the ground.
