I worked in the oilfield for over 10 years, and feel like I can lend a little incite into this that goes slightly beyond layman; they want public lands.
Oil companies pay pennies on the dollar for public lands, and they profit-share significantly less with the federal government than with a private land-lease. They make significantly more over the life of a producing well on public lands (land owned by you and me), which is why they were pissed when Biden said “no more public lands!” during his Presidency which is a direct result of oil companies not willing to negotiate for fair value for these leases despite the profit they make.
They want to be able to extract oil and natural gas (and possibly lithium in the future, soon as they figure out a cost effective way to remove it from produced fluid) that’s owned by you, and me, for as cheap as possible and sell it back to you and to me for a massive profit.
This entire “energy emergency” is a way to skirt around existing laws against leasing public lands to oil companies without having to spend time in court or expending political capital to repeal them.
Don’t forget Nestle paying pennies for water and then selling it back to us!
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nestle-ceo-water-not-human-right/
“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.”
Just another form of loophole abuse.
Welcome back to the USA, the country where everything is made up and the points made to justify anything and everything don’t matter.
So much of this is just “It’s a National Emergency because I said so!”
If people could stop saying “they can’t do X because of the Constitution” that’d be great. We’re well into a Constitutional crisis.
Agreed. I still see people (including my friends, despite my multiple attempts to explain what’s actually going on) that just go “Wait, but that violates the Constitution!” Like, no shit, dude, they know, and they do not give a fuck, especially if no one is actually going to punish them for it
@Zenodyne @SnotFlickerman the clue should probably have been the fact that Musk openly stated that he would, and Trump actually was going to, go to prison if Trump didn’t win the election. Running the country is their way *into* lawbreaking.
Musk openly stated that he would, and Trump actually was going to, go to prison if Trump didn’t win the election.
We were so close to that timeline.
Drill baby drill is one thing (which is bad) but halting green energy expansion is declaring, “We don’t want energy independence!”
I always thought sticking with fossil fuels was dumb even by their standards. Like, “like if you’re goal is isolationism, why cling to something that requires external sources?”
