"I can comment on that but I don't have anything intelligent to say."

Myron Ebell admitted in his one of his rare moments of truth. He also added, "I'm not an economist, and I don't know how much the economy is going to slow down."

But he is still sure that all our problems are due to the Endangered Species Act (now in the process of being gutted), government regulation, and the worldwide public ownership of mineral resources such as oil. That, he says, is why there is an oil price rise. That and the Chinese using up too much of it, with their penny wages and competitive economy. He didn't, of course, reach the conclusion that we should fight back with low wages too, because that's not good for public relations. He's too busy whinging about his own poverty.

It's quite neat how he always believes that private property will make everything better. According to him, if the oil was privatized in Iraq and everyone was given a share in it which they could sell back to Exxon, "in very few years it would be very efficient". Why not?

I'll tell you why not. Land ownership is a legal fiction, where the government declares a defined patch of land is owned by somebody, and on that patch that somebody has the right to commit murder to protect their property. The problem is, mineral resources are so valuable that quite a bit of murder needs to be committed to protect it, and only governments have the necessary killing power.

So it's far easier to put the oil-rich lands in the hands of the government, and then buy the Government. And at the same time for a few pennies you can hire a professional stooge like Myron Ebell to lie about it, and cry about how much they care about "small businesses". They can tell us that there is no pollution, and how "most" scientists (except the ones in print) believe that the melting of the polar ice-caps is part of a natural cycle. They will refreeze in another decade, after the polar bears go extinct. Our children will thank us for the burning all this oil in our own era so we can pay for them to go to college and get an education to become accountants.

Myron the Cavalier

Myron's bollocks is getting thin on the ground these days. It's unclear what he is doing for a living to account for his thin slice of Exxon's blood money, I mean profits.

Recently he was quoted in The Cavalier Daily. No. Sorry. That's the one about driving illustrated with the same picture. Try here, where Myron is quoted talking about "our aging and inadequate energy infrastructure (which) is stretched to the limit".

Indeed. Let's just review those profits again. Hmm. That's a lot of money. Over the past five years, I ask you, were the oil companies investing their income in improved infrastructure and, for example, preparing for wholly predictable oncoming "natural cycle" of hurricane activity? No. It was those pesky Greens who single-handedly, against the whole corpocracy, stopped Exxon from expanding responsibly and forced them to cash out billions of dollars into the trousers of the rich and pay people like Myron Ebell to explain why it was all completely reasonable. That's what these guys do when they're free and unconstrained.

That money is gone now. Wasted. The rich have taken it all and these days they can't be taxed. The same old managers running the show tell us to cough up more dough to pay for their "short sightedness". Look, idiot columnists like Allan Cruickshanks can write garbage about the "lack of insight" of anyone who knows what goes down when oil companies are given more freedom, and votes accordingly, but it doesn't make it true.

Stop Press: Myron's written to the Financial Times. He gives the usual hollow prescription of "Free markets, private property, and the rule of law" for leading to "wealthier and technologically more creative societies" which are going to be "resiliant enough to handle environmental challenges".

What sort of resiliance does he have in mind that will withstand 20 foot of water? A yacht?

Bubble-Heads in Print

Myron gets his words printed more and more in the lunatic fringe.

In a recent free-market puff piece, ("The best evidence for an oil bubble comes from the lessons of America's last six energy crises, dating back to the late 19th century"), Myron bubbled:

"[T]he constraints on our ability to find and extract new oil... are created by government [not geologic or scientific]. Myron Ebell... notes that roughly 90% of the oil on the planet rests under government-owned land and these resources are abysmally managed."

Myron doesn't actually care that most of this "abysmal management" can be traced directly to the unvarnished advice of the oil industry, and even the appointment their executives into positions of high office where they practice their abysmal management. Like any private industry, the oil business has a habit of routinely lying about the costs and future production availability, for political gain. Myron, being an employee of this industry, is part of the lying machine. Even if the US oil fields were optimally managed, perhaps even closed down for climactic reasons and to save them for the benefit of future generations, Myron would holler blue murder for the fact that not every dollar was being squeezed out for Exxon this quarter. Not one other thing else matters to him.

I get tired of reading this unadulterated horseshit from the business press. It's like theology:

"Higher prices for gas and fuel for home heating have cost the average U.S. family about $1,500 to $2,000 a year. (Thankfully the Bush tax cuts have given back about precisely that amount in lower tax payments to the IRS.)" -- to the rich, who are not the same people as those who are burdened by these costs.

"But for today it is sufficient to note that the free market will deliver oil, electricity and other forms of energy at declining prices in the future, if only the government will let the market's benign and productive forces work their magic." -- as it has done with health care.

And this drilling for oil in Alaska thing. What is the plan supposed to be? The market didn't invent Alaska. It came about as a natural set of geological processes over millions of years. What, say, if it was attached to and still owned by Russia? Could the free market have performed its "magic" with regards to the oil supply in this alternative reality?

The only plan seems to be a phase issue. If this wasn't the last freaking untapped reservoir in mainland North America, they could get their oil from all the reserves they tell us are there for the taking. They think we should burn it now, and in five years time we will be in exactly the situation we are today, but with no oil, no Arctic wildlife (who needs it; the place is going to melt anyway), still no replacement technology, and Myron a bit older, but having finished putting his four kids through university so they can set out on their life's journey into a ruined world.