Lies so big you can see them from space

Just when I thought there was going to be a break, that final smear of excrement in the corner of the office pipes up on its home camera in front of a curled printout of the CEI logo of the Earth bearing Saturn's rings to drop his lies about drilling for more oil in the Depleted States of America.



According to space alien Myron -- whose job will not be done until the climate of the Earth becomes like Venus where it rains concentrated sulphuric acid -- high oil prices are a result of environmentalist pressure on the US government to ban oil drilling in Federal lands and off-shore areas.

Yeah, and how many secret meetings did Greenpeace hold with Dick Cheney in the last 8 years, exactly?

But let's listen to what he says:

The public is angry over high gasoline prices.

Environmental pressure groups and many in Congress [smirk] have responded over and over again: "We can't drill our way out of this problem."

They say that and then they say the reason is because the United States consumes 25% of the world's oil, but has only 3% of the reserves.

What they don't say is: "The United States only has 3% of the proven reserves."

The reason we have only 3% of the proven reserves is because Congress and pressure from environmental groups has made off-limits 85% of our off-shore areas and large areas that have huge oil and gas potential in Alaska and the Rocky Mountains on Federal land. Those areas can't be explored, and therefore they have no proven reserves, because proven reserves mean drilling a well and finding oil.

So the next time you hear the words, "We can't drill our way out of the problem," just tell them, "Yes we can."

I'm Myron Ebell with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Let's think about the world's oil reserves. Nobody knows what it is, so saying something is 3% of it makes no sense. In any case, he's forgetting to count Iraq, whose reserves have been annexed by US oil companies.

But that's beside the point. The fact is that the leasing and drilling activity in Public lands has been at a record high under the Bush administration, not surprisingly. The industry is working at max capacity and creating as much environmental pollution as it possibly can -- which makes Myron Ebell pleased.

The oil companies, through mouthpieces such as Myron, always, always exaggerate the situation and the dire threats posed by any regulation whatsoever, that it is left to other people to produce analyses that, you know, contain numbers that can be checked out. For example:

• Economically recoverable gas in national forest roadless areas of our study area would meet total U.S. gas consumption for about 9 to 11 weeks.


• Economically recoverable oil in those roadless areas would meet total U.S. oil consumption for less than 24 days.


• The 15 national monuments contain less than six days of gas use and 15 days of oil use for the United States.

As to the usual cries to drill the last tiny corner of Alaska that hasn't yet been drilled, I'm sick to death of it. The area is miniscule and has hardly any oil. Myron would be happy to personally plow it under the treads of his fat SUV.

But that's not the point. The point is psychological. By hammering this one tiny sore spot over and over again like a demented devil-child as though it were something really big, Myron and his pals keep the opposition occupied over something that is basically inconsequential. This means they can get on with the real work hastening the extinction of the human race.

And finally, the topic of off-shore drilling has been so packed with lies like this one about China drilling off the coast of Florida, and this one about there being no oil pollution as a result of Hurricane Katrina, that it's no surprise to find Myron picking it up.

There is no limitation imposed by off-shore drilling moratoriums. As in the Rockies, the oil companies are running at max capacity on a surplus of leases they already have. This is their final chance to grab a set of valuable new leases which they can bank for the future from the most oil friendly administration in the history of the Union.

Myron is just a front man for the lies necessary to cover over for this outrageous give-away.

And remember, the issue is not about money. It's about power. The more free money the oil companies can get, the more power they can buy with it, and the more incredible damage they can do in less time to all life on this planet.

Myron on Tour

Is anyone still paying this guy to be listened to?

Apparently so.

I had cherished the brief hope that Myron had finally retired to some palm leaf shack on the coast of Louisiana where he was shortly going to be washed into the sea by the next hurricane. There hadn't been many updates on his employee page (now devoid of a mugshot), and it was always possible that his official employer, the self-described CEI Institute, was withering down into its final smear of excrement, occasionally lashing out with a cringeworthy annual dinner speech by its founder Fred Smith railing on about "liberal fascism" to an audience of six too shy to appear in the picture.

Of course, they have their extensive list of "experts" -- all of whom are senior directors of some sort, and they're never going to delete the names, because it makes them appear inflated and impressive to idiotic, shallow-minded reporters who keep calling them up for a little cup of sadness that we so need on our way to our eventual self-extermination.

So I was very disappointed to discover today that Myron Ebell has been invited to various events to peddle his pathetic power-point presentation of piddling pop-dogs over the last twelve months.

These include:

• 10 June 2007 - Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association in Las Colinas, Texas. (title: Global Warming and Carbon Constraints: Conventional Wisdom versus Reality)


• 11 June 2007 - Colorado Mining Association, Denver. (title: Global Warming and Energy Realities)


• 13 December 2007 - Colorado River Water Users Association, Las Vegas. (title: If Global Warming is a Problem, What are the Solutions?)


• 23 April 2008 - LSU Center for Energy Studies, Baton Rouge. (Agenda.) (title: Alternative Energy: The Role of Government)

There's certainly a few more dates where the organizers haven't posted up a copy of his drivel onto the internet in a way that can be found by a search engine.

Roughly, the presentation breaks down into the following sections, all if which are jam-packed with lies from start to finish.

Where is the CEI coming from?
"We are non-profit, non-partisan [yeah, right]... We believe that scientific objectivity must be scrupulously respected, regardless of our political preferences."

Some bogus graphs and statistics
These include selective temperature time series at single points on earth to refute the issue of GLOBAL warming.

Also includes arguments about how the targets for cutting emissions are unobtainable and how Kyoto has failed -- thanks in part to the irreversible work by him and his pals over the last 20 years.

Some bashing of European policy, and statements that emissions have only been reduced in countries who have undergone an economic collapse in the last 20 years, such as Poland, Russia, Germany, United Kingdom and Sweden. On the other hand, the US economic collapse is merely psychological.

We're glad it is. You just keep right on going.

Some selected experts
Richard S J Tol is apparently "one of the world's leading environmental economists", not just a man with silly hair who feels spiteful because other economists are not picking up on his theory of arbitrary discounting horizons.

Professor William Nordhaus has the conclusions of his multi-trillion dollar back-of-the-envelope calculations reversed in every statement by Myron.

It's always the same dudes. The Climate covered their misquoted statements in an earlier post about Ebell's testimony before Congress. These are tried and tested false witnesses who don't seem to sue Myron for misquoting them, so he will carry on with it.

Americans like hot climates and air-conditioners
Yeah, and they also like eating tonnes of fat and sugar and not exercising, and looking like walking haggises.

"Studies show that cold weather kills approximately ten times as many people as hot weather -- thus global warming will result in lower net human mortality"!!!

I'm getting sick of this one. And the one about it's evil to cut down on American energy use because that stops over 2 billion of the poorest people in the world from ever getting access to electricity.

Concluded conclusions
What we can do now about global warming is:

• Take advantage of the benefits


• Adapt -- deal with the impacts


• Build resiliency


• Geo- and bio-engineering engineering


• Lots of Nuclear power


• Wait for new technologies

And anyway, all the predictions (which so far have been absolutely correct within the stated margin of error -- yes I'm talking to you, Iain Murray, you bonehead, with your stupid video podcast claim that the IPCC has been revising down its climate projections, when in fact they've been narrowing the uncertainty range, and you're highlighting the top of that range.)

... are bogus, and you should "forget about trying to accommodate your industry to cap-and-trade," and "instead oppose attempts to limit burning oil, and instead create energy abundance and relieve poverty" because "access to affordable energy enhances the quality and extends the duration of human life."

And anyway we'll all be 50 times wealthier by the next century if we stick with our god-given economic policies that result in a god-given right to a 4% growth in GDP per year every year.

Even better news is that, by this logic, people will be a hundred million billion times better off than they are now in a thousand years. We will be gods. Don't know how, but the economic predictions say it's so. Now lets get back to criticising real scientists' predictions based on actual thermodynamic qualities of the various atmospheric chemicals.

So it goes, on and on and on, like a relentless chicken. Make it stop, please.