The New York Times’ Hidden Hand On Oil’s Agenda

Ironically, last Sunday the New York Times’ front page headlined ” Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand”. On the front page of the Week in Review section Jad Mouawad set out to instruct us that oil’s future is murky (“The Big Thirst”). If ever a commentator on a given issue is freighted with prescribed points of view the New York Times’ reporter Jad Mouawad would be a standout candidate for the oil patch’s “golden goose” award for espousing the preprogrammed pieties that are wont to make us continue our soporific acceptance of the greatest heist, and transfer of wealth in human history. Where there are arguments to be contrived and oil patch rationalizations to excuse the heist inherent in today’s oil prices or to explain them away, leave it to the New York Times and Mouwad to convey the imprimatur of what once passed for serious journalism to this greatest of all con games.
Mr. Mouawad and his New York Times have been writing ceaselessly and irresponsibly on the issue of oil. Mouawad has never been held to account by the Times’ editors nor its editorial page. His writings could easily be attributed to an OPEC or oil patch pitchman. With Mouwad it is never the industry, its willing allies in and out of government, nor the perverting hand of the Organization of Petroleum Exportng Countries (OPEC). It is us, and a bevy of reasons that are repeated ad nauseum that are the cause of what has become a dysfunctional oil market. Let me explain by citing a few examples from his Week in Review article “The Big Thirst”. More would run me out of ink and you out of patience:

“no exporter turning off the spigot…Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can…”

Here alone the full dimension of Mouawad’s freighted reporting is laid bare. Clearly and seemingly purposefully no mention of the fact that OPEC by its own admission has held 1.2 million barrels off the market since the end of 2006 that it could readily produce. That Saudi Arabia and OPEC have turned a cold shoulder on President Bush’s lame entreaties as well as that of the International Energy Agency (IEA) to produce more, not because they can’t but because they wont.

“The North Sea and Alaska are slowly running out of oil and producers there are struggling to keep production from falling. Russia’s phenomenal surge is coming to an end”.

Ah, shortages on the horizon, one of the oil patch’s banner headlines to screw up the price another notch. No mention of the new finds off shore Brazil, the massive revised upward revision of Saudi Arabia’s reserves (please see “Peak Oil’ RIP. Official Obit Frontpaged in the New York Times” 03.08.07 — commenting on an article penned by Mouawad himself on the NYTimes’ front page March 5, 2007, so he will not be able to claim ignorance, upwardly estimating Saudi Reserves alone at some 700 billion to one trillion barrels), the burgeoning oil development activities in Iraq (“35 Firms OK’d to Bid on Iraq Oil Deals” The Huffington Post 04.13.08) whose reserves are estimated to be comparable to those of Saudi Arabia with barely 10 percent of its land mass having been prospected for oil. As to Russia, no explanation that the slowing of the ‘oil surge’ is structural and hardly due to an inherent diminishment of oil potential under the right rules and management. But that is how the oil boys and the New York Times try to scare us into ever higher prices. That the oil shortage is inherent and imminent, that we are running out of accessible oil. We are not, there are still trillions of barrels of oil around to be found and tapped, from offshore Alaska in the Chukchi Sea (please see “Royal Dutch Shell’s ‘New Heartland’, Alaskan Drilling Rights, The Abject Surrender of Our National Patrimony” 02.25.08) to coastal Africa, the South China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, Greenland, the Arctic, offshore Sakhalin, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and untapped reservoirs offshore the United States, the Gulf of Mexico and on. At current and significantly lower oil prices oil all are economically viable. But leave it to Mouawad to pull out the ‘arms length’ opinion from his friends at BP, “Another 1.2 trillion barrels of known conventional oil reserves wait to be tapped…But given the current rate of growth in demand, a trillion of those barrels will be used up in in less than 30 years”. Feel better now? Once upon a time the same argumentation was flagged to oil consumers, and yes we did run out of oil in Pennsylvania. You all remember that, don’t you?

Yahoo!

Compare Mouawad’s story through an earlier PO.com post or directly from New York Times