“We should never forget that the oil industry, whatever its problems (and most of those are caused by bad government policies) is the single most vital industry in the world.”
This election year, America faces many crucial legislative choices in the oil/gas industry–and the PR strategy of oil companies will certainly affect the outcome.
What should oil company executives do to improve their industry’s reputation and secure their freedom to produce the lifeblood of civilization?
Unfortunately, the conventional answer is: pretend they’re not oil companies. BP’s John Browne some years ago infamously declared his company’s aspirations to be “Beyond Petroleum”–a slogan that obviously does not aid the industry’s desire for more petroleum drilling rights. (BP, to its credit, no longer trumpets this slogan, which defaults BP back to the implicit original, British Petroleum.)…
Continue ReadingThe development of enormous reserves of American energy from tight formations such as shale has been hailed as a “game-changer” by the Energy Information Administration; as playing a “key role in our nation’s clean energy future” by the Environmental Protection Agency; and as a means of helping our country “create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper” by President Obama earlier this year.
But for one mom in rural northeast Pennsylvania, the only real question that mattered was this: Is the process used to develop these resources safe? Or is it the way “Gasland” star Josh Fox tried to portray it in his HBO film: dangerous and disruptive – and completely unregulated, to boot? Shelly – a mother, grandmother, farmer and science teacher from Susquehanna Co., Pa.…
Continue Reading“[Gasoline] taxes do not properly price roads, with the result that traffic congestion costs Americans close to $200 billion per year…. Congestion pricing can … nearly double actual road capacities during rush hour, from 1,000 to 2,000 vehicles an hour.”
Gasoline and diesel fuel taxes have long been the main source of funding for building, maintaining, and operating America’s network of highways, roads, and streets. This is why the American Petroleum Institute nearly a century ago worked to enact such levies, welcoming taxes on its product to enable systemic road building to increase the demand for its chief product.
Today’s motor-fuel taxes are, at best, an imperfect user fee. One problem is that inflation and increasingly fuel-efficient cars have rapidly eroded gas tax revenues. After adjusting for inflation, drivers today pay only a third as much for each mile they drive as they did in 1956, when Congress created the Interstate Highway System.…
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