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Mediamatters.Org - In reporting on high
gas prices and initiatives that have been proposed to address the issue, the
media have repeated or failed to challenge several myths, falsehoods, and
claims contradicted by government agencies. Many of the media-advanced myths and falsehoods have
promoted the
notion that lifting the current moratorium on offshore drilling and expanding
domestic drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) will have an immediate
impact on rising gas prices.
1. Opening additional acres for offshore
drilling will lower today's oil and gasoline prices
After successive
speeches from Sen. John McCain and President Bush in which they both called for
an increase in offshore oil drilling, many major news outlets have uncritically
reported the suggestion by drilling proponents that lifting the federal
moratorium will
have an immediate effect on fuel prices, without noting that, in its Annual
Energy Outlook 2007, the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration
(EIA) estimated the effects
of allowing the moratorium
to expire in
2012 and said that "access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern
Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and
natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner
than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017."
June 23 articles
in The Washington Post and New
York Times, as well as July 15 articles
in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, reporting on suggestions that offshore
drilling would lower oil and gas prices, made no mention of the EIA's
findings. By contrast, a July 14 Post
article did note the EIA's conclusions,
although that article appeared
on the front page under a headline -- "Offshore Drilling Backed as Remedy
for Oil Prices" -- whose suggestion of short-term
effects was contradicted by the article itself.
2. Opening ANWR to drilling will impact
today's oil and gasoline prices
Suggestions that opening federally protected ANWR to
drilling will help lower today's gas prices also frequently go
unchallenged by news media outlets. For instance, while discussing Bush's trip
to the U.S.-European Union summit on MSNBC
Live, anchor Contessa Brewer said
Bush "will push for help from our European partners on the oil front"
and aired a video clip of Bush saying, "The United States has an opportunity to help
increase the supply of oil on the market, therefore taking pressure off
gasoline for our hard-working Americans, and that I've proposed to the Congress
that they open up ANWR, and open up the continental shelf, and give this
country a chance to help us through this difficult period."
But in its May 2008 "Analysis of Crude Oil Production
in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge," the EIA concluded
that oil drilling in ANWR would not impact the U.S. oil supply for at least a
decade: "The opening of the ANWR 1002 Area to oil and natural gas
development is projected to increase domestic crude oil production starting in 2018"
[emphasis added]. Further, the report says: "This analysis assumes
that enactment of the legislation in 2008 would result in first production from
the ANWR area in 10 years, i.e., 2018." Further, based on its Annual Energy Outlook
2008 report, EIA estimated that the opening of ANWR would reduce the price of imported low-sulfur, light crude oil by $0.75 per barrel in 2025 (in the "mean oil resource case"), from a predicted reference case price of $64.49. As of the close of trading
on August 13,
the price of oil settled
at $116 per
barrel.
3. No oil was spilled offshore as a result of Hurricane Katrina
Proponents of lifting the moratorium on certain offshore drilling have on several
occasions falsely claimed that no oil was spilled offshore
during Hurricane Katrina --
with no challenge from cable news anchors;
at least one Fox News contributor has also made this false claim. In fact, as Media Matters has noted, a 2007 report
prepared for the U.S. Minerals
Management Service (MMS) by the international consulting firm Det Norske
Veritas found that damage related to Hurricane Katrina resulted
in 70 spills from outer continental shelf structures with a total volume spilled of approximately 5,552 barrels of
petroleum products. The study specifically identified damage from
Katrina to 27 platforms and rigs that resulted in approximately
2,843 barrels of spilled petroleum products. The combined impacts of hurricanes
Katrina and Rita on outer continental shelf structures in the Gulf
of Mexico, according to the report, were "124 spills ...
with a total volume of roughly 17,700 barrels of total petroleum
products."
On Fox News' Fox & Friends, former Republican presidential
candidate and Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee falsely asserted,
"When Katrina, a Cat-5 hurricane, hit the Gulf
Coast, not one drop of oil was spilled
off of those rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico."
The claim has also been promulgated on MSNBC. NBC News chief foreign affairs
correspondent Andrea Mitchell has twice
allowed guests to claim that Hurricane Katrina did not result in any oil spills.
On the June 24 edition of MSNBC Live,
Mitchell did not challenge Sen. Richard Burr's (R-NC) false
assertion that "there wasn't a drop" of oil spilled
in the Gulf of Mexico due to a Category 5 hurricane. And during a July 15 interview on MSNBC Live, Mitchell did not challenge energy lobbyist and former
Sen. Trent Lott's
(R-MS) false
claim that "[w]e didn't have one drop of oil spilt when we had
the biggest hurricane in, you know, recent history, Hurricane Katrina."
However, on the July 17 edition of MSNBC Live, anchor David Shuster did confront McCain senior policy
adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer about her past use of the false claim on MSNBC. Shuster
said: "Earlier this week on this
program, though, you defended offshore drilling and said, quote, 'We
withstood Hurricanes Rita and Katrina and did not spill a drop.' In fact,
the U.S. Mineral Management Service said that Katrina and Rita caused 124
offshore spills for a total of more than 743,000 gallons of oil and refined
products spilled. So, Nancy,
do you want to take back what you said?" Pfotenhauer replied:
"Right. Well, I
actually do. I was misinformed, and my embarrassment aside, the point is still
that we had a remarkable performance."
4. "Natural seepage" of oil into the ocean means oil spills have insignificant environmental impact
Some in the media have cited reports finding that more oil
leaks into the water from "natural seepage" than from oil tanker and
offshore drilling accidents to suggest that the damage caused by spills is comparatively insignificant.
But a report by the County of Santa Barbara discussing the effects of natural
seepage and oil spills, including a 1969 oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast
that released an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil, stated
that "major spills can have far greater"
environmental impact than seeps have, as the blog Think Progress noted.
In a July 12 Wall Street
Journal op-ed, Manchester Union
Leader editorial page editor Andrew Cline wrote that
a "joint study by NASA and the Smithsonian Institution, examining several
decades' worth of data, found that more oil seeps into the ocean naturally than
from accidents involving tankers and offshore drilling. Natural seepage from
underwater oil deposits leaks an average of 62 million gallons a year; offshore
drilling, on the other hand, accounted for only 15 million gallons, the
smallest source of oil leaking into the oceans." Likewise, during the July 15 edition of Fox
News' Special Report,
correspondent William La Jeunesse stated: "Almost 40 years later [after
the Santa Barbara spill], the National Academy of Sciences says mother nature
spills more oil into the environment than Exxon, Shell, B.P., and Chevron combined -- 63
percent of all oil in U.S. coastal waters comes from natural seepage from
cracks in the earth; 32 percent from consumers in their boats and runoff from
cities; 4 percent from oil tankers; and just 1 percent from offshore platforms."
However, in a 2002 report, the Santa Barbara County Planning and
Development Energy Division stated that
a "comparison of the impacts of seeps and spills based solely on volume
would be misleading. The evidence is clear that, far from being invisible
against a background of seeps, major spills can have far greater and
qualitatively different impacts on the environment than do seeps."
From the report:
A comparison of the impacts of
natural oil seeps versus oil spills involves much more than determining the
volume of oil released. Natural oil seeps in the Santa Barbara Channel
introduce substantial volumes of hydrocarbons into the marine environment.
Seepage rates may be on the order of 100 barrels of oil per day. Most spills
associated with oil production offshore of Santa
Barbara County have
been small during the years since the catastrophic 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. The Minerals
Management Service estimates that total combined spill volume for the 841
reported spills between 1970 and 1999 was about 830 barrels. However, a
comparison of the impacts of seeps and spills based solely on volume would be
misleading. The evidence is clear that, far from being invisible against a
background of seeps, major spills can have far greater and qualitatively
different impacts on the environment than do seeps.
The county concluded: "Natural seeps and spills
differ in that seep rates do not, on average, exceed the marine
environment's capacity to digest the oil, whereas spills may exceed its
capacity. Major spills overwhelm nature's mechanisms for processing the
oil, in the short term. The consequences include severe oiling of shorelines
and mortality to organisms that are ill-prepared to live in an oil-soaked
environment."
5. China is drilling
for oil 60 miles off the coast of Florida
In the June 5 edition of The
Washington Post column, columnist
George Will falsely asserted,
"Drilling is underway 60 miles off Florida.
The drilling is being done by China,
in cooperation with Cuba,
which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are." Vice
President Dick Cheney made a similar claim -- citing Will's column--
about China drilling off the coast of Florida in a June 11 speech
to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but according to an Associated Press article
the following day, Cheney's office issued a statement saying he was
mistaken. The AP reported that the statement said: "It is our
understanding that, although Cuba has leased out exploration blocks 60 miles
off the coast of southern Florida, which is closer than American firms are
allowed to operate in that area, no Chinese firm is drilling there." The
article stated that "Jorge Pinon, a senior energy fellow at the University of Miami
specializing in Latin America, said Cuba
has awarded offshore oil leases, or concessionary blocs, in its offshore waters
to six oil companies -- none of them Chinese -- and soon may announce an
agreement with Brazil's
state oil company, Petrobras." It further reported that Pinon said,
"But no one is currently drilling in any of those concessions." Will
issued
a correction to his claim in a June 17 column.
Despite the statement from Cheney's office, Fox
News' Sean Hannity claimed on the June 16
edition of his nationally syndicated radio program: "[W]e've got China,
you know, joining with Cuba, they're drilling 60 miles off our shores of
Florida."
6. Obama's energy strategy consists only of
keeping tires properly inflated
During the July 31
edition of Fox News' Hannity
& Colmes, Fox News contributor and former House
Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) repeatedly mischaracterized
Sen. Barack Obama's energy policy, falsely suggesting that Obama's only "energy
strategy" was to encourage people to keep the tires on their vehicles
properly inflated and asserting that Obama "suggested if we all inflated
our tires, that we would solve the problem." He said to guest co-host
Kirsten Powers, "[D]o you really think that inflating your tires is a
rational energy strategy?" Later in the show, Gingrich also suggested that
Obama's energy policy was limited to "inflate here, inflate now, avoid
reality" and "inflate here, inflate now, pretend it doesn't
exist."
But as Media Matters has noted, during the
July 30 campaign event in
which he told the audience that "there are things you can do individually
to save energy" such as "making sure your tires are properly
inflated," Obama also mentioned proposals such as "help[ing]
incentivize consumers" to transition to more fuel-efficient cars,
developing new technologies, "work[ing] with the auto industry in
developing some of these new technologies and plug-in hybrids," and
"put[ting] people back to work building windmills and setting up wind
turbines." Moreover, Obama's "Plan for a Clean Energy Future" on
his campaign's website
includes proposals to "invest $150 billion over 10 years in clean
energy," "improve energy efficiency 50 percent by 2030,"
"support next generation biofuels," "double fuel economy
standards within 18 years," "investigate market manipulation in oil
futures," and enact a windfall profits tax on oil companies, the revenue
from which "will be invested in a number of measures to reduce the burden
of rising prices on families."
Gingrich's ridicule of
Obama's suggestion aside, fueleconomy.gov, a website
maintained jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of
Energy, states:
"You can improve your gas mileage by around 3.3 percent by keeping your tires
inflated to the proper pressure. Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by
0.4 percent for every 1 psi drop in pressure of all four tires." It
further calculated a fuel economy benefit of 3 percent, or a savings of up to
12 cents per gallon, with properly inflated tires.
7. Oil companies reinvest
all their profits
into finding more oil
During the June 26
edition of NBC's Today, correspondent
Janet Shamlian -- reporting from a Chevron Corp.
oil and gas platform -- said: "Each
barrel [of oil] yields about 26 gallons of gas. Criticized for record
profits, companies like Chevron say every dollar coming out is going right back
in to the quest for more." But Shamlian did not note that according
to Chevron's 2007 annual report and a press release about its earnings
for the first quarter of 2008, both of which were available
before her report, a portion of Chevron's earnings goes into stock buybacks and dividend payments.
Indeed, in its first-quarter 2008
earnings press release, issued
May 2, Chevron "announced a 12 percent increase in its quarterly dividend
on common stock" and reported spending approximately $2 billion to buy back
shares of its own stock during the quarter. In its 2007 annual report,
released on February 28, the company stated that it had raised its dividend by
11.5 percent to 58 cents a share, and had bought back
approximately $7 billion of its stock.
The
Associated Press reported in a July 22 article: "The [oil] companies insist they're trying to find new oil that might help
bring down gas prices, but the money they spend on exploration is nothing compared
with what they spend on stock buybacks and dividends." The AP further reported: "The five biggest international oil companies plowed
about 55
percent of the cash they made
from their businesses into stock buybacks and dividends last year ... according to Rice
University's James A.
Baker III Institute for Public Policy."
Chevron is one of the "so-called Big Five" international oil
companies, according to the Baker Institute report cited in the article. The AP reported that "[i]n the first quarter of this year,
Exxon, ConocoPhillips and Chevron were all among the top 10 companies for share
buybacks in the S&P 500." The article also stated that "[s]tock
buybacks are common throughout corporate America, not just for Big Oil. They
shrink the amount of stock on the open market, essentially increasing its value
and giving individual shareholders a bigger stake in the company."
From the July 15 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:
HUME: President Bush's move to lift
the executive ban on offshore oil drilling has many environmentalists concerned
about the potential for destructive oil spills.
But would you believe that the
greatest source of oil spills in the world's oceans is not the drilling
industry, but something far more difficult to regulate. Correspondent William
La Jeunesse explains.
[begin video
clip]
LA JEUNESSE: 1969 -- an oil spill off Santa Barbara
prompts Congress to put a stop to offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans.
Almost 40 years
later, the National Academy of Sciences says mother nature spills more oil into
the environment than Exxon, Shell, B.P., and Chevron combined -- 63 percent of all oil in U.S.
coastal waters comes from natural seepage from cracks in the earth; 32 percent
from consumers in their boats and runoff from cities; 4 percent from oil
tankers; and just 1 percent from offshore platforms.
DANIEL KISH (Institute for Energy Research senior vice president): The truth is that two-thirds of all the oil
that comes on the beaches of the United States is natural seepage.
LA JEUNESSE: Yet many politicians and green
groups say the environmental damage of another serious accident, such as the
Alaska Exxon Valdez tanker spill, is not worth the risk.
DAVE DAVIS (Community
Environmental Council executive
director): The environment of the Valdez Sound never recovered.
The economic effects are still being felt today, right?
Is that worth 25 cents in your tank?
LA JEUNESSE: All energy production carries an environmental cost, but
offshore oil production is radically different from what it was decades ago.
From the July 12 Wall
Street Journal op-ed:
On the morning of Jan. 28, 1969, a
Union Oil drilling site six miles off the coast of Santa
Barbara, Calif.,
sprang a leak. The ensuing spill stretched for miles, killed thousands of
birds, and gave America
the image of wildlife and shorelines covered in black crude. That spill is
widely considered to have conceived the modern environmental movement. A year
later, the first Earth Day was held, followed by passage of the Clean Air Act
and Clean Water Act.
After the spill, Santa Barbara residents formed an
environmental group called GOO! (Get Oil Out!), one of the first community
groups to oppose offshore oil drilling. Thirty-nine years later, GOO! is still
around. But this April the group did something astonishing. It publicly
supported an oil company's proposal to drill off the coast of Santa Barbara.
Houston-based Plains Exploration and
Production Company proposed drilling 22 wells from a platform 4.7 miles from
land. It made numerous concessions to the local environmental groups that would
curtail drilling in about a decade -- and in the end even the adamantly
"no-drilling" crowd agreed that the deal was beneficial for everyone.
The Environmental
Defense Center,
a nonprofit environmental law firm, endorsed the plan. Abe Powell, president of
GOO!, told the Los Angeles Times it was "good for the community."
Terry Leftgoff, a former GOO! executive director, wrote in the Santa Barbara
Independent the deal was "a brilliant proposal that finally gives the
public something back: the certain removal of four offshore oil platforms, the
decommissioning of a notorious industrial plant, and the reversion of rural
land subjugated into oil development back into the public trust as
parkland."
When an environmental group formed
for the sole purpose of opposing offshore oil drilling warmly embraces a plan
to drill off its own coast, you know something important has changed in our
culture: Americans have recognized that offshore oil drilling is largely safe.
Since 1975, drilling in the
Exclusive Economic Zone (within 200 miles of the U.S. coast) has had a 99.999%
safety record, according to the Energy Information Administration, which
reports that "only .001 percent of the oil produced has been
spilled."
Thanks to technological advances,
large spills are rare. Most spills are tiny, only a few feet in diameter. Large
tanker spills, such as the Exxon Valdez in 1989, are so infrequent they account
for a very small fraction of the oil that winds up in the sea.
A joint study by NASA
and the Smithsonian Institution, examining several decades' worth of data,
found that more oil seeps into the ocean naturally than from accidents
involving tankers and offshore drilling. Natural seepage from underwater oil
deposits leaks an average of 62 million gallons a year; offshore drilling, on
the other hand, accounted for only 15 million gallons, the smallest source of
oil leaking into the oceans.
The vast majority of the oil that
finds its way into the sea comes from dry land, NASA found. Runoff from cities,
roads, industrial sites and garages deposits 363 million gallons into the sea,
making runoff by far the single largest source of oil pollution in the oceans.
"Every year oily road runoff from a city of 5 million could contain as
much oil as one large tanker spill," notes the Smithsonian exhibit,
"Ocean Planet."
The second-largest source of ocean
oil pollution was routine ship maintenance, accountable for 137 million gallons
a year, NASA found -- more than 2.5 times the amount that comes from tanker
spills and offshore drilling combined. But no one is proposing that we ban
cargo and cruise ships.
Media Matters - Myths and falsehoods about oil policies {...} Published: August 14, 2008, 5:00 pm - Indexed: August 14, 2008, 9:00 pm - Page Size: 39KB |