Most of the lamestream media accounts of this find that I’ve read have spun it as something minor and unimportant. I first read of the find in business news, where they tend to be more concerned with facts (imagine that!) than ideology. So I knew it was a big — make that huge — deal. It took quite a search for me to find even one newspaper article that got it right:
And it could increase U.S. domestic reserves by 50 per cent. Only part of that overall total, however, could be attributed to the Jack prospect, which some analysts said Tuesday is likely to amount to 500 million barrels.
Whatever the ultimate size of Jack, its true importance lies in when it was discovered — earlier this decade, rather than in the 1960s or 1970s, said Mr. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research Inc. It is proof positive that higher commodity prices and improvements in exploration technology can result in major new discoveries, he said.
And of course that was in their business section.
The best indicator of the import of this find is this: worldwide crude oil prices dropped 2% within minutes of the announcement, and they’re continuing to drop.
Business runs on facts, and business seems to have assessed this discovery as a major event (a 2% drop in oil prices is many millions of dollars each and every day). So why is the lamestream media spinning it as nearly irrelevant? The only reason I can think of is that a major oil find undermines their ideology-driven agenda to have governments force a switch from fossil fuels. If major amounts of fossil fuel are found, it…detracts…from the urgency of making that switch.
This is, I suspect, why you also won’t read about another inconvenient fact: if you measure “oil reserves” by what’s actually in the ground and economically extractable at current oil prices (rather than at an arbitrary price, as is the standard used today), then for each of the past 12 years, proven reserves have increased. Yup, we’re finding more oil than we’re using. We aren’t going to run out of oil next week, or the week after. In fact, the way things are looking at the moment, we’re not going to run out of oil for something like 80 or 100 years…
In the old blog, Elliot Essman said:
ReplyDeleteBig oil is one thing, big media another. They differ as to reserves. Once the media run into a gusher of an issue, they milk it to the last drop. Unlike oil, they are hardly hampered by the reality of geology. When the well yields no more, long after time, they move on to re-drill.