The Government's drill team

The cry from some quarters is for the government to open its off-shore and arctic and other lands to more drilling by oil and gas companies.

Why bother when, if the government simply collected the money it should rightfully be due from existing properties, it could subsidize the price of existing supplies.

Guambat ran a few posts on this topic over 2 years ago. In one such post it was reported

Walter Cruickshank, deputy director for the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service which oversees offshore drilling, said that as a result of the error the government has already lost several hundred million dollars in royalties and stands to lose many billions more if energy prices remain high.

Guambat reckons that energy prices have not only remained high they have skyrocketed.

The story is again popping up. And once again, the oil companies are screwing us.

The AFP reports, "US Department of the Interior employees who handled billions of dollars in oil contracts improperly engaged in sex with energy company employees, a new report has said."

The International Herald Tribune reports that Chevron isn't cooperating, Shell isn't commenting and Hess says its investigations reveal no wrongdoing by its employees.

This is getting a lot of press, so Guambat will not go into it more than point to the Google aggregation page for this news item.

The OIG report can be found here and a related report found here.

Thinkprogress.org has pointed out that the government employees had all attended ethics programs so should have known the behaviour was unethical. Indeed, the employees tried to re-write the ethics rules to give their nefarious deeds cover.

In tracking down the cite for the report, Guambat noticed another OIG report, written in 2007. The current report concerns the Minerals Management Service (MMS). The 2007 report concerns the Minerals Revenue Service, a division within MMS. The 2007 report claims that it "demonstrates a band-aid approach to holding together one of the Federal Government's largest revenue producing operations".

If America is to free itself from the domination of foreign oil, it need only start by freeing itself from the influence of the global oil companies. We have so many different needs to develop alternative means of energizing our transportation and housing, foreign sovereign oil ownership, global company market domination, environmental and health degradation to name but a few, that we must make that a number one priority.


And Furthermore ... This reportage from POGO.