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July 4, 2021

Leftists blame capitalism, global warming for Mexican state oil company's Gulf fire

By Monica Showalter

To get a whiff of just how unserious the left is, take a look at the leftist knee-jerk reaction to a recent oil fire in the Gulf of Mexico:

These tweets are stupidities because while the boiling gas fire at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is spectacular, it hasn't a single thing to do with either capitalism or global warming. 

It's the result of an accident from a poorly maintained pipeline owned by Pemex, the state oil company of Mexico. That's a 100% government-owned entity that was created in 1938 based on uncompensated expropriation from private-sector energy companies.

State energy enterprises are never capitalist, they are socialist state entities. Mexico's is worse than most of them - even Venezuela's state oil company has some private ownership. Mexico's, though is a full socialist state creature with zero accountability to shareholders.

It calls to mind that it's not capitalism, nor global warming that's causing these accidents, but the hard fact that socialist state energy enterprises have an amazing environmental record.

In Venezuela, we see state oil company pollution on an untold scale, with this sort of thing going on:

While the collapse of Venezuela’s oil industry and what was once the richest economy in South America are well documented, there is little coverage of the immense environmental damage being caused by the decay of its energy infrastructure.

The autocratic Maduro regime is determined to squeeze whatever oil and gasoline production it can generate from Venezuela’s crumbling oilfields, corroded refineries and rusting pipelines. The situation is so dire that oil spills are a regular event in the near-failed state, especially since Washington ratcheted up sanctions, preventing Caracas from obtaining the capital required to conduct critical maintenance and overhauls. Under Maduro’s leadership Venezuela’s government, including national oil company PDVSA, has ceased collecting and releasing data, making it near-impossible for international observers to ascertain what is occurring in the country. PDVSA data (Spanish) from 2016, before the national oil company stopped releasing operational information, showed that oil spills had multiplied fourfold since 1999. This was a worrying portent of what was to come because the worst of the decline for Venezuela’s oil industry did not start until 2018 as progressively stricter U.S. sanctions were imposed.

Aside from PDVSA ceasing to publicly report operational data, Caracas regularly attempts to ignore or even cover up oil spills. That makes it extremely difficult for neighboring countries and the international community to discern just how much environmental damage is occurring.

 Notice the cover-ups, easy to do in a socialist state when the state controls the press.

In Ecuador, we've got another state oil company situation that's just about as bad:

Chevron has never conducted oil production operations in Ecuador. Its subsidiary Texaco Petroleum Co. (TexPet) did operate in Ecuador, mostly in minority partnership with Ecuador's state oil company, Petroecuador, which owned 62.5 percent. TexPet left Ecuador in 1992, and at that time it fully remediated its share of environmental impacts arising from oil production. The $40 million remediation operation was certified by all agencies of the Ecuadorian government responsible for oversight, and TexPet received a complete release from Ecuador's national, provincial and municipal governments. Chevron acquired TexPet in 2001.

For more than two decades, Petroecuador has been the sole owner of the operations TexPet left behind, and the state oil company has greatly expanded them. Petroecuador has been slow to remediate its majority share of pre-1992 impacts and has amassed a poor environmental record since that time. All remaining environmental conditions in the region are the sole legal responsibility of Petroecuador, and in December 2011, Petroecuador announced a $70 million remediation program that would address the balance of the necessary clean-up.

A phony lawsuit pinning Chevron for blame for the Ecuadorean state oil company's oil pollution in the Amazon fell apart after Chevron spent hundreds of millions to get the truth out. That has not just left Ecuador with state environmental pollution, it's poisoned the environment for future foreign investment. Lucky Ecuador, and since that happened, the ChiComs have rolled in. In December 2018, I wrote:

If there was ever an example for nations worldwide of What Not To Do, take a look at what socialist Ecuador has done to itself in dumping the U.S. and turning to align its interests to China. The New York Times has a superb (albeit stomach-churning) report about how Ecuador sold itself out as a vassal of China, getting for itself a junk dam that is already collapsing, and turning over 80% of its oil production to the communist behemoth in order to pay its massive, massive debts from it. That, in exchange for scrapping its military ties to the U.S. and skipping out on its tab with western banks.

All that state capitalism, and pollution, too, yet somehow the West with its capitalism and rule of law, plus existing environmental standards that don't exist in the socialist state-owned third world, is now to blame.

Similar cases of socialist state oil company mismanagement and the horrible consequences of it abound in Russia, China, Nigeria, Iran, the list is pretty amazing.

Now we have this Mexican case, and Mexico's state oil company, Pemex, to its credit, has said it has since got the fire out.  

If anything, this fire amounts to an argument against state oil companies and the inevitable results of their activity, where profit is not the foremost concern, profit is not a thing, and making shareholders happy is not an issue. These state enterprises just serve as a cash cow for socialist governments that have so impoverished their people they've lost their tax base.

Now, if there's any argument at all about global warming in this, it's that countries like Mexico and China need to be held to the same standards as every other nation signed on to the Paris accord. That of course, is not happening, so this garbage goes on, useful to the left for pointing fingers at capitalism and global warming and, in reality, the West

That brings us back to these leftists with their dishonest narratives about capitalism and global warming.

Two of the idiots who posted those statements are leftist politicians who have a big thirst for attaining more power, for the state, and for themselves.

And now before any facts are in, they're assuming the voters are idiots, too, and will buy hook, line, and sinker the notion that capitalism and global warming are to blame for the Gulf fire.

According to these tweets, it doesn't seem to be working. Voters seem to be onto them and their ignorant, cynical game. Twitchy has curated some choice tweets educating these charlatans about the nature of the beast, too.

It just goes to show that they'll use a condemnation of capitalism, or a claim to global warming, to blame anything, no matter what disaster went down, on the West. It's like a knee reflex.

Image: Twitter screen shot

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