Search Results

After successfully defending the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Reservations from non-Indian mining, American Indians launched a national campaign to prepare similarly situated energy tribes for the coming onslaught in energy demand. This chapter details those efforts that began with Northern Cheyenne and Crow leaders helping to organize a regional coalition of tribes to fight federally planned development on the Northern Plains. From this defensive alliance, energy tribes then turned to exploring options to mine their own minerals. They worked with federal agencies charged with expanding domestic energy production in the wake of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo and consulted energy experts familiar with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Ultimately, tribes nationwide formed the Council of Energy Resource Tribes to provide a unified Indian voice to federal energy policymakers, lobby for federal aid in developing tribal resources, and share information about energy development. After much confusion as to CERT’s primary purpose – including whether it was a cartel-like “Native American OPEC” – the organization evolved into a professional consulting firm that both worked with individual tribes to pursue specific mining projects and lobbied the federal government for beneficial grants and policies.

Sadly, just as energy tribes secured recognition of their sovereign rights to control resource development, the market for Indian energy collapsed. This Epilogue explains the changes in international energy markets that produced a glut of cheap foreign oil in mid-1980s, making investment in tribal-led energy projects uneconomical. It also updates readers on the fitful attempts by the Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and Navajo to establish mineral revenues amid fluctuating energy markets, and details the intense intra-tribal debates over resource development that continue to divide these communities. Despite these setbacks, however, the book concludes on a hopeful note, describing subsequent changes to federal law that continue to expand tribal control over reservation resources. The last anecdote offers CERT Chairman Peter MacDonald’s 1982 farewell address as an opportunity to summarize the energy tribes’ momentous efforts. These groups mobilized a defense of the homeland, developed the institutional capacity to regulate energy development, and secured legal authority over reservation resources. Only the successful execution of that authority to alleviate suffocating poverty remains.

This chapter discusses a case study of British Petroleum Exploration's (BPX) IT outsourcing arrangements. Outsourcing at BPX presented a novel way of using multiple suppliers to deliver best-in-class services for all areas contracted out. The use of multiple suppliers in part was driven by BP's desire to keep control, yet at the same time seek benefits from their expertise and capabilities. BP's objectives of maintaining high global service and technology standards, while reducing the overall IT costs beyond what the internal IT group could possibly have achieved was accomplished. Vendors, on the other hand, benefited from the risk-reward arrangements, the new business projects and BPX's expansion globally, and of course from BP's prestige as a ‘blue chip’ company and leading-edge technology user.

In Chapter 4, the author discusses French doctrine and organization for logistics and the modifications necessary in Indochina to shift from a territorial based system to one capable of supporting mobile forces in the field. The organization, personnel, and challenges faced by the various logistical branches (Intendance, Ordnance, and Petroleum Services) are also discussed, as are the storage and distribution of rations, clothing and equipment, weapons, vehicles, ammunition, and petroleum products, as well as maintenance.

Chapter 1 begins by stressing the severity of climate change (CC) and showing how, contrary to popular belief, atomic energy is not a viable solution to CC. Many scientists and most market proponents agree that renewable energy and energy efficiencies are better options. The chapter also shows that government subsidies for oil and nuclear power are the result of flawed science, poor ethics, short-term thinking, and special-interest influence. The chapter has 7 sections, the first of which surveys four major components of the energy crisis. These are oil addiction, non-CC-related deaths from fossil-fuel pollution, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and catastrophic CC. The second section summarizes some of the powerful evidence for global CC. The third section uses historical, ahistorical, Rawlsian, and utilitarian ethical principles to show how developed nations, especially the US, are most responsible for human-caused CC. The fourth section shows why climate-change skeptics, such as “deniers” who doubt CC is real, and “delayers” who say that it should not yet be addressed, have no valid objections. Instead, they all err scientifically and ethically. The fifth section illustrates that all modern scientific methods—and scientific consensus since at least 1995—confirm the reality of global CC. Essentially all expert-scientific analyses published in refereed, scientific-professional journals confirm the reality of global CC. The sixth section of the chapter shows how fossil-fuel special interests have contributed to the continued CC debate largely by paying non-experts to deny or challenge CC. The seventh section of the chapter provides an outline of each chapter in the book, noting that this book makes use of both scientific and ethical analyses to show why nuclear proponents’ arguments err, why CC deniers are wrong, and how scientific-methodological understanding can advance sound energy policy—including conservation, renewable energy, and energy efficiencies.

It’s certainly not intuitively obvious that the noble gases, which don’t do anything, which don’t react either chemically or biologically, should be intimately related with questions of life and death, but so they are. The conventional wisdom is that they are physiologically inert: you breathe them in, you breathe them out; they don’t react with your body at all. This is not quite true. In 1938, two scientists at the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, Albert R. Behnke and Oscar D. Yarbrough, were working on the “remarkable stupefaction and neuromuscular impairment experienced by deep sea divers at depths below 100 feet” due to nitrogen narcosis. They discovered that substituting helium for atmospheric nitrogen in the air supply minimized the problem. The helium didn’t actually interact physiologically, but it improved the flow of oxygen through the aerobic pathways, according to Graham’s Law, which relates air flow to the inverse square root of the gas’s density (i.e., atomic mass). It seemed natural to investigate the role of argon, and the following year they found that, as expected, argon (being more dense than air) interfered with air flow rather than improving it. But further experiments showed, to their surprise, that argon was even more narcotic than nitrogen, an effect they ascribed to its increased solubility in both water and fat; that is, the effect on the central nervous system seemed to depend not so much on the identity of the gas but on its total dissolved concentration in the body and blood stream. Interesting, but soon there was a war on, and it wasn’t until 1946 that several workers at the University of California, Berkeley, took the obvious next step: the solubility of the noble gases increases with atomic number, so xenon should be most narcotic. And they found this to be so; indeed, xenon was so narcotic it worked as a general anesthetic on mice. Well, that was interesting.

This Chapter an overview of the economic implications of the UKCS’s status as a mature oil and gas province. It reviews the economic dimension of a number of issues that are treated in more detail from the legal perspective by other contributors to this book. It thus considers the way in which the UK Government has adapted the licensing regime to encourage new entrants as well as the exploration and development of frontier areas. It also considers the way in which uncertainty surrounding decommissioning liabilities has an impact on investment decisions as regards both new and existing developments and notes the deleterious effect which the Government’s ultra-cautious approach may have on the national interest. On the fiscal side, the Chapter notes and welcomes the Government’s recent attempt to encourage high-cost development through the provision of field allowances against Supplementary Charge and notes the inherent instability in the UK’s system of taxing oil and gas revenues, and the barrier to investment which that represents.

This Chapter considers the fiscal regime applying to operations on the UK Continental Shelf, with a particular focus on those elements of taxation that are specific to the oil and gas industry. The discussions include the Petroleum Revenue Tax, Ring Fence Corporation Tax and the Supplementary Charge. The Chapter subsequently speculates on the future direction of upstream taxation: given the extent of fiscal instability that has characterised the history of the UKCS as a hydrocarbon province and given the economic position of the country at present and for the foreseeable future, how will the Government strike the balance between regarding the industry as a cash cow to be milked when times are tough and the need to encourage continuing investment in the mature province to ensure maximum recovery?

In the preceding chapters, we’ve focused largely on what is often called “traditional pollution”: soot and smog and their precursors, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. But power plants are also the nation’s largest source of a very different sort of pollutant: carbon dioxide. Unlike traditional pollution, atmospheric CO2 does not pose a threat to public health through inhalation. As every schoolchild learns, humans exhale CO2 during normal respiration, and plants absorb it as part of the photosynthesis that fuels their growth. Carbon dioxide does, however, act as a “greenhouse gas.” Like the glass of a greenhouse, molecules of CO2 let sunlight pass through to warm the earth but then trap some of the heat that radiates back from the planet’s surface. Up to a point, this heat-trapping effect is beneficial; without it, the earth would be too cold to support life. But when humans burn fossil fuels, carbon that has been sequestered underground for millions of years is rapidly released in the form of CO2, and the natural carbon cycle is altered. As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the greenhouse effect becomes stronger, and the earth’s surface temperature rises. Over time, warming driven by ever-increasing industrial emissions of CO2 is expected to have serious, possibly devastating consequences for all corners of human society. (There are other greenhouse gases, like methane, but CO2 is by far the most common, accounting for more than 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and almost 85 percent of U.S. emissions.) And yet, when President Obama took office in 2009, almost forty years after the U.S. Congress passed a piece of legislation designed to eliminate all air pollution that posed a threat to public health and welfare, emissions of carbon dioxide were still entirely unregulated at the federal level. As the President observed in his first Earth Day address on April 22, 2009: “[W] e place limits on pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide and other harmful emissions. But we haven’t placed any limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It’s what’s called the carbon loophole.”

Although known as “Mr. Clean” for his longtime environmental advocacy, Edmund Muskie had little knowledge of the American hazardous waste grid until 1978. A congressional sponsor of the landmark Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the senator from Maine epitomized environmental politics. In fact, a few months before the Love Canal crisis unfolded, Muskie proposed yet another federal environmental law: a “comprehensive scheme to assure full protection of our national resources” in the wake of oil drilling disasters, tanker spills and toxic train derailments. Yet Muskie soon realized that his plan omitted something important: hazardous waste dumps. Love Canal had illuminated the toxic perils many Americans faced in their own neighborhoods. With an EPA study showing that tens of thousands of old toxic sites had yet to be contained, it was clear that the everyday landscape of homes, playgrounds, and schools needed environmental protection too. “In our society,” Muskie told an interviewer in the late 1970s, ...we are discovering almost every day, in almost every day’s newspaper, new hazards that have been released into the atmosphere over the period of our industrial revolution. [They] suddenly crop up in Love Canal, up in New York State … to create enormous hazards to public health, property values, to people. So we are constantly dealing with problems that [we] were not anticipating, which suddenly create almost insoluble problems for people and communities … [A]ll of these poisons and toxic materials were buried in landfill sites here, there, and elsewhere and sadly begin leaking in underground water, or into lakes and rivers, streams[,] only to rise up to hit people in the face with disease, with cancer, declining property values so on.... For Muskie, Love Canal was revelatory. It showed that federal law lagged behind the mounting problem of hazardous waste. After hearing Love Canal residents’ testimony, he believed that the time had come for a national statute governing toxic waste remediation—what he would refer to as a “clean land” law.

The way in which this manager relied on his network to obtain information and knowledge critical to the success of an important project is common and likely resonates with your own experience. Usually when we think of where people turn for information or knowledge we think of databases, the Web, intranets and portals or other, more traditional, repositories such as file cabinets or policy and procedure manuals. However, a significant component of a person’s information environment consists of the relationships he or she can tap for various informational needs. For example, in summarizing a decade worth of studies, Tom Allen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that engineers and scientists were roughly five times more likely to turn to a person for information than to an impersonal source such as a database or a file cabinet. In other settings, research has consistently shown that who you know has a significant impact on what you come to know, as relationships are critical for obtaining information, solving problems, and learning how to do your work. Particularly in knowledge-intensive work, creating an informational environment that helps employees solve increasingly complex and often ambiguous problems holds significant performance implications. Frequently such efforts entail knowledge-management initiatives focusing on the capture and sharing of codified knowledge and reusable work products. To be sure, these so-called knowledge bases hold pragmatic benefits. They bridge boundaries of time and space, allow for potential reuse of tools or work products employed successfully in other areas of an organization, and provide a means of reducing organizational “forgetting” as a function of employee turnover. However, such initiatives often undervalue crucial knowledge held by employees and the web of relationships that help dynamically solve problems and create new knowledge. As we move further into an economy where collaboration and innovation are increasingly central to organizational effectiveness, we must pay more attention to the sets of relationships that people rely on to accomplish their work. Certainly we can expect emerging collaborative technologies to facilitate virtual work and skill-profiling systems to help with the location of relevant expertise.

Chapter 5 examines how Chinese geologists dealt with the Japanese occupation of China’s coastal regions during the War of Resistance. The chapter describes the great inland migration of Chinese scientific institutions and the problems of wartime scarcity. Under these conditions, Chinese geology expanded to include new members without the same intellectual pedigrees as the pre-war community, and existing institutions had to develop new mechanisms for initiating them into an active research community. The move to the Interior also opened up previously inaccessible frontier territories to Chinese geological investigation, and the urgency of China’s fuel shortage brought the Geological Survey to these outlying areas in search of petroleum. On one hand, the wartime experience galvanized the community and gave it the confidence to privilege the physical evidence of the earth over naysaying foreign authorities. However, the isolation of war also narrowed Chinese focus, and Chinese geology showed signs of becoming strictly the geology of China by Chinese, rather than an open program of scientific exchange.

This chapter examines the challenge of state control with regard to the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). It considers how the state utilizes economic statecraft in the context of efforts to secure oil through the creation and subsequent “going out” of the Chinese national oil corporations, which were among the earliest Chinese commercial actors to venture abroad. The chapter begins with a historical background on China's petroleum industry and its relationship to the Chinese state before turning to a discussion of the CNPC's early efforts to venture abroad. In particular, it discusses the CNPC's activities in Sudan and the strategic difficulties caused by the state's “going out” policy. It also explains how Chinese authorities sought to re-establish control over the international activities of its commercial actors in the extractive resources sector through balance of relative resources and unity of the state.

Chapter one opens with a contemporary dilemma in Ecuador: with the help of the “international community” will the nation complete the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, which would keep its “oil in the soil” to protect its biodiversity, indigenous tribes, and limit greenhouse gasses, or will it drill for petroleum and use the proceeds to further the social and economic development of its people? Through this example, the rest of the chapter develops the central concern of the book: how can states and civil society work within the constraints of the global economic structure to develop sustainably? Three possible futures for development are laid out: sustainable development, extractive development, and alternatives to development. The theoretical underpinning of the book, the treadmill of production theory, is explained with regard to the key players in the narrative: the state, nongovernmental organizations, social movement activists, and transnational organizations. The chapter concludes with an overview of the argument and the book.