Our dealings with Big Oil are an outgrowth of how we view them, how they view us, how we view ourselves and how we all view the resource. Big Oil seems to view the resource as theirs and they are willing to pay a certain amount of tax to keep the public off their backs while they produce their (?) oil. Much of the public has bought into this mindset, too. Big Oil perpetuates this mindset by seeing to it that apologists sympathetic to their cause are the ones making the law. They have a direct hold on two senators and fairly good control over the governor and strong influence over much of the legislature. Wally Hickel and Jay Hammond, two guys with big hearts and courage, tried to get people to understand that WE own the resource and were entitled to the lions share of the benefits and our laws substantiate this stance. From Hammond and Hickels perspective, we are hiring the oil companies to perform a service for us -- to drill wells and pump our oil through a pipe. And we should have the same rights and recourse youd have if you didnt like your cable TV service. We need to rethink our relationship with the oil companies and quit feeling subordinate to them and beholden to them. We need to have an honest conversation with them about what sort of income stream they need in order to generate a fair and reasonable rate of return on their investment. Its a very simple concept though the nuts and bolts of the thing are complicated. We need to have negotiators who are at least as shrewd and knowledgeable as theirs working for us, not people who are actually drawing a flippin paycheck from them, for heavens sake. But success in this undertaking stems from being intellectually and emotionally anchored in one underlying assumption -- we own this oil and we are paying these people to produce it and pump it through a pipe to a boat. And if they are unwilling to perform this service for us at a reasonable cost, then maybe they need to sell their assets to someone who IS willing.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 16:27:38 +0000
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