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Drilling Would Help No One But Mismanaged Oil Industry
October 3, 2008
By Steve Colby
Huffington Post
Oil companies pump millions of barrels of oil from US Federal lands... While American Taxpayers receive pennies in return. Why? Listening to oil industry TV commercials and some campaign speeches, it's easy to get the impression drilling for oil and gas on US public lands is a "no brainer". Facts are bandied about American support for drilling new oil wells and the quantities of oil and gas that lay under America. With all the hoorah, what you don't hear is claims that new oil and gas wells will reduce the price of gas at the pump or your home heating bills. … (4) During the mid-1990S, whistle blowers and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a government watchdog group, filed suit against sixteen oil companies for failing to pay their required royalties. From 1998 to 2001, a dozen major companies, while acknowledging no wrongdoing, paid $438 million to settle charges that they had intentionally misreported their sale prices for oil (in order to pay lower royalties). POGO eventually issued several reports finding hundreds of millions of dollars in uncollected royalties. (SourceWatch.org) …
