The most profitable year in the history of American big oil. How the media reinforce America's obsession with gas prices & the rattiest cities ... in America.
Great links, reading and images from Chartbook newsletter by Adam Tooze
Aref El Rayess, Male Figure 1/5/1973 حلال المشاكل ‘Problem Solver’ Source: British Museum
How Chinese investment is shifting from construction and infrastructure to electrification
Source: Daily Shot
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2022 was the most profitable year EVER for America’s publicly listed oil firms
As a result of higher prices, 2022 was the most profitable year on record for publicly traded US oil companies.
US oil industry has done vastly under the Biden admin than under Trump
The country’s top-10 listed operators by value amassed a combined net income of $313bn in the first three years of the Biden administration, almost triple the amount in the same period under Trump. Oil and gas production in the US hit record levels in 2023.
And yet the oil lobby hates the Biden admin. It focuses on a mass of regulations that are seen as hostile, even though their impact is largely symbolic rather than commercial.
“One of the great ironies of President Biden’s first term is that he campaigned on a pledge to address climate change and make significant changes to oil and gas policies, yet through this first term, profits and production for these companies have both boomed,” says Andrew Gillick, a managing director at energy consultancy Enverus.
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Source: FT
Meanwhile, news of petrol prices dominates America’s economic headlines more than ever before. Once prices hit $3.50 coverage surges.
And rather than rising with prosperity, America’s pain threshold, at least as the media imagine it, has fallen in real terms.
For subscribers only
Fox News has used petrol prices as a cudgel against the Biden administration.
The strongest effect of all this is seen with the rightwing Fox News, where the record high pump prices of June 2022 led to almost 80 per cent of programmes mentioning the cost of petrol, compared with about 50 per cent on CNN and MSNBC, and less than 20 per cent on network channels. In light of this it is unsurprising that data from the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey shows Republicans are almost twice as likely as Democrats to say they’ve recently heard unfavourable news about high prices.
Source: FT
Aref El Rayess, Figures with urban scene in background 3/5/1973 Source: British Museum
Born in Beirut, Aref Rayess started his career as a self-taught artist exhibiting for the first time in 1948. He lived in Africa for many years during which he traveled between Senegal and Paris. In Paris, he joined the studios of Fernand Léger, André Lhote, Marcel Marceau and Ossip Zadkine while studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1957, he returned to Lebanon, but left again for Florence in 1959 with a scholarship from the Italian government. From 1960 to 1963, he lived in Rome where he went on studying and exhibiting. In 1963, he returned to Lebanon. With the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, El Rayess was one of the artists who interpreted the tragic events in art. Staying in Algiers, he produced in 1976 a series of etchings entitled The Road to Peace. This work gave its name to an exhibition Saleh Barakat curated in 2009 at the Beirut Art Center, encompassing Lebanese visual arts between 1975 and 1991.[5] Apart from the etching series, oil paintings depicting the horror of war were featured in the exhibition.[6] In these troubled times, El Rayess showed political involvement in creating a poster commemorating the assassination of the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt.[7]
Source: Wikipedia
Sinclair’s Hidden Highway: the excitement of laying an oil pipeline in 1960s America.
The loving description of how the tube is cleaned, welded and wrapped is poetry.
The omnipresence of rodents in NYC takes a little getting used to. And NYC is not America’s rattiest city!
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Lines, by Anne Carson
While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone.
Paperclips
in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks
longingly
of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction.
Out
the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,
love
of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling
faster
now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I
want
to tell her–sign of God’s pity. She won’t keep me
she says, she
won’t run up my bill. Miracles slip past us. The
paperclips
are immortally aligned. God’s pity! How long
will
it feel like burning, said the child trying to be
kind.
Aref El Rayess, The Road to Peace 1978 Source: British Museum
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