So You Want to Drill for Oil: An Earthly Comedy
Zycher, Benjamin
rection of their foreign policy. This leaves Tang's proposal, or some variant of it, as the only other option. The question is whether it is meaningful. To answer this, one first has to...
...And so we form the People's Community Oil Company (PCOC), the avowed purpose of which is to discover and produce new sources of domestic crude oil...
...Defending our long-term interests requires the same order of perseverance, and there is no mistaking our interest in Southeast Asia...
...He represents a party that waited not ten but thirty-five years for its triumph and would have been willing to wait as many more...
...We were fighting an enemy as patient as he was implacable...
...BLM consults with a Geological Survey (GS) District Engineer (DE) to see if our plans endanger other important resource values...
...Consequently, the resources we put into that region's defense have to be judged in terms of our ability to stay the course...
...Their basic function is psychological-to weaken the hold a regime has on its people and to exacerbate internal differences...
...After the Fourth Congress in 1976, nearly one-quarter-million Party members were deprived of their affiliation (and all the privileges that go with it...
...Whatever decisions we make about Indochina, we now have to make them both quickly and with adequate consideration of our long-term strategic goals...
...Nguyen Co Thach, Vietnam's foreign minister, recently told the Far Eastern Economic Review that Americans think in terms of two years, French in terms of four, and the Vietnamese in terms of ten...
...This, if anything, was the lesson of the Vietnam war...
...Are you, dear Reader, a wild horse or burro...
...There is no assurance that committing aid to the domestic opponents of Soviet-supported Vietnam will provide the leverage necessary to affect Hanoi's intransigence...
...Many cadres serving with the army have deserted to Thailand and others live in continual fear of changes in Party policies...
...We first must file with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) a topographic map showing the location and general physical features of the area...
...That this weed kills cattle is of no particular concern, since cattle are not an endangered species, or at least have not been since price controls on meat were removed...
...BLM accepts this, but points out, second, that exploration and drilling activity would 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...
...Not insignificantly, enhancing the viability of popular opposition will also provide additional incentives for Russian disengagement in such places as Afghanistan and Indochina...
...In response, we hire a botanist who surveys the region and reports that the weed in question is a common one that would thrive were we to disturb the land...
...The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the Council of Economic Advisers...
...0 Benjamin Zycher SO YOU WANT TO DRILL FOR OIL: AN EARTHLY COMEDY The oil development game...
...But Vietnam in its turn has now become prey to internal dissension...
...Unless affirmative action has degenerated more than we realize, one would suspect not...
...My goal here is to convey a sense Benjamin Zycher is a Senior Staff Economist on the Council of Economic Advisers...
...But given the alternatives, it is an option that deserves serious consideration...
...Vietnam today is replete with intraParty discord and distrust...
...PCOC's in-house geolo gist notes excitedly that the land is a promising prospect for large oil and gas deposits...
...These are precisely the tactics used by the Vietnamese Communists so successfully against the United States during the war, as we remember all too painfully...
...Experts themselves in psychological warfare, the Vietnamese can be expected to manifest a high level of sensitivity toward their own vulnerability to domestic opposition...
...Read on...
...The prevailing atmosphere is of passivity, disloyalty, and vindictiveness...
...We thus decide to seek a lease for exploratory drilling: this is how it is done...
...Regardless of whether you stand on two legs or four, you and your family and your neighbors and their families are affected in important ways by the law cited above and by a host of others affecting the availability and use of onshore and offshore territory for development and production of energy resources.* A simple reading of this list of laws-let alone a journey through the permit morass dictated by them-makes for a tedious undertaking...
...From a geopolitical standpoint it is vital to us, and our heritage of commitment to the area is second only to our commitment to Europe...
...The region interlocks the South Pacific and encompasses many of our traditional allies...
...of the complexity, the inconsistency-in a word, the absurdity-of the actual process of obtaining permission for energy resource development for federal onshore sites...
...Unfortunately, at least two are mentioned...
...During the Fifth Party Congress last year, another 300,000 were purged...
...To answer this, one first has to recognize that opposition movements are not merely military operations, perhaps not even primarily military operations...
...and, if not, the Wild Horses and Burros Act of 1971 is seemingly of little concern...
...How tedious is it...
...Alas, if you believe yourself safe from such laws, then you do not understand the legislative production of modern American government, a fairly well-protected monopoly...
...For this reason, aid to indigenous resistance movements carried out purposefully with Vietnam's neighbors does have a chance of turning Vietnamese thoughts to the benefits of American and Chinese neutrality, if not friendship...
...First, there are reports that the area is a prime breeding-ground for a particular kind of locoweed listed on the endangered-species list...
...Thach was calibrating his remarks for Western ears...
...As luck would have it, we happen to know of a sizable piece of government property currently producing little more than weeds and mosquitoes...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
