When Government Drills, Enviro’s Cheer  
By Martin Harris

I’m indebted to Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady for publicizing a set of correlations I wasn’t perceptive enough to see for myself, without adult direction and supervision. In her 16 June column, she points out that, in nations where the shareholders of private-sector companies own the oil and gas businesses and the profits they generate, their efforts are made ever more difficult at every turn by various cohorts of environmentalists, NIMBY-ists, Flipper-lovers and wind-surfers who use their substantial political skills to prevent hydrocarbon extraction (think US and UK); but in nations where government owns the drilling rigs (and the profits from their use) exploration and extraction proceed without enviro protest (think Mexico, Cuba, and now Brazil). There’s a lesson in this for the Peoples’ Republic of Vermont, whose Golden Dome (GD) folks already own some formerly private-sector means-of-production (think railroad tracks) partially own a lot more (think subsidized housing) and aspire to own and operate such additional sectors as health care (think Catamount and its corollaries) and now food distribution (think the Symington gubernatorial campaign platform). Indeed, the GD politicians have already laid Statewide claim to underground mineral rights in the form of sub-surface water.

Here’s my suggestion: let’s have the GD politicians lay claim to subterranean oil and gas as well. There’s enough of these combustibles under the Eastern Overthrust, that range of hills and ridges running along Vermont’s Left Coast, and extending from Pawlet to St. Albans, that those of us then owning land in that corridor were selling drilling rights to such –ugh—private sector entities as the Cambrian Corporation, back in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Of course, exploration was never consummated, and Earth Goddess Gaia was never violated, and the oil-and-gas resources were never tapped and remain untouched, for a couple of reasons: when oil futures were in the teens-of-dollars, it didn’t pay; and, particularly, enviro opposition made corporate exploration not worth the effort. Just think how much more smoothly it could have gone if Montpelier had been the owner of a government energy industry, particularly now that oil and gas futures are a dozen times in value what they were then. Yes, indeed: let Mexico’s Pemex and Brazil’s Petrobras be the models for Vermont’s own further foray into government ownership and operation of a major industrial sector. Surely a drilling rig adorned with the State Seal would deserve cheers and approbation from such as VNRC and Sierra, not the criticism and contempt richly deserved by, say, the private-sector Cambrian Corporation. Montpelier could then sell the black gold to Vermont’s local-vore contingent, that highly vocal activist group which wants all foods raised east of Lake Champlain and logically would simply love, dahling, to have all energy extracted locally as well. And, of course, there’s the follow-the-money principle: as O’Grady writes in her Journal column, "Environmentalists don’t seem to mind State profits". Indeed, when it comes to more-money-going-to-Montpelier, what’s not to love? Their constantly professed concern for "affordability" aside, the GD politicians could sell oil and gas to the same folks it collects taxes from, and at market rates, to boot. In the interest of cosmic fairness, it might even charge high-income resident more per therm of energy than the "less fortunate", and, of course, free (at the expense of other taxpayers, that is) for the most deserving.

And what about those pesky land-owners on whose acreage the drill rigs sit? That issue was decided by the Supreme Court of the US decades ago in Pennsylvania Coal Company v. Mahon, when it ruled that, yes, the coal company owned all the coal in fee simple and could extract as much as it wanted from under above-ground landowner Mahon, who enjoyed surface rights only. Penn Coal was required only to leave enough coal in place so that Mahon’s house wouldn’t fall into the hole. Vermont’s new Agency of Petrochemical Exploration (APE) wouldn’t let that happen by removing too much oil from any single site, because then the Division of Property Valuation would complain about not be able to collect taxes on an in-the-hole house.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights