Yoshie posted:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/business/worldbusiness/09pemex.html>
March 9, 2007
Output Falling in Oil-Rich Mexico, and Politics Gets the Blame
By ELISABETH MALKIN
MEXICO CITY, March 8 — The KU-S oil production platform off the coast
of Ciudad del Carmen, with its 10,000-ton tangle of yellow and red
tanks and pipes, would seem the natural product of three years of
soaring energy prices. The newly installed platform certainly is the
face that Mexico's state oil monopoly, Pemex, would like to show off.
But Pemex is in trouble. Its production and proven reserves are
falling, and it has no money to reverse the slide. Mexico is the
second-largest supplier of imported oil to the United States, after
Canada, but its total exports are slipping. If the company continues
on its current course, Mexico may one day have trouble just keeping up
with rising demand at home.
Then Yoshie comments:
What looks like the problem of "peak oil" to some is in reality the
political problem of mismatch between who has oil and who has
investment capital and advanced technology, in the context of rising
domestic oil consumption on the part of oil producers, NOT a
geological problem of running out of recoverable oil (which we WON'T
any time soon). This is actually a very politically interesting and
important problem, at the heart of imperialist thought today, but
"peak oil" theory confuses everything and turns attention of leftists
away from the real problem.
I agree it's a political problem. But I'd frame it differently.
PEMEX's problem is basically the same as FEMA's in the U.S. In
Mexico, you have a group of corrupt, incompetent prevaricators running
the government (and government-controlled companies) who -- by their
very nature of corrupt and incompetent prevaricators -- have it easy
to show that the government is a bad manager.
So, all this press on PEMEX and peak oil is to prepare conditions for
-- indeed -- the privatization of PEMEX. Since PEMEX provides a large
chunk of the funds for social spending (education, health care,
infrastructure, etc.), then this is their strategy to "starve the
beast." They want PEMEX for obvious reasons and also because that
would tie the hands of a potential left-wing government in the future.
It's a class struggle.
