One of the greatest bones of contention about extracting fossil fuels — in the industrialized world anyway — is the damage it can or will do to the environment. The industries resist the idea.

Do the costs of environmental protections cripple the production of newer, more unconventional fields, as the industry has long proclaimed?

Apparently not.  For example: the Associated Press reported this week that Chevron, a partner in the joint venture, had agreed to meet the 28 environmental conditions Australia set for the development of the offshore Gorgon gas field, worth $41 billion in gas exports to China. One of the condition is a safeguard for a rare turtle.

Similarly, in northern Pennsylvania, Hess has just signed a deal with a large group of farmers, in the Marcellus shale play. Their environmental demands included much stronger safeguards for their farmland and water supplies than required by state or federal law, and stringent demands on waste disposal. Responding to public pressure, the regional water authorities there have also set much tougher regulations to limit water use.

In the contracts offered by extraction companies, environmental protections are played down, although according to energy lawyers I have talked to, these contracts are still infinitely better than those signed years ago. These lawyers also say that the worst offenders aren’t the energy super-giants, but the smaller scrappier companies who have leaner margins and are willing to take greater risks in developing small or questionable fields.

Unsurprisingly, all these contracts serve the financial interests of the company. Meaningful environmental considerations, especially site specific ones, are conveniently limited. A number of developing countries seem to just accept this — perhaps they lack capacity or perhaps they are ill-informed or, for some of the worst dictatorships, they just don’t care. But they don’t have to accept these terms and shouldn’t.

Similarly, the landmen who travel through the US seeking unsuspecting homeowners in resources-rich areas willing to sign over their mineral rights for a pittance also offer environmentally inadequate terms.

Most companies will start with the gambit that strong environmental protections make any given project economically unfeasible. Occasionally, this is true. However, increasingly, though, this argument seems like a negotiating tactic — untrue and dishonest. The rationale that it’s just business to glean every penny even at the cost of environmental damage is even worse than ripping people off financially. It ruins their homes, their lives.

Fortunately, more and more, it seems that if a country or group of contiguous landowners sitting on a sizeable deposit worth extracting comes up with its own thought-out and locally appropriate environmental demands and sticks to them, sooner or later an energy company will come along willing to meet the terms.

Oil and gas companies have historically managed to develop truly astonishing technology to get oil under the conditions that they face. Some of these will be the environment and they can and do rise meet these challenges — but only if they must. It is up to the governments that set the environmental laws to make them.

A Gallup poll done two weeks ago reveals that of all industries, Americans rated the oil and gas worst, even worse than banking, GM and lawyers.

There have been some annoyed, defensive responses from workers in the oil and gas field — understandable since most people in the industry are hard-working, honest and understandably offended at being categorized as disreputable.

These complaints are undercut by recent oil company actions, like this month’s artificially staged “grassroots” events in Texas against stronger emissions controls. The New York Times reported:

“The event on Tuesday was organized by a group called Energy Citizens, which is backed by the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s main trade group. Many of the people attending the demonstration were employees of oil companies who work in Houston and were bused from their workplaces…
For its part, the oil industry plans to raise the pressure in coming weeks through its public rallies so that it can negotiate more favorable terms in the Senate than it got in the House. The strategy was outlined by the American Petroleum Institute in a memorandum sent to its members, which include Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips. The memorandum, not meant for the public, was obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace last week.”

In a related story, PR firms for the coal industry were found to have sent more than five dozen fake letters ( supposedly from groups like senior centers and the NAACP) opposing new climate change laws to members of Congress. The PR company, Bonner and Associates, blamed it on a rogue temp. The coal industry has apologized. But it’s understandable that public suspicion continues.

The new documentary film, Sweet Crude, directed by Sandy Cioffi, offers a rare visceral look at the enormous problems facing the people of Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger River delta.

Everyone interested in energy knows the complexity of the problem: massive oil reserves, oil companies only too willing to get into bed with corrupt military dictators (or now elected officials) in the name of if-I-didn’t-someone-else-would, extreme environmental degradation, excessively violent Nigerian security forces supposedly policing the area, violent militants kidnapping oil workers and stealing oil, aggravated ethnic tensions, desperate poverty for the local people — and the mind-boggling corruption that makes Nigeria the poster child of the resource curse.

But few outside the energy field know or care much about the situation; it’s simply below the radar, another messed-up African country.

Cioffi’s passionate film doesn’t pretend to be fair or balanced — she openly sides with the local activists in one small part of the delta whom she had come to know personally. The movie’s best parts offer glimpses of the infinitely sad lives of the residents.

It may be too much to expect balance from a filmmaker who was arrested, detained and whose footage was confiscated by Nigerian forces for making this film.  Yet Cioffi also seems unwilling to explore evolution of the organization MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) — she claims her friends are the true MEND and are non-violent. But someone is out there as a much more violent and militant version of this group, and she doesn’t help her case by blithely dismissing these supposed pretenders so easily.

And she doesn’t talk to any major figures (corrupt or otherwise) inside the government  at any level  or any of international NGOs working on this issue.  There is  only one vague chat with an oil company manager. There is no exploration of why this issue has been so unbelievably hard to resolve.

Perhaps no film could tell the whole story of the Nigerian tragedy. But a more complete set of characters and deeper understanding of all sides would have given this film much more power and credibility.

In my family, there is the story of how, when one of my aunts sold her house, her sisters, helping her empty the place, found 27 boxes of Fab detergent squirreled away in the kitchen cupboard. In case she should ever run out, and besides it was on sale, you see. Something like this may be about to happen to China.

This week’s Forbes has once again posed the questions sporadically floated for some time: what happens when the Chinese realize they have over-bought commodities? Did the Chinese inadvertently create a mini-bubble in commodities?

In the depths of the financial crash, when the global economy seemed to be unable to find bottom and the prices of oil, gas and metals were in freefall, China, as we know, went on quite a shopping spree.

Everyone was willing to sell and China gave loans in exchange for future guarantees on oil and gas from Russian companies, Brazil’s Petrobras, and many others. They went shopping in Africa, Latin America and Australia, snapping up commodities at great prices (and not always as low as they could have gone, either).  Overextended mining giants like Rio Tinto sought out China for huge cash infusions to keep them afloat — though that deal, of course, obviously ended in disaster with Rio Tinto pulling back as prices improved and China retaliating with charges of spying.

Most investors are not betting on metal futures. Oil and gas prices seem unnaturally high, given the lower demands. Metals like copper have piled up in Chinese warehouses. Forbes reports China has imported nearly 300 million tons of iron ore this year, and nearly a half million tons of copper more than it needs.

Even with all the building going on in Shanghai for next year’s World Expo, even with their own stimulus package, even with the Chinese banks supporting it, it seems impossible that China will actually need all this stuff in the foreseeable future, especially with world demand still slow and its own exports down.

Chinese buying has slowed. Will the oil, gas and metals prices hang in there till there is a real economic recovery, or again crash to reflect actual demand?

On Friday, the New York Times reported that Iraq’s date production, has fallen to half of what it was in the 1980s, when the country was the world’s leading date producer. “Date palms have been left to die for lack of water, and fungi and pests have ruined thousands of tons of fruit because the country has only three crop-dusting airplanes and three qualified pilots. American military approval is still needed to fly.”

The Iraqi government says it cannot spare any oil income to save the agricultural sector.

If, for thousands of years, Iraq, “the Fertile Crescent”, had a decent agricultural sector, and until the 1980s, also a stable manufacturing sector, its economy is now about only one commodity: oil. According to a senior Iraqi economist quoted in the article, 95% of the government’s revenue now comes from oil. It isn’t only the war’s destruction that threatens the Iraqi date crop. Even under the best of circumstances, countries with a heavy extractive sector have to work especially hard to sustain their agricultural or manufacturing sector in the face of the so-called Dutch disease, which vastly inflates the value of the resource country’s currency.

This means that a country’s other exports become too expensive to compete internationally and the economy withers. The country becomes totally dependent on its oil or gas. And extraction sectors bring in far fewer jobs than is commonly thought, leaving a lot of unemployed, bored, angry and restive people.

When you think of what the Dutch disease done to large sections of the Middle East, Nigeria, Gabon, Angola, and many other countries, you can see why this bodes very, very ill for Iraq in the long run. It would be smart for USAID or another American agency to start focusing on helping Iraq with more than oil and peace.

Green tech leaders meeting this week in Las Vegas at the National Clean Energy Summit conference sponsored by Democratic Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid used the opportunity to complain about the lack of government support. Despite recent announcements from the Obama Administration that some initiatives are moving, the money is not going out the door as fast as they would like.

But its not just funding that is delaying alternative energy development. There are more structural issues such as permitting that all levels of government need to address to foster green projects. For example, fears over the fate of the sage grouse are stymieing plans for a large-scale alternative wind energy project in Wyoming developed by Texas-based Horizon Wind Energy. As such projects increase in scale to create efficiencies, they are becoming ensnared in permitting issues as they may create other environmental problems.

The government will seek to reduce the environmental impact of any large project, but at some point the government must make a fundamental decision. Either sacrifice large renewable projects, which means relying on older more polluting fuels that affect many species, or build a project could affect just one.

As the governments in the US debate permitting issue, other countries, such as China are making decisions and companies, such as Evolution Solar Company are jumping ship and finding more profitable opportunities there. Stimulus funding will no doubt give green tech companies some support, but without a more flexible regulatory environment, the US will still be behind the green curve.