Oil Money in Politics

About: oil change international - follow the oil money - presidential races

This is a very interesting graphic representation of donations related to candidates and oil. It would be interesting to expose some of the other relationships in this manner. The link goes to an interactive version. Nice Job. It may require a subscription. IMHO, there is nothing inherently evil about who a candidate is supported by. OTOH, it provides a lens with which to measure their future behavior. I would also like to have the complementary application showing who is being funded by the "green" lobby. Who is being supported by the immigration lobby (if you could find such) ? etc.

Comments

Seth says

Yeah the tool is done well. I particularly like that you can go to the other tabs and zoom in on the actual transactions. One, of course, would need to spend quite a bit of time with it to determine how and where the tool might distort the reality. These kinds of graphs are showing up more and more these days ... i ran into this one, Amazon Browser, the other day. Raw data is dry and incomprehensible ... it does need a visualizer.

I doubt that there is enough green money floating around to track ... and determining its greenarity would not be all that easy, far easier to track the black stuff. I suspect that most of the green money is being used to engineer green process rather than being waisted on politicians ... well at least i hope it is.

Mark de LA says
Well, for example there is a huge ethanol subsidy lobby in the corn belt. Yet we know that corn is not the best source of ethanol (see Sci channel). There are lots of people who would profit from government grants for climate projects. It's just less obvious than oil to track.

Seth says
The oil drum has a very informative article on ethanol from corn. Growing Popular trees or turning algae into biodiesel seems to me a better way to go.

Mark de LA says

Yes, kinda interesting. Hard to reach a conclusion in my mind with all the various statistics from different sources; some contradicting. IMHO, the subsidy should be added to the price/gallon since it is the taxpayer who is paying it (along with the taxes). Biomass wasn't discussed much. In the end we are still burning something to get transportation or other work from a resource - still not a good answer. It may help ameliorate the foreign oil problem until we get a good non combustion answer for energy needs.

Mark de LA says

seth 2008-02-07 08:48:20 9238

M 2008-02-06 13:11:20 9238

IMHO, the subsidy should be added to the price/gallon since it is the taxpayer who is paying it (along with the taxes).

Huh?

Taxpayers subsidize the ethanol, particularly in Iowa & other corn belt states. That cost is born by the taxpayers. When you get a gallon of ethanol (E85) those subsidies have already been payed to the corn growers. You should factor in your contribution in taxes to subsidize the growers into the "real" cost of the ethanol when you compare it to other fuels. The same goes for oil which also has subsidies (I don't know why given record profits

Mark de LA says

BTW, this node is not about fuel & alternatives. It is much more about the connections of political candidates to various contributors from the domain of oil & hopefully someday can expand into other arenas like unions, religions, race etc. It is similar to David Horowitz's DiscoverTheNetworks.org mentioned here with a link to the java applet here.

Mark de LA says

Google's socialgraph is interesting, netwise & is used to check public connections on the iternet between blogs etc. Fastblogit connects to nobody according to their demos.

Oil Money in Politics

About: oil change international - follow the oil money - presidential races

Tags

Comments

See Also