Pedantry and Another Hatchet Job from McClatchy.

The leftist McClatchy News Service has an article today that tries to prove that China is, in fact, not looking for oil within 50 miles of Key West. The article has a lot of quotes from people who apparently don’t know anything about China doing anything in the water off of Cuba which is offered as proof that there is, in fact, nothing happening.

Well, that’s not entirely true. McClatchy is playing a silly semantic game. They take the claims that china is drilling closer to the US than US companies can and are focusing on the word “drilling”. That way they can say, “Hey, we don’t see any drills. How can they be drilling?”. That’s a cheap way of framing the argument and it ignores common sense. When we talk about drilling, no one thinks that you’re just talking about the point at which spinning tube hits sea floor. They expect that you’re talking about the entire process of extracting oil from the Earth: finding the best place to drill, conducting studies, making test drills, building the rigs and setting them in place, and extracting the oil. It’s like the word “reporting”. No one would begrudge a McClatchy person for saying he was reporting on a story if we saw him at a meeting taking notes and preparing to do a couple interviews instead of sitting in front of his computer writing the story. Reporting the news is a process that has several components, just like drilling out. It’s pedantic of McClatchy to try to pick that nit with such vigor.

However, the article makes a couple claims that are at direct odds with what has been reported from authoritative sources.

First, it’ll help to start with the New York Times article that was published back in 2006, or the sister article published in the NYT’s international version. Here’s where the reporter cites the source of the story.

Cuba has divided its side of the Florida Straits into 59 lease areas. As of the end of February, foreign countries had secured the rights or were negotiating the rights to 16 of them, according to Cuban government documents provided by the Cuban Interests Section in Washington.

China was specifically mentioned as one of those nations at the very beginning of the article. That, generally, would be enough to use as fact, but it always helps to have corroborating information, right? Unluckily for McClatchy and its mystified sources, there is such information.

Lets turn to the Vietnam News Agency, working from an announcement directly from the Cuban government.

The Cuba Oil Company (Cubapetroleo) signed a production contract with the China Petroleum & Chemical Corp (SINOPEC) to work in areas around the Cuban island believed to contain oil deposits, Cuba’s Ministry of Basic Industry reported on Monday.

The deal was reached during an early Sunday meeting attended by Li Lianfu, China’s ambassador to Cuba, Cuba’s Basic Industry Minister Yadira Garcia and Minister of Government Ricardo Cabrisas, according to the report.

Not only is there an official press release, but there are specific officials present that McClatchy could have asked. They didn’t, nor did they apparently asked their diplomatic sources about the release. I wonder why, in the McClatchy article, “Western diplomats” were so ignorant of this? Don’t embassies get press releases from their host governments? I guess not. This VNA article also has an interesting bit that bears on the McClatchy article as well.

In late December, Cuban President Fidel Castro announced the discovery of a crude oil deposit off the coast of Santa Cruz del Norte, east of Havana, containing up to 100 million barrels.

You have to expect that the deal would include this huge deposit of oil. It makes absolutely no sense for China to get a sweeping deal to work “around” Cuba but not in this brand new patch. That announcement looks even more odd put against this statement from the McClatchy article.

China’s Sinopec oil company does have an agreement with the Cuban government, but it’s to develop onshore resources west of Havana, Pinon said. The Chinese have done some seismic testing, he said, but no drilling, and nothing offshore.

Ooooookay. So they can work onshore east of Havana, but they can’t touch that 100 million barrel goodie bag of oil that’s also east of Havana? What government interested in making any money at all (and let’s face it, the Castro government is pretty darned good at milking money from its resources, people included) would let China all ove the island but would but that field off-limits? Come on. Pull the other leg; it has bells on.

[Correction - I Mis-read the direction. I'll still ask the question, though. Why in the world would Cuba give China such wide-ranging rights to drill but put this one patch off-limits, especially givent hat Cuba could make bank off of it and get some of that oil, too?]

Pinon’s expertise seems a bit more suspect when you consider this al-Jazeera story from a week after the the NYT report.

The Cuban government is to allow China to station 12 oil rigs in its waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

Fidel Castro’s government has stepped up work on 36 new oil wells in partnership with Chinese and Canadian companies, officials said on Thursday.

The Cuban government is generally silent about oil matters, but this week Communist Party newspaper Granma also reported that Cuba had drilled its deepest oil well yet near Varadero, east of Havana.

So is that deal onshore or off shore? If it’s the former, then these “officials” (whom we can assume are close enough to the deal to know exact numbers) are either completely wrong or lying. I admit that either could be true, but it doesn’t seem terribly likely. We already knew that Cuba and China has inked a deal. This report is just adding particulars to that fact. If it’s offshore, and the preponderance of the reporting say it is, then Piron got this one wrong. Since this is the key point of the entire article, that makes the article wrong, too.

So, to sum up, McClatchy’s “proof” consists of a guy from a think-tank who’s not actually in Cuba and some anonymous Western diplomats who “don’t believe” there’s any drilling going on. On the other hand, we have at least one press release from the Cuban government that names witnesses to the agreement, a statement from Fidel Castro about an oil field in the same area McClatchy’s think-tanker identified, and information from anonymous officials close enough to the agreements to give specifics about how many oil rigs are involved in the Florida Straits. I know which reports I’m going to consider authoritative and which I’m going to consider a shoddy effort to kick Republicans in the pants again.

McClatchy? Next time you want to do a hatchet job on Republicans, try asking why their presidential candidate opposes expanding our domestic oil exploration even the slightest bit. It’ll get done what you want and it will also have the benefit of being true.

Other Posts of Interest:

• Democrats Vote to Drive Gas Prices Higher
• You Say “Sectarian”, I Say “Iranian”. You say “Violence”, I say “Invasion”.
• Who Doesn’t Want Cheap Energy? Plenty of Folks.

Tags: China, Cuba, Energy Policy, Media Bias

Category: Anti-Americanism, Oh, THAT liberal media., Thinking About Energy