Oil, will it be the last straw for America?

Okie

It is true that the oil in Anwar is going to Japan and the benificiary is going to be an oil company. The implication that it will be of some benefit to the American public is nonsense.

As for demagogery, the facts belie your arguments. Sure there are some very talented engineers and geologists working for oil companies. It is not the people who work for them that set the policies. It is the management and their policies are detrimental to the economic health of this country. It is a matter of National Security.

I have lived through all of the oil crises. I have watched each time the economy has had to make an adjustment to the artificail inflation that the oil price escalations induced. I know a bunch of bull when I see it and this current price gouge is just more of the same.

Okie

I hope you are right. The time has been right for many years. Ford has been working on hydrogen fuel cells for ten plus years.

Hydrogen fuel cells will not work; simply because it takes more energy to make and store them.

From today's Chicago Tribune:

Aren't there mandates dictating the transport of the Alaskan oil at Prudhoe Bay to the U.S. starting with the Alaskan oil pipeline? I assume the same would happen with ANWR. I understand Prudhoe Bay production is on decline now and we need new oil to replace the decline into the pipleline. And even if oil did go to Japan, don't you think there would be some agreement of an in-kind trade with oil coming from another source? Like it or not, it is a world market, and the more we produce here, the more ultimate self sufficiency we will have as an end result, regardless of how the oil is distributed point to point based on transportation and refining considerations. The beneficiary would be oil companies because they do the work, but the final and most important beneficiary is us.

We currently produce less than 50% of our own demand, and any further decline simply puts us at increasing mercy of other countries, and we continue to pay billions to countries that help fund terrorist organizations that are bent to kill us all. That makes no sense to me at all. It makes no sense to lock up one of the potentially largest oil reserve areas in the world within our own borders, when it can be developed with little environmental impact to the area. It is liberal insanity in my opinion.

+1 Seldom do I agree so completely.

DuPont, Mellon, and Hearst:

Diesel expected that his engine would be powered by vegetable oils (including hemp) and seed oils. At the 1900 World's Fair, Diesel ran his engines on peanut oil. Later, George Schlichten invented a hemp 'decorticating' machine that stood poised to revolutionize paper making. Henry Ford demonstrated that cars can be made of, and run on, hemp. Evidence suggests a special-interest group that included the DuPont petrochemical company, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon (Dupont's major financial backer), and the newspaper man William Randolph Hearst mounted a yellow journalism campaign against hemp. Hearst deliberately confused psychoactive marijuana with industrial hemp, one of humankind's oldest and most useful resources. DuPont and Hearst were heavily invested in timber and petroleum resources, and saw hemp as a threat to their empires. Petroleum companies also knew that petroleum emits noxious, toxic byproducts when incompletely burned, as in an auto engine. Pollution was important to Diesel and he saw his engine as a solution to the inefficient, highly polluting engines of his time. In 1937 DuPont, Mellen and Hearst were able to push a "marijuana" prohibition bill through Congress in less than three months, which destroyed the domestic hemp industry. source

Actually, the Democrats philosophy on energy and ANWR and drilling offshore is similar to their philosophy on other issues. No, no, no, and no again, and the problem will go away. No practical solutions of their own, except government will magicly solve the problem at some future point in time. No specifics that are practical today. And no specifics that are economical, or even technologically feasible today. What is their platform anyway besides gridlock?

C'mon, Okie, cut the partisan bullcrap. You know better than this.

Cycloptichorn

Sorry to bring politics into it, but sad to say, politics is very much involved in the subject. Politics is the arena where the battles of energy policy will be fought. Policies in regard to drilling in ANWR and offshore are just two pieces of the puzzle that will be decided by politicians from the parties, and so they are part of the equation whether we like it or not.

GOP Blocks Tax Hikes on Oil Firm Profits
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042606K.shtml
While Republican leaders sharply criticize soaring gasoline prices and energy industry profits, GOP negotiators have decided to knock out provisions in a major tax bill that would force the oil companies to pay billions of dollars more in taxes on their profits.

What good would tax hikes do? It would not lower gasoline prices, and might raise the prices. Also, it leaves less money for plowing into more research and further drilling for future reserves, so shortages will be even more likely as a result.

Another bad spinoff is lower performance of 401ks and other funds benefiting from profits.

More liberal stupidity.

Okie

Politics aside. There isn't enough oil in ANWAR to make a difference. Add to that the despoiling of one of the few remaining pristine areas in this country and drilling there makes very little common sense. What it does say is that the people wanting to do this are telling the rest of us "we'll do this because we can, not because we need to"

One other thing, The need for oil is what it is because the power brokers in this country don't want it to change. We have gone to war too many times to protect oil interests. We are doing it again to our long term detriment. We went to Iraq for oil and have depleted our resources and our military to the point that we cannot effective take on Iran where we should be.

You accuse of going to war for oil, yet oppose drilling in ANWR, which would could more than replace any oil we would get from a country such as Iraq. And you say the oil in ANWR is insignificant. If it is insignificant, then why would we go to war for oil when the amount we are talking about is so insignificant? The arguments do not add up.

If you don't like any of my suggestions that would have some real impact on the problem, then do you have any positive answers to the crisis? If so, I am interested in what they could possibly be?

Okie

Someone has been feeding you a real pile. Iraq has huge reserves as yet untapped. ANWAR is 6 months worth.

We go to war because it benefits the oil interests to control the middle east. We are building huge PERMANENT bases in Iraq. If we had gone there as the President said why are wwe going to stay? ANSWER: OIL.

The power these monied interests hold can best be realized by this statement. The net worth of the top 1% of this country is greater than the combined net worth of the other 99%.

My solution is to go to renewable energy. Solar, wind, hydrogen and anything else we can invent. It's out there, but we have to have the political clout to make the politicians get out of the way. They represent the monied interests, not us!

Solar, wind, and hydrogen are already competing in the market, and so far they simply are not winning out over the competition because of price, availability, consistency, and applicability. So your solutions are not working very well. I am in favor of the above too if they prove to be competitive, especially solar. I would consider installing solar for myself if the price becomes slightly more affordable. But for powering cars, I think we are already seeing some progress with hybrids, but to fuel the millions of cars, trucks, airplanes, trains, ships, you name it, every hour of every day all across the country, oil and gas is still the most economical and most practical method, and I think will be the principle fuel for years or decades into the future.

Hydrogen has simply not been proven to be an economical system so far. If further progress is made, I am all for it, but until that happens we need more practical solutions now. If you are willing to live with higher gasoline and fuel prices so that other competitive sources might become more competitive sooner, rather than doing things like drilling ANWR, then thats okay, but then you don't have as much license to criticize prices, because you forfeit that by not favoring practical solutions that would help us some now.

Continuing our addiction to oil isn't a 'practical solution.' It's just putting the problem off a little bit longer.

What would be better for the US is for us to start taking some chances on revolutionizing our way of life, and getting away from our old habits. It will mean a reduction in the 'quality of life' for those people who are used to having what amounts to 'free' energy in the form of oil; not actually free, but so cheap as to be inconsequential to one's lifestyle. Those days are flat-out gone, and there is no point in pretending that they are not.

A lot of people aren't going to like this, but so what? They don't have a choice. None of us do.

Cycloptichorn

The US has one of the worst public transportation system in all the developed countries, so most must rely on their cars. Unless our government begins to imporove public transportation, we will continue our demand on oil. It's that simple.

Here's a question for ya, Okie: how much money does the US consumer spend on gasoline, every single day, total for all of them?

And the question coming from that: how could that money be better spent to get us to where we need to go?

Cycloptichorn

That's because we have people spread out all over the suburbs. Our large cities have excellent mass transit (at least til you get to the mississippi river).

Public transportation is not the solution. What difference does it make if a bus takes me to work the 25 miles, or my car does?