No doubt about it. None. Too bad the GOP was too busy with prescription drugs and campaign finance reform to get this corrected while they were in power.
Jim, there’s trying to force social changes upon the American people by keeping energy cost high at a time when we could and should be energy self-reliant and have affordable energy cost for our homes and businesses.
“Exploration and drilling for oil is banned in the Alaskan wasteland, even though the area proposed for such use is tiny – 2000 acres, an area smaller than Washington Dulles Airport, in a “wildlife refuge” of 19,600,000 acres, about the size of South Carolina.”
A little bit off on a tangent, but this always makes me curious. Is that 2,000 acres the only area in ANWR where they believe crude is located, or is it the only area that’s been explored.
Any estimate as to how much crude might be in that entire 19,600,000 acres?
OUTSTANDING article by Richard A. Viguerie! OUTSTANDING post, Jim Robinson! Thanks to you both. WOOOOOHOOOOO!
America’s energy problems have been brought to us courtesy of the environmental movement and their political allies – liberal Democrats and timid or complacent Republicans
Correct.
Energy is not traded freely.
It’s a 100% artificial market.
If you like $5/gal, Thank Congress in Nov.
Pray for W and Our Troops
I dunno what these people are smoking, but I swear, they are insane! Sad that they are, but get them out of the public policy making arena!!!!!!
The reality is that there is no energy crises. This is a price of energy crises caused entirely by the devaluation of the dollar and increased demand by China and India.
Adjusted for inflation the price of oil today is apx. equal to $40 a barrel gas in the 70’s. High but not out of sight.
Increased energy production is not likely to decrease prices. Decreasing prices will simply increase demand from China. All that the has to happen for the cost of energy to go down is that the Feds need to stop creating money like crazy. The problem with that solution is that our financial institutions are on the verge of collapse. The collapse of the housing bubble has devastated leveraged investments.
Finally, until the cheap oil from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East is either exhausted or not able to meet demand, it doesn’t make financial sense to try and compete. The Saudi’s cost of oil is in the under $10 dollar a barrel range (closer to a dollar) and our average cost per barrel is closer to $30.
The true energy solution (for us) would be to make more nuclear power plants and/or simply seize the Middle East oil. Neither of which is going to happen.
In a free market there is a tendency toward the equalization of the price of a good in the present with the expected price of that good in the future.
The basis of this principle is the familiar fact that any discrepancy in price creates an opportunity for profit, the exploitation of which reduces the discrepancy.
The activity of speculators therefore serves to transfer supplies from a period on which they are less urgently needed, as indicated by their lower price to a period in which they are more urgently needed, as indicated by their higher price. In this way, it brings about the optimum rate of consumption of limited supplies.
bookmark
And they need to proclaim it loudly and continuously. This is the winning issue of the 2008 elections.
agree.
but this is just too complicated for emotional tv viewers that hate “big oil”
to figure out.
/s
bump!
How does the free market determine what energy sources are worth exploiting? Price. If we want oil from oil shale, the price of gas is not going to be going back down as much as we would like.
not a single oil refinery has been built in the United States in over 30 years.
The current refineries are not operating at full capacity. If there were a shortage of refinery capacity, that would actually act to hold down the price of crude oil since the refiners are the demand side of crude oil sales.
the government makes roughly four times as much on each gallon as the oil companies do.
I think this is more accurately stated as the government makes roughly four times as much on a gallon as the owner of a service station. The oil companies themselves would be in a different line of work if they could only make a few percent profit after all that work.