"Oil prices spiked more than $25 a barrel Monday -- the biggest one-day price jump ever -- as anxiety over the government's $700 billion bailout plan, a weak dollar and an expiring crude contract ignited a dramatic rally." http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080922/oil_prices.html
Speaker Pelosi gets the blame for this one; the do-nothing Democrat-led Congress passes a sham bill that does nothing to aid domestic petroleum exploration/drilling then she wonders why Americans are mad and oil prices increase.... Can't this excuse for a House leader be removed from office?
...and the one before this one. ...and the next one. ...and the next one after the next one. Got the point.
and exactly why have they not been able to do anything? silly ItN No amount of domestic drilling will change the price of oil speculation.
What about the do-nothing Republican President and Congress from 2001 to 2006? Why couldn't they pass (or propose) this all-important legislation on a key "national security" issue?
Sorry. More lawmaking aint gonna cure this problem. We are destroying the dollar at a pretty fast pace. Oil has been lower than it should have been the last month or so. We are seeing a general jump in commodities due to a trend towards inflation. Oil is up, Gold is up, all in all, commodities are seeing a nice (no, not so nice) increase. Wait. That's too hard to understand: PELOSI DID IT! So I expect McCain to appoint a commission any day now to study prices.
At one point Saudi Arabians were all for domestic drilling in their country; gee I wonder why? Said another way, this: "A 2008 United States Geological Survey estimates that areas north of the Arctic Circle have 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil (and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids ) in 25 geologically defined areas thought to have potential for petroleum. This represents 13% of the undiscovered oil in the world. Of the estimated totals, more than half of the undiscovered oil resources are estimated to occur in just three geologic provinces - Arctic Alaska, the Amerasia Basin, and the East Greenland Rift Basins. More than 70% of the mean undiscovered oil resources is estimated to occur in five provinces: Arctic Alaska, Amerasia Basin, East Greenland Rift Basins, East Barents Basins, and West Greenland–East Canada. It is further estimated that approximately 84% of the undiscovered oil and gas occurs offshore"
Simply awesome ITN. Sily me, I was thinking it was the lack of meaningful regulations to stop this sort of profiteering. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a42969f2-88e1-11dd-a179-0000779fd18c.html
The guy on CNBC seemed to think this was more of contract-closing issue than anything else. Apparently the November contracts didn't close up nearly as much. I'm not agreeing with that (I have no idea whether or not it's true), just passing it along.
She didn't force people to buy all those SUVs that get 15 mpg. More drilling might help a little, but the numbers are quite clear that we need to improve the gas mileage of our transportation infrastructure to make any dent in this.
The U.S. is way past peak. The next paragraph from your link: Extensive drilling was done in the Canadian Arctic during the 1970s and 1980s by such companies as Panarctic Oils Ltd., Petro Canada and Dome Petroleum. After 176 wells were drilled at billions of dollars of cost, approximately 1.9 billion barrels (300×106 m3) of oil and 19.8 trillion cubic feet (560×109 m3) of natural gas were found. These discoveries were insufficient to justify development, and all the wells which were drilled were plugged and abandoned. Drilling in the Canadian Arctic turned out to be expensive and dangerous. The geology of the Canadian Arctic turned out to be far more complex than oil-producing regions like the Gulf of Mexico. It was discovered to be gas prone rather than oil prone (i.e. most of the oil had been transformed into natural gas by geological processes), and most of the reservoirs had been fractured by tectonic activity, allowing most of the petroleum which might at one time have been present to leak out Yeah--that's what we need...more dangerous, environmentally destructive drilling for something that won't make any difference at all for at least 30 years. By then if we're still this drug addicted to oil, the planet won't be inhabitable. So great strategy.
Geez, LF. What is it about "Drill Here, Drill Now" that you don't understand? You take a simple solution and complicate it by referring to reality and stuff. Why would you do something like that.
LiverpoolFanatic; you misjudge me, as do others, repeatedly. I am not unsympathetic to those advancing some other-than-oil energy strategy! I'm all on board with whatever gadget and energy process we can quickly harness to propel our economy and I admit our dependence on foreign oil has crippled our foreign policy. That said, however, we need to face facts. No alternate energy source is within decades of replacing our gasoline-powered internal combustion engines in our vehicles. Even the best hybrids are at least half dependent upon petroleum and our entire transportation infrastructure and fueling stations are based on oil. Changing that paradigm is admirable and good for leaders to make progress on. But as I said, facing facts mean we need to quickly bring on some way of rapidly changing the balance of foreign oil dependence and John McCain's/Sarah Palin's plan to tap domestic energy supplies make more sense that Barack Obama's/Joe Biden's pie-in-the-sky plans to suddenly make all automobiles obsolete. We should have had this discussion decades ago and moved away from oil with a clear plan; we didn't and we can blame whoever for that. But now, when we need some process to free ourselves from high international oil prices and domestic drilling seems the way to go... By all means let's get busy developing alternatives but you are fooling yourself if you think any of these is a reality anytime soon. Domestic drilling is the only real answer to our immediate energy question.
Hey ITN, didn't I smack you around in this forum enough yesterday? Okay, he's some more for ya, courtest of swiftboat financier T Boone Pickens: http://voanews.com/english/2008-09-23-voa3.cfm
We need to switch away from gasoline as quickly as practical. The best end point 20 to 30 years out, when battery technology improves by a factor of 10x - is the electric car charged up at night off of the electrical grid. The base power for the grid should be mostly nuclear. Solar and wind can be part of the mix, but aren't practical for 24 hours/day power. The transition from 100% gas car to 100% electrical is a progression from: current Prius-style-hybrid -> plug-in hybrid -> 100% electrical. As each generation of car gets better less cars will be visiting the local gas stations and more will be just charging up at night off the grid. It can be a gradual transition, but will powerful interests lobbying for the status quo it will take a national consensus to do it. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26843591/
http://www.amazon.com/Energy-Victory-Winning-Terror-Breaking/dp/1591025915 In addition to switch from gas to electrical, this books makes a strong case that we should switch to "flex-fuel" engines, so the monopoly of oil is broken and becomes "just another commodity" instead of the only fuel used in our transportation system. 46 of 52 people rated this 5 stars at Amazon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Victory By mandating that we switch to "Flex Fuel" hybrids cars we could make the switch away from OPEC controlled oil even quicker.
He's begun telling people he's voting for Obama but will not advocate directly for him in order to hedge his bets.