Wow I just heard it costs OPEC $2 to make a barrel of OIL!

reefraff

Active Member
Closing the Enron loophole does exactly squat. The speculators are only one piece of the bubble. You have hedge funds and unions investing in oil futures now.
There is nothing to keep the oil trading from being moved to another country which is exactly what will happen if they rush in an try to create a government fix. The only way to lower oil prices is to increase supply and or lower demand. You cant do that by irrationally locking up billions of barrels of reserves in the US.
All this talk of increaseing wind and solar power does nothing to effect the price of gasoline. Oil isn't used to generate power. It's all natural gas and coal (with a little hydro and nuke). If you could flip a switch tomorrow and have half of our power generated by wind and solar it wouldn't change the price of gasoline because the only decrease in oil demand would come from the decreased transportation of coal to coal fired power plants. That wouldn't equal a blip in the big picture.
Even assuming opening up ANWAR and the coasts to drilling wouldn't add a drop of oil to the supply for 5 years It does provid additional tax and royalty revenue to the government and creates new jobs in the United States. Is that such a bad thing?
Remeber Clintons reason for vetoing the ANWAR drilling bill? It wouldn't make it to the supply chain for 10 years. Will if he hadn't vetoed it we would have the additional oil supply now. China and India's demands aren't going to decrease over the next 5 years, it's going up, way up. Even assuming our demand for oil decreased 5% a year over that time the increased demand from developing countries will far outweigh that.
The Anti drilling crowd is even going against Californians. 53% of Californians favored drilling of the coast in a poll that was just released. Somewhere around 70% nation wide favored it. Should be an interesting few months.
 
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