[quote]BobParr wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
I got a PM from someone regarding my post above. Thought I might as well post my response here:
I don’t know much about him (although I do have one of his books that I have yet to read) but I’ve just got to believe based on things I’ve heard him say on the news that he would’ve opened the floodgates to American domestic gas and oil production.
I do know a little about what is going on in the oil patch in eastern MT, western ND and Alberta and lemme tell you one thing…that business makes an economy BOOM. It provides really GOOD livings for all involved, directly and indirectly.
FWIW, my little corner of MT, the northwest portion, has been almost totally shut down by environmentalism in terms of mining and timber. If not for the Alberta oil dollars flowing south there might be 5 - 10 [joking] people left in our whole county (Lincoln).
In other words, it’s Canadian dollars that originate in the Alberta oil sands that is the only thing going on here. But the Montanans reaping those benefits are in the service sector and not making a very good living. The Canadians coming south to play and buy real estate ARE.[/quote]
Other than the jobs created in areas like yours, which isn’t a very significant amount on a national level (not that they aren’t important jobs), there isn’t much of a benefit to drilling for oil in ANWAR and the lower 48.
The fact is that even if all of the U.S.'s known oil reserves were opened up it wouldn’t put much of a dent at all in oil prices. It’s a global market, so while there may be a large amount of oil available, globally it’s only enough to lower the price of a gallon of unrefined oil by 10% at the most.
So I think we should temper our enthusiasm about oil reserves a little. The fact is, it IS environmentally-damaging to a certain extent and while the jobs created are a benefit, it’s a complete misnomer that this country could single-handedly lower the cost of oil-produced energy here through more drilling alone. We simply wouldn’t be able to make much of a dent in the global supply at all.[/quote]
I don’t buy the “why drill when it’s not enough to make a difference” argument. For one thing, we have the examples of the surging economies of countries or areas where petroleum reserves are being tapped. As Push points out, the entire economy (even beyond the energy sector) of Alberta has been booming. Brazil, with its huge oil and gas deposits, has advanced very rapidly economically. And if you take a look at a place like Dubai, which has the oil without the crackpot repression of the neighboring Saudis, you see what a mega-wealthy, near-utopian city looks like.
Beyond that, you also need to look at the role of international speculators when it comes to determining energy prices. They look at trends and REACT to those trends by buying or selling, and that helps set the price. Just like with the stock market, it’s all about supply and demand and people’s guesses about where supply and demand is headed.
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I remember when I was s scrawny, underdeveloped 15 year old and I started lifting weights. I lifted like a jackass but I made serious gains, and very fast. If I lifted the same way now, I wouldn’t see shit for gains and might even get weaker.
As far as speculation goes, if speculators/“industry insiders” are forecasting higher prices, which is why gas prices go up every year, what does that tell you about the expected future supply of oil? I’m no economist, but last I checked when supply increases, price goes down. So it seems to me that speculators aren’t expecting a rise in supply anytime soon that will be less than the rise in demand.
Furthermore, what do you think would happen if we did start massive drilling? We’d say Fuck Researching Further into Laser Inertial Fusion Engines (LIFE), which is the future of energy production in this country. If we tap a bunch of oil, it may last for a hundred years or more, but then we would be less inclined to further fund research into LIFE nuclear technology, which is the real future. Any decrease in funding LIFE research would serve to put the U.S. at a severe disadvantage regarding a major burgeoning technology. I don’t find it surprising at all that there seems to be an increase in attention paid to accessing more oil reserves on the heels of a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory a few months ago. Oil people are scared shitless this nuclear power thing is going to become a reality in the next decade or so. Why wouldn’t they be? Creating nuclear energy with half a percent of the uranium ending up as waste, along with creating this energy with our existing nuclear waste, would make anyone heavily-invested in oil a complete irrelevancy.
