[quote]harris447 wrote:
I used to think you were bright, man.
People aren’t willing to pay $3.00 a gallon…they have to.[/quote]
Well, people are.
We all made the choice (or our representatives made it for us), when we didn’t provide adequately for any alternative means of transportation, and built things so spread out.
A little planning goes a long way. And we still can pressure our state governments to concentrate on enhancing alternative travel options such as metro service, etc.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Beowolf wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
hspder wrote:
grew7 wrote:
Well that’s nice, but wouldn’t oil companies just raise their prices to compensate like Nephorm wrote? Wouldn’t that make this whole thing pointless?
Nephorm also wrote:
Unless, of course, lawmakers also restricted what they were allowed to charge for the product.
Bingo!
Yes, let’s introduce price controls and profit controls. This will encourage oil companies to hunt for more oil.
Let’s also put controls in place about how much gasoline each person is alloted per month. In fact, let’s control EVERYTHING, telling each person exactly what to do all the time and in every way!! Let’s put televisions in every room of every house that WORK BOTH WAYS, so people can be watched and controlled.
HH
Stop pulling the slippery slope bullshit. Total capitalism is crap. Total socialism is crap. Complete non-involvement is retarded. Total control is tyranny. The middle is the place to be.
Kind of like the middle of the highway? Remember the Karate Kid movie?
“Daniel-san, walk on left side, okay. Walk on right side, still okay. Walk down middle, squished like grape!”
— Mr. Miyagi
HH
[/quote]
How witty… you even assumed I was smart enough to make the connection between a highway and a country! Good job!
A political system is not a desicion. It is ever changing. Sitcking the middle ground isn’t indesicive or stupid.
Back in 98/99 when oil was less than $15 a barrel the oil companies didn’t get any government assistance when times were tough and they were having to lay off people left and right. Now the government wants to take their profits when they are reaping the benefits of their privately owned at-risk capital investments? For what? What would our brilliant minds in Washington come up with that would put that windfall to a good use? This would be a HUGE mistake. This is not a windfall, it is a reflection of a dynamic marketplace that the idiots in Washington need to study a lot harder before they make any snap judgements. Do you really want these types of shrill conspiracy theorists making decisions for you?
Though the huge Exxon profits have been much hyped, their profit margin is not out of line with other major corporations. As petroleum resources become scarcer, they produce from fields that are more expensive to produce from. That particular company is just damn good at finding oil. And who owns Exxon and benefits from all of this profit?–millions of Americans own Exxon by way of their pension plans and mutual funds.
I am a geologist, and I can tell you that even when times are good, exploring for oil is a very risky business. One subsalt exploratory well in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico costs upwards of $100 million dollars. One well! And it is basically a wildcat because the subsalt is so poorly imaged in seismic. Building a production platform is a multi-BILLION dollar investment. And that is risky also because you are hoping that your reservoir is as big as you think it is. But consider that after all of this expense of gathering seimic data, drilling exploratory wells to 28,000+ ft deep, building a huge production platform in 5,000+ ft water, transporting it in pipelines to the refinery, and delivering to the gas station, that gasoline is still cheaper than bottled water.
Texaco drilled just a couple of dry holes in the deepwater GoM and it had such an effect on their bottom-line that it opened them up to being bought out by Chevron, so the risks are obvious. If our companies are hamstrung by Washington they won’t have as much incentive to take the huge risks required for huge profit. Therefore we won’t be replacing reserves as quickly, we’ll be paying higher prices at the pump, and we’ll be even more dependent on foreign governments for oil.
Also consider that as big as Exxon, BP, Shell, and Chevron are–they are nothing compared to the size of the big state-owned oil companies like Aramco, Pemex, Petrobras, Pedevesa, etc. So when people complain that mergers or some conspiracy has driven up oil prices, realizes that they have no where near the market power required to control the global price of oil. The real reason prices have increased so much is that demand worldwide (mainly from China) is exploding and production can’t keep up with demand. If anybody tries to give you another reason please let them know that they are an idiot. I firmly believe that were are on the descending leg of “peak oil”, so expect prices to continue to rise. There are definitely going to be some big changes ahead in energy usage.