rich hippies are making me poor
by Emma Onom
Published: June 21, 2008
With gas prices at about a billion dollars per gallon, Sen. John McCain and President Bush have both recently pushed for overturning the ban on offshore drilling and extracting oil from shale.
Barack Obama, a man of the people who wants politicians to work together for the good of the people, disagrees with McCain and Bush because Democrats have to disagree with Republicans. (Sidenote: if Obama really is so altruistic about bipartisanship, shouldn’t he work across the aisle once or twice? Or at least once?)
McCain argues the offshore drilling would lead to a drop in oil prices because of increased supply, while Obama says the move would have no short-term effect and would only save cents in the long term.
Maybe I’m being narrow-minded here, but at first, second and third glance the whole supply and demand thing really appears to be a good argument for the drilling. It couldn’t possibly cost more money to have more oil than before. Especially if the United States is sitting on more oil than OPEC has ever seen, as some claim.
I don’t know how heavy a barrel of oil is and how much UPS charges to ship it from OPEC-land to the United States, but the overseas costs have got to be a lot more than shipping it from across the country, or across the state.
While Obama claims McCain’s plan will only save “cents,” his own is a lot easier to tear apart. Obama is pushing for plug-in hybrid cars and oil alternatives instead. No bipartisan combination of increasing supply while looking for alternatives. Nope, we’re just going to hope this one works.
Obama’s plans are a lot like my plans to lose weight. Instead of doing something right now, I figure I’ll wait to get my Wii Fit and see how that goes. It’s the easy way out, the one that sounds good and nobody knows if it’s realistic. It’s kind of a pie in the sky, but boy will I show them if it works. If.
Honda’s new FCX hydrogen car costs $1 million to make and $500 per month to own. How that saves me money, I don’t know. While I wait for that price to come down to my level, I sure wish gas prices would go down, even a little.
As an “average guy” who “just finished paying off his school loans,” Obama isn’t striking me as someone who really knows how it feels for me to gas up my car. He can tell me he’s filling up with the same gas, but I know $100 is chump change to him.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 1:31 am
That was fantastic, Emma. Thank you for the last three paragraphs; they were highly entertaining. I agree, the “Obama Wii Fit” program isn’t going to get rid of this beer belly or the fifty bucks it costs to fill up my tank.
And how about McCain? Who is this guy? Find this man a party. He’s not blue or red. The man is purple, for crying out loud.
If only we had some oil reserves IN our country….oh yeah! Alaska and Texas! Have we tried there yet?
Heaven forbid the rare, blue-eyed-polka-dot butterfly should lose some of its natural habitat. Yeah, we’d definitely better keep paying the four-fifty a gallon.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:39 am
Could we perhaps concentrate more on why oil’s jumped a hundred bucks a barrel in the past seven years? Or would that step on the toes of too many people…
We’re talking about shaving 75 cents/barrel if we open Alaska, and that’s according to the DOE, not some rich hippie think tank. Here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/anwr/introduction.html
Figure the OCR’s has an estimated 18-21 million barrels, so double the amount, that’s another $1.50, so there’s a potential savings of $2.25 sometime 17 years from now in today’s prices! Excellent!
Really people, buy a bike, combine trips, don’t go out every Friday and Saturday night… Gas is going to be expensive. Hell, it should be expensive. Are we supposed to get a price break over the rest of the world because we use more than everyone else? Not sure it should really work that way.
Oil was eight bucks a barrel in Jan. 99 (when Iraq increased production 12%, how about that…), it was around $35-40 when Bush took office, DROPPED (nay raise, dropped) after 9/11, and then for some inexplicable reason starting rising exponentially in late 2004.
And we can’t look past the impact speculating on oil futures is having. But, again, that would involve trying to solve the real problems behind the cause of the price hikes instead of trying to rhetoric us to death by preaching about ANWR and the OCR and how they’ll quickly put hundreds of dollars right back in your pocket. Besides, less than a quarter of OCR acreage currently leased is being drilled, and drilling permits issued for public lands has increased over 350% in the last eight years. So if drilling these lands is really the answer then the oil companies should really get their acts together instead of sitting on the nearly 10,000 permits they’re been granted but, as of yet, have not used.
June 23rd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Well said! I am all for the oil companies getting their act together. And let’s face it, some of our Republican presidents need to stop trying to pay favors to the oil companies that helped fund their campaign. I mean, politics are corrupt, and almost EVERYONE pays favors to someone, but this is just the issue at hand.
But do you really think that drilling in our own vast reserves in America wouldn’t help the prices out a ton? I mean, as you said, not till the producers get their heads on straight, but still? Anything we are getting from our own natural resources has to be cheaper than importing it from countries like Saudi Arabia, right?
June 23rd, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Cheaper? Maybe. Again, DOE says it’ll save us $2.25/barrel in 2025. Is that going to help you pay your cell phone bill next week?
We can’t fix the problem overnight, and that’s what people want. So if the solution has to be a long term one, which this clearly is, then I think we could come up with better ones sometime in the next 20 years. We’re not going to make a substantial dent in gas prices with our countries oil reserves. Ever. It’s just something we have to accept and move on from. “America” is not the answer to everything.
Like I said, you want a quick fix? Find it in yourself. I ride my bike or take the bus to the office every day. Guess how much I’m spending on gas when I do that…
It’s like a lifestyle change on a macro scale, in which the country just has to begin moving on from oil. I know, it’s so nice and comfortable and we’ve been together for so long. But this slow breakup has gone on long enough and therapy just isn’t getting it done anymore.
Simply put, the solution to the oil problem is not more oil. Whenever we get past that mental block and on to finding real answers then we’ll be getting somewhere.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Well, I still believe we should be tapping our nation’s own resources instead of trying to play this double-standard game with Saudi Arabia. We try to be their enemy and condemn their abysmal disregard for human rights but buy billions of dollars worth of oil every year. It’s pretty ridiculous.
But yes, I think we should start trying to find alternate sources. I really wish we would do more digging into the nuclear concept. Solar and hydrogen cars aren’t looking very cheap or as effective.
(I realize that riding your bike and such isn’t a sin, we just need to keep in mind that planes and spaceships and ships and everything else can’t be run on human “gerbil power.” :))
June 24th, 2008 at 8:22 am
I’m all for nuclear exploration. Just one other area we’re well behind the ball. Coal and natural gas are terrible inefficient and just add to the problems we already face.
In the same vain, I think it’s more important to look at how much energy we waste, as if there’s an infinite amount available to us. I like to use NASCAR as an example: If we’re so concerned as a nation with fuel prices-and changes that could be easily implemented in order to stop maxing our credit cards out at the pump-shouldn’t this be the first thing we get rid of? You’ve got 43 cars that get five miles/gallon driving around in circles for 500 miles, plus the haulers that criss-cross the country carrying these machines, all the qualifying and practicing and testing, the 90,000 people that show up in more that likely fuel un-friendly vehicles…
But that’s it, isn’t it? To a far too large chunk of Americans it’s “what can change so I don’t have to.” Why can’t the Saudi’s produce more, why can’t we drill here for more, who the hell do China and India think they are stealing all the oil..? It’s never a proactive shift in a different direction, always a reactive “change” to current ways and policies.
June 24th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Haha! Well, there’s human nature for you. We are the only beings on earth that change the environment to suit us, instead of adapting to our environment. One of the many things that separates us from animals. I don’t think we have to change our whole oil industry overnight, but we should definitely be looking at alternate ways; I mean, coal used to be the major source of fuel, and we improved on that. (Not much environmentally, but as to efficiency, we did.) I don’t see why we shouldn’t use oil until we find a new, just as efficient source by using our own resources. Maybe if we wasted less money on what seems to be unprofitable research and put more into the energy crisis we’re facing, we’d be closer to nuclear power.
But yeah, NASCAR really does seem like a big irony to our country, doesn’t it? Not caring for cars going in circles myself, I’m all for getting rid of it. You might find a lot of other people opposed to that, though. :)
June 24th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Yeah, and they’re the ones complaining the most about high gas prices.
June 24th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Shane, I’m all for the exploration of new energy sources. But new sources will only alleviate the problem when market forces are brought to bear. Ethanol is a prime example. Bush got up during a State of The Union address and committed us to fueling our cars with corn. The next thing you know everyone the world over is selling corn to the U.S. and we don’t have the science to turn a profit on the deal. Meanwhile other staple products get ignored so there’s not enough rice to fill all the bowls from Peru to Indonesia.
For the last 30 years the argument against ANWR and OCS has been “It won’t help us in the short run!” True. It won’t. But had we done it anyway we would have never run into today’s crisis. As a matter of fact, today’s crisis would have been solved 15 years ago.
Oil is a fuel that sells today. Let the nuclear scientist work their craft, let the wind geeks work theirs, for heaven’s sake, if someone can turn string beans into gasoline I can finally give my wife a reason to stop forcing them down my throat. But until the alternative fuels can deliver fuel, we have to play with our current deck.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
To steal the headline, How about a car that runs on water?
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/06/24/how-about-a-car-that-runs-on-water/
Oh, but it only goes 50mph… that means most people would have to get up ten minutes early so they can get to Starbucks five minutes sooner in order to get to work on time. Scratch that. And god, can you even begin to imagine having to stop and add water to the tank in the back in the middle of a trip? Horrible…
Again, the DOE’s said ANWR and OCS don’t contain enough oil to put a serious dent in the problem, so whether we’d drilled it 20 years ago or start drilling it now we’re still talking about a 1-2% drop in crude oil prices as a result. Really worth it? Don’t know, I don’t think so. The money invested to do so could be much better spent elsewhere.
You know, being a Knoxvillian by choice, one of the main focuses of the 1982 World’s Fair was renewable energies and the steps that we needed to take in order to remedy the oil crisis, and the Saudi’s were actually there with a booth full of information all about the future sources of energy and where we go next from oil.
Oil crisis.
Renewable energy sources.
1982.
Want to talk about hindsight and the modern oil crisis? There it is. Spending more resources, strapping programs that research alternative energy solutions, to extract an energy source that we know is being rapidly depleted, that we know the cost of will only continue to rise, that we know is wasteful and harmful… I’ve had quite enough, thanks.
Ethanol was tried and failed, but what’s the Bush administration committed to developing alternative fuels? I can’t remember it, and you think I would since he tells us all the GD time, but isn’t it around $5-10b? Whatever it is it’s a joke compared to what we should be forking over. What’ve we spent on developing or subsidizing “clean coal” in that time? Or ethanol, which we’ve known for a while is nothing but a loss leader in this whole process? $5-10b isn’t going to cut it… not yesterday, not today, certainly not tomorrow.
June 25th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Just a few additions here. Ethanol has been around since the late 1970’s, not since 2001. I grew up in Iowa and the policy failure that is ethanol has been a big feather in the cap of Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley my entire adult life. Yet when the media FINALLY decide to investigate how much it actually costs to make, we the public come to the conclusion that like everything else in this country Bush is to blame. Th comment about the unused permits is baffling to me. Do you really believe that there is oil under the land where all those permits are for? Do you really believe that there is enough oil to make it worth the effort to drill there? Do you really beleive the enviromental restrictions play no part in whether that area is drilled or not? I know, next let’s blame speculators, not only do they stabalize a volatile market, they make a profit-those bastards! Or we could ride bikes to work, all 150 million working Americans will cancel out the 100 million new cars purchased EACH YEAR in China and India. Let’s not forget that electricity does not come from magic and electric cars still need oil, just not for the engine. Alternative energy sources are a great idea and I don’t think anyone in the entire country would argue against it but while we wait 20 years for the technology to give us something viable, let’s go ahead and get that “few cents saved”.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:35 am
On the ethanol: trust me, I’m from northern Illinois, I know about the corn that powers cars far too well. Hell, wasn’t the Model T able to run on ethanol with a couple modifications? …I don’t blame Bush for the fact that it’s ridiculously expensive to produce; I do blame him for continuing to tout it as a legitimate success somehow.
As for the permits, I’d have to trust that the oil companies had some reason to buy them in the first place. Of course with their cash on hand at the present I’m sure it’s not taking too much out of the bottom line. Unless of course they bought them up so they could sell them off at a massive profit later, but they would never do that to their fine paying customers, would they? …I don’t know, I just see around 28,000 permits to drill issued and only 18,000 or so currently being utilized.
Speculators… how good of a job are they doing at stabilizing this volatile market? I believe The Economist ran a story earlier this year that showed oil futures moves on NYMEX had tripled since 2004, which correlates pretty well with the increase in prices since then. And the large numbers of them short selling their holdings over the past year haven’t helped much either, so let’s not give them too much credit for keeping prices in check, unless you think oil would be at $250/barrel without their collective influence.
And we’d still be waiting 20 years for that “‘few cents saved.’” So maybe yet again I’m a bit too idealist, but I see changes that we’re not making now in our own lifestyles that would have a far greater impact than waiting for the prices savings from more drilling inside our borders. All of those cars being sold in China have to get 38mpg, which jumps to 43mpg this year. We’re currently shooting for 35mpg by 2020. Wow, what a massive step in the right direction.
Electricity? More nuclear, please. Oil for the engines? Well, okay, got me there. I’m not saying we could or should do away with it completely, just that we could and should be doing a lot more to ween ourselves off of it. We don’t invest enough into what will be our future sources, we don’t reward people who are making strides in the right directions, and I’m not talking about McCain’s $300mil reward for Flash Gordon technology. I just find it rather backward to continue investing the bulk of our energy-aimed capital into a supply we know is dying, at least as the prime source that it currently is. We’re looking at a point where short term solutions aren’t going to save large amounts of money, now or in the future. Instead, they’re just buying us time until we can make large scale changes to how we use and attain energy, and that’s just not good enough anymore.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:37 am
And if this is Kevin Brown the pitcher I want the $42 I spent to acquire you before the 2001 season in my roto-league back. That’s like half a tank of gas right now!
June 26th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Experts:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Allowing oil drilling in U.S. offshore waters that are now closed to energy exploration would do little to lower gasoline prices paid by consumers, the government’s top energy forecaster said on Wednesday.
In response to record pump prices, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain and President George W. Bush this month called for Congress to end its moratorium on drilling off the East and West coasts and in Florida waters, leaving it up to each affected state to decide where to permit drilling.
McCain and Bush said the additional oil supplies likely to be found in the closed areas would help reduce gasoline costs.
However, Guy Caruso, who heads the federal Energy Information Administration, said consumers would see little savings at the pump.
“It would be a relatively small effect, because it would take such a long time to bring those supplies on,” Caruso said during a briefing at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the EIA’s new long-term international energy forecast. “It doesn’t affect prices that much.”
Most energy experts say it would take five to 10 years to find oil in the closed areas and bring the crude to market. Caruso said the additional supplies would amount to only a couple of hundred thousand barrels of oil a day.
“It does take a long time to develop these resources, and therefore the price impact is muted by that,” he said.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is against opening more offshore areas to drilling for many of the reasons cited by Caruso.
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That was yesterday, this is from a report of theirs filed in 2007:
“The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017…
“Although a significant volume of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and natural gas resources is added in the OCS access case, conversion of those resources to production would require both time and money. In addition, the average field size in the Pacific and Atlantic regions tends to be smaller than the average in the Gulf of Mexico, implying that a significant portion of the additional resource would not be economically attractive to develop…”
Of course why should we trust people who actually do this stuff for a living? Let’s listen to advisers for politicians trying to get elected to office!
Dealing with facts is a lot better for your health than trying to decipher the amount of BS wrapped around a sound bite.
June 26th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I think the most important thing is to start researching alternate ways of energy (nuclear, cough cough) that are just as powerful, if not more, than oil. If the alternate source of choice is not as good as oil, however, let’s stick with oil. Like I said, the hydrogen car right now just isn’t going to cut it.
But even though it would take a lot of money and time to bring this oil to our market, I think it’s important we stop being dependent on Saudi oil and start tapping into our own resources. If off-shore oil drilling is the starting place, so be it. And maybe if we’d been allowed to start drilling in our own country a long time ago, we’d already have that oil in our market. We can’t just keep putting it off under the slogan “It will take too long.” We’ll never find an instantaneous, immediate soulution to our problems. We realize it’s going to take a lot of time. And this world runs on money, so we’re pretty used to that. Maybe this off-shore drilling will finally lead to more drilling in places like Alaska and Texas.
June 26th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
It’s not just that it will take too long. It’s that there simply isn’t enough there to make up the difference.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Shane,
Good replys, and I am sorry that you are out $42.00 but that was not me. I don’t get injured while walking down the stairs, lol.
June 30th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Winston I’m just not sure how many more times someone can post this as a reply, but I guess I’ll give it one more shot. MOST EXPERTS AGREE DRILLING IN AMERICA IS NOT GOING TO DO US ANY GOOD.
You want to destroy a national wildlife refuge and risk poluting our entire coast line just to save $0.03 cents a gallon 20 years from now. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Even if your not an enviromentalist, you can’t honestly think that’s worth it.