Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Crapweasels

Energy prices | Air America Radio: "But our high gasoline costs are more than just a supply problem. It seems that it is also a speculation problem which ironically (or not) seems to have beeen bequeathed on us by Enron."

Posted by David at 3:35 PM

2 comments:

will said...

This is certainly not the first time it has occurred to me, but the response of Bush (and his administration) to high gas prices has really emphasized, for me, their skill in manipulating news outlets and the American public. As many outright stupid decisions as this administration has made, they seem to be extremely effective in establishing talking points regardless of their sense or pertinence to a given topic. With the public clamoring over the (relatively) high gas prices the reaction (in addition to a slow return to speculation oversight) has been to make a loud appeal to repeal the ban on drilling for oil offshore and in ANWR: despite the fact that I've seen innumerable articles about how oil supply is not in any way the problem, that high gas prices have been caused almost solely by futures trading, and that drilling offshore or in ANWR will have hardly any effect on gas prices, supply or dependence on foreign oil, and how its only real benefits will be for oil companies the administration has somehow managed this announcement in such a way that even the relatively in-depth and liberal news outlets (NPR, BBC, etc.) tend to start their story with a sentence roughly equivalent to "President Bush is pressuring congress to repeal restrictions on drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in order to lower gas prices." Though there tends to be some caveat later in the story about how Democrats or various industry experts have pointed out the break of logic, the main idea that comes across is still that a lack of supply is responsible for gas prices and I think even people who give close and fair attention will come away with the idea that there is an actual correlation. There was an interesting article in The Atlantic recently about how Google has affected our thought processes and how more and more people are expecting a new topic every minute or two and hardly have the patience to become deeply engrossed in a book or movie, and it's made me more aware of the fact that people are likely to read a headline (or google heading) and infer the rest from there. It won't really matter if congress decides to allow drilling in ANWR (and I suspect they won't) because once once the connection between supply and high prices has been established it will be easy for Bush/GOP leadership to blame continually high gas prices on the Democrats/environmentalists who would block it for years to come. If it does pass the Bush cronies make a pile of money and continue to blame gas prices on anything other than speculation much as they've been comfortably doing for the past couple years.

While I respect the reluctance of more reasonable people to resort to such crude tactics, I'm frustrated and disappointed to see them being beat so badly by showmanship (though I suppose it has probably been this way for a long time) and even more frustrated with the American public for its passivity and forgetfulness when the blatant lies of our leaders are brought to light.

11:37 PM
Anonymous said...

This country seems to have some kind of subconscious death wish. We have the current ability to put a serious dent in our dependence on foreign energy sources, yet we ignore our own resources and instead choose to give other countries the ability to bring us to our knees by choking off supply.

We refuse to even look for (let alone recover) oil deposits off our coasts in the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico. It's illegal for American companies to even explore there. The excuse given is always the environmental dangers of drilling for oil so close to the coast but the Cubans and the Chinese are preparing to start drilling off Florida as we speak. Since they're not subject to U.S. law, they're not even regulated. By prohibiting American companies from staking those claims, the environmental dangers have been *exacerbated*. American companies would have to follow safety standards and environmental regs that the Chinese and Cubans can ignore. And all those resources are now going elsewhere instead of directly to America.

We refuse to adopt nuclear energy like most of Europe has done.

We refuse to develop the shale oil reserves in the Rocky Mountains which are a larger source of oil than all of Saudi Arabia's reserves combined. But any kind of exploitation of that oil source is currently illegal.

We refuse to allow any new refining capacity to be built that would bring crude to market more quickly and result in lower gas prices. (Instead the Democrats have taken a page from the Hugo Chavez playbook and have called for the nationalization of the energy industry. I expect Maxine Waters to start wearing red shirts in public any day now. Yeah, that's all I want-- for that group of yahoos on Capitol Hill who have run this country's government into the by creating a bureacracy unparalled in the history of mankind to be in charge of bring gas to the pump. That certainly doesn't have disaster written all over it.)

We refuse to drill for oil in ANWR, valuing a few caribou over the hundreds of millions of our own citizens. (And that assumes the drilling would even affect the caribou-- the enviro-radicals predicted their demise decades ago due to the construction of the Alaskan pipeline and instead of dying off, they ended up thriving because the pipeline provided a source of heat which allowed them to weather the winters in greater numbers.)

We have all this at our disposal and yet our own Congress passes laws to make taking advantage of it illegal, preferring instead to place our energy interests in the hands of OPEC, most of whose member countries despise us.

It's so ludicrous if it were the plot of a book or movie, you'd walk away thinking what a stupid story it was. Yet that's our Congress in action-- representing the best interests of the American public as usual.

Instead, these buffoons sit up there on the Hill and blame the oil companies for this whole mess, as if they're somehow at fault just for selling a product that everyone wants and needs and (gasp!) earning a profit for their effort. And they bemoan how much money these oil companies are making but they never mention that the oil companies only get 4% of the take. The federal government takes 19%. If the oil companies are evil for taking 4% on the backs of the American people, why isn't the government even more evil for making over four times that amount of money at our expense? At least the oil companies are DOING SOMETHING for their 4%. They're exploring for the crude, extracting it, transporting it, refining it and getting it to market. The government takes 19% for doing NOTHING.

Another argument is that even if we started drilling for oil and shale and building nuclear plants, those benefits won't be realized for a decade or more but that's just more shortsightedness.

If the U.S. announced a major energy initiative tomorrow with all those things I outlined above, just the mere announcement of it-- the idea that America isn't just going to sit back and take it in the shorts anymore when it comes to OPEC and the its energy supply-- would have a dramatic and galvanizing effect on the futures market. The prices would surely drop over the short term. Any market that can be influenced by something so esoteric as which NFL legaue wins the Superbowl can't help but take real notice of something like a fundamental shift in America's energy policy.

But of course no one currently in our government wants to do it and both presidential candidates have expressed, at best, lukewarm desire to do anything different, despite the fact that one candidate's mantra is "change, change, change..."

2:06 PM

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