How can this be I hate China

[Uncle Punk]

I knew most of this but thought it might be fun to hear others opinions about this.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/02/13/3-economic-misconceptions-that-need-to-die/?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-sb-bb%7Cdl8%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D135454

Mostly this shows that we have enough oil domestically to support ourselves if we would just access it.

[magley64]

it doesn't make sense to access it now...

If we bogart the oil now while it's $100 a barrel, and run the "stan" countries out, we'll still be sitting on our same volume of stockpile when it's $1,000 a barrel or $10,000 a barrel... great long term strategy if you ask me...

[CBBaron]

Mostly this shows that we have enough oil domestically to support ourselves if we would just access it.

Not sure where you got this information from the article. It may be true but was stated in the article.

We do get most of our oil from the Americas (North and South) because it costs less to ship it from closer sources. However the price paid is heavily influenced by the Middle East because they have a significant chunk of the production and reserves of oil. If prices of Middleeast oil goes up Europe and Asia starts buying from our American suppliers driving up the cost here.

Nothing surprising in the article if you think about it. Even if you buy a product made in China I'm betting a good amount of the cost is going to American sources. Distribution and retail both add markups that are domestic. Things are blown out of proportion but it is small differences that can throw the economy out of whack. Just look at some of the cascade effects from the loss of a couple refineries in a hurricane, or the bankruptcy of an modest sized bank in recent years. China is a concern because all those numbers are growing fairly quickly and China has a much higher level of central gov control than other significant economies and a gov that has been at odds with the US.

Craig

[Bad324]

it doesn't make sense to access it now...

If we bogart the oil now while it's $100 a barrel, and run the "stan" countries out, we'll still be sitting on our same volume of stockpile when it's $1,000 a barrel or $10,000 a barrel... great long term strategy if you ask me...

although I agree with said strategy there are a few different ways to meet in the middle while still keeping long term plans pretty solid

[dorifto240]

I question some of those statistics, but it's good to know that if China comes collecting the sky won't fall down.

The question I have when we people start with "drill baby drill" is what do we do when it's gone and why are we drilling?

I'm not one for damaging massive tracts of our country to preserve the Auto & Oil Industry status quo, for some politicians next term, or to attempt to preserve some golden age that is unfeasible.

[CBBaron]

it doesn't make sense to access it now...

If we bogart the oil now while it's $100 a barrel, and run the "stan" countries out, we'll still be sitting on our same volume of stockpile when it's $1,000 a barrel or $10,000 a barrel... great long term strategy if you ask me...

+1

Why access our somewhat difficult to access oil with minor profits now when other are willing to provide it much cheaper. When it starts getting really expensive, then you invest in higher levels of extraction.

Craig

[Uncle Punk]

Not sure where you got this information from the article. It may be true but was stated in the article.

The majority of our imported oil comes from North America namely Canada and Mexico. It stands to reason that the oil reserves didn't skip our part of North America we just haven't utilized it for energy, we use it for politics. Much like the man made climate change ruse people are actually under the impression that we could run out of oil.

I remember in the early seventies reading articles about the oil shortage. One in particular had copy from a 1910 news paper article that was written by some "expert" of the time stating that if oil consumption continued at the pace it was on all the oil reserves would be dry in a decade. The same idiot experts are still around fucking up our shit and are still just as wrong as they were then.

Drill Baby Drill.

[Bad324]

The majority of our imported oil comes from North America namely Canada and Mexico. It stands to reason that the oil reserves didn't skip our part of North America we just haven't utilized it for energy, we use it for politics. Much like the man made climate change ruse people are actually under the impression that we are going to run out of oil

nailed it!!!

[Pfloydgad]

It is all conjecture, and until we as a country build another Refinery or two, we will be held hostage by the "Speculators" on Wall Street controling the hourly pricing. Rumore says there are 6, it would be nice to enter that meeting somday and have a heart to heart.

I can gaurantee it would be interesting.

Ride safe all,

Greg

[Gixxus Christ!]

It is all conjecture, and until we as a country build another Refinery or two, we will be held hostage by the "Speculators" on Wall Street controling the hourly pricing. Rumore says there are 6, it would be nice to enter that meeting somday and have a heart to heart.

I can gaurantee it would be interesting.

Ride safe all,

Greg

+1

Refineries and speculators are choking this country. The volume they can ship from the middle east is what essentially sets the price for crude worldwide, the volume we can refine sets the price of gasoline in the us.

[CBBaron]

The majority of our imported oil comes from North America namely Canada and Mexico. It stands to reason that the oil reserves didn't skip our part of North America we just haven't utilized it for energy, we use it for politics. Much like the man made climate change ruse people are actually under the impression that we could run out of oil.

Ummm, from the article 49% of our oil is produced domestically. So we are heavily using local oil. It is a BIG stretch to say based on information in the article that we could produce enough to satisfy domestic demand.

I'm not saying we cant but that article gave nothing to indicate that we could.

We wont run out of oil in the near future. However that does not mean that it wont continue to get more and more difficult (read expensive) to extract additional oil.

Yep in the 70s some predicted oil would become scarce in the near future. Then technologies improved finding oil and extracting oil and allow accessing oil in places that was previously unaccessible. Can that happen again? Maybe. I'm betting that it will get more and more expensive to find and extract that next barrel of oil. I'm not sure it will reach some kind of crisis point in the near future but I expect that its only going to get more expensive to buy a gallon of gas.

Craig

Edited February 14, 2012 by CBBaron

[Bad324]

+1

Refineries and speculators are choking this country. The volume they can ship from the middle east is what essentially sets the price for crude worldwide, the volume we can refine sets the price of gasoline in the us.

true. The problem is that 3 major oil corps. have all had plans in the last 5 years to build a refinery of their own. Each has been turned down for a variety of reasons due to government control and regulations. I love the old Bush and Cheney only cared about oil theories because Halliburton was one that wanted to build the biggest most efficient refinery and were unable to get it through the government to make happen, even with them in White House. How bout them fucking apples?

[ReconRat]

Deep water extraction of oil wasn't possible till late in the last century.

And there is a lot of deep water oil to extract.

Two oil fields on the East coast of South America are about as big as everything else in the world put together. We just can't get to it yet. It would take decades to start up.

In the Gulf Wars, rumor had it that the Saudis had discovered new oil fields of light crude. Light crude needs very little refining, and is worth a lot on the market. Supposedly these newly discovered oil fields are larger than anything found so far in Saudi Arabia. It was guessed that Iraq found out and attempted to attack and take over those oil fields. The main reason was that oil in Iraq is of lower quality and would be hard to sell.

We will always need oil to produce plastics and other polymers.

We do need to get over using oil as fuel.

[dorifto240]

Deep water extraction of oil wasn't possible till late in the last century.

And there is a lot of deep water oil to extract.

True, but does the danger of another Deep Water Horizon warrant the risk? These things aren't really being built to a level of quality I feel comfortable with.

We will always need oil to produce plastics and other polymers.

We do need to get over using oil as fuel.

Exactly! That's not going to happen if we don't start weening ourselves off of oil.

[kawi kid]

The gulf oil spill wasn't as bad as the media played it up to be. I understand we don't need to be dumping oil into the ocean but the oceans are huge. The best explanation i heard was the spill was about as equivalent to filling the super dome with water to the very top and setting a 24oz beer in the middle.

[ohiomike]

I just do not buy that the media played the spill up to be worse than it actually was/is. In fact I believe the msm, the same msm that has been in Obama's back pocket since he started campaigning for his initial election, that msm has played it down trying to qualm the public's fears. Partly due to pressure from big oil (don't want to lose any $business$) and partly to keep Obama's public image conducive to him running for office again, this being done by use of govt control and pressure.

Underwater drilling should only be done once there are proven procedures for repair/containment for the next 'Deep Water Horizon' event that will happen.

Remember the commercial...'its not smart to fool mother nature'??....well we are fooling with it at every turn, and its bound to come back on us sooner or later if we're not careful.

[kawi kid]

Really? The constant 24/7 coverage and even the live camera feed on the oil spewing from the busted pipe was down playing? Remember all the plooms of oil they said was out there killing everything? Hey never showed up... I was planning a vacation to Florida at that time and all the reports and predictions were that all the oil was going to go around Florida and up the east coast ruining all the summer vacations.

The media tried to destroy BP. It was a chance to stick it to the oil industry and big business. Obama hurt himself by not making a statement on it for however long.

Edited February 15, 2012 by kawi kid

[ohiomike]

I know there was extensive msm scrutiny, but the implications were enormous. I have heard firsthand how once the govt swooped in the flow of info became very controlled.

I just cannot give them (msm) a pass on presenting full disclosure. Plus they have discovered the oil is still there, its just on the bottom of the gulf. My mom winters in Fla along the gulf coast and yes there was globs of oil that were found on the beaches there tho we (at least I didn't) hear anything about that. Just a small blurb about some up near the panhandle.

What industry is bigger than the Oil Industry? Imho the only entity large enough to be able to hold their feet to the fire is big govt. Who subsidizes big oil and who stands to lose large monetary support if certain toes are stepped on? Imho, our govt and big oil are in bed together with both standing to lose $bigtime$ over it all, and since our govt can (and does) control the msm here it only makes sense that controlling and limiting what the public knows means less money lost for the big boys of business.

[dorifto240]

The gulf oil spill wasn't as bad as the media played it up to be. I understand we don't need to be dumping oil into the ocean but the oceans are huge. The best explanation i heard was the spill was about as equivalent to filling the super dome with water to the very top and setting a 24oz beer in the middle.

I'm going to take some heat for this...

An individual spill is probably similar to that analogy, except it doesn't take into account how interconnected the oceans are. If it was just an individual spill, it wouldn't be an issue. Just like if only one person littered, and no one else did, or if there was only one bad driver on the road ever.

Damaging one area has consequences all over the world, and combined with everything else we do, it all starts to add up.

One of the largest collection of garbage is floating in the Pacific Ccean.

We've successfully over fished large swaths of it. In the 1880s English fishing fleets brought in 300,000 tons of fish, as of 2010, English fleets netted 150,000 tons of fish. Telegraph

There's a corollary between international fishing fleets of the coast of Africa and the rise in poaching and bush meat sale in African villages.

Some of the species in the oceans traverse thousands of miles, and we know almost nothing about them.

Fishing grounds on the eastern coast of Canada have collapsed, and international fleets sweep the coasts of Africa every year.

Whole tracts of the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico are barren. And there are whole zones of the Gulf that are dead due to algae blooms from fertilizers coming in from the Mississippi.

The Exxon Valdez spill STILL hasn't been cleaned up.

Most of our oxygen comes from sea algae. The whole planet depends on a healthy ocean, but we want to barge in like a bull in a china shop, without even a decent grasp of what's occurring?

We're like children who've found daddy's loaded gun, and don't have Scruit's cameras to catch us before we do something stupid. Or we're like Donnie from The Big Lebowski. Take your pick.

[ReconRat]

...all the reports and predictions were that all the oil was going to go around Florida and up the east coast ruining all the summer vacations. ...

lol, I had a co-worker nearly in tears, for having just bought a house on the Florida West coast around Tampa. She rushed down there and found... *cricket cricket*.... nothing...

[ReconRat]

...We've successfully over fished large swaths of it...

Indeed true. The fish I ate when I was a kid, are long gone. Perhaps never to return. Same goes for most every other species of fish pulled from the oceans to replace the supply. Multiple times this has happened to where we now eat modified fish that would have been considered trash "back-in-the-day". It has progressed to the point where fishing fleets are starting to sit idle. No fish to fish.

I used to think dwindling supplies of fresh water would trump the shortages of fuel and oil. But in our lifetimes we will very likely see a nearly total collapse of the ocean ecosystems. As always, nature takes it's hand, and the oceans will change. But not necessarily for the better as humans might be concerned.

[dorifto240]

Indeed true. The fish I ate when I was a kid, are long gone. Perhaps never to return. Same goes for most every other species of fish pulled from the oceans to replace the supply. Multiple times this has happened to where we now eat modified fish that would have been considered trash "back-in-the-day". It has progressed to the point where fishing fleets are starting to sit idle. No fish to fish.

I used to think dwindling supplies of fresh water would trump the shortages of fuel and oil. But in our lifetimes we will very likely see a nearly total collapse of the ocean ecosystems. As always, nature takes it's hand, and the oceans will change. But not necessarily for the better as humans might be concerned.

What's so damned frustrating about all of it is that we have the capabilities to work with the world around us in such a way that it's better for everything involved. Look at how we've been able to bring back species from extinction, how healthy well-managed areas of land are, how large and consistent crop yields are when sound farming practices are used. This is a situation where we can have our cake AND eat it!

Easy solution to our oil crisis? Double the MPG requirements for vehicles now. Provide subsidies for people to buy cars that have an MPG rating that is double their current (and not just new cars. Cash For Clunkers was a debacle. 80s toyotas, BMWs and Hondas have ridiculously efficient engines) MPG. Or allow that subsidy to be used to upgrade the motor and gear box in a car. Push for 6 or even 8 speed gear boxes to be standard. And place a tax on trucks and SUVs that don't or can't meet those mileage requirements (With a subsidy for work, farm and ranch vehicles). You want a F-350 Ranch King Super Cab to compensate? Go for it. But you've got to pay.

Offer subsidies or tax breaks for people buying diesels as well. And allow several European car companies to fast track their super efficient diesel vehicles as well. Audi, BMW and Seat all have great cars that aren't available over here for no reason whatsoever. If it's allowed on the Autobahn it can handle the US roadways.

After that's in place, raise taxes on gasoline. The reason roads in Europe are so nice, and health care is so free, is because they pay $6.00 in tax per litre. If I get 70 to 100 mpg from my car, free health care, and the roads I drive make glass feel like a teenagers acne:

I don't care if gas is $10 a gallon.