Obviously, neither resident of the white house had much if anything to do with the price of oil (with the exception of their fiscal policies, which both tended to weaken the dollar). Blaming the U.S. government for the price of a commodity on the international market is a little silly, it is not within their control. Americans seem to have an exaggerated opinion of the power/influence of their government.
That may be because Clinton and Gore never promised to control fuel prices while campaigning in 1992. In 2000 when Gore and Bush were debating, Bush criticized the Clinton/Gore Administration for its ineffective energy policy, claiming he could do better. I guess what he meant by “better” was that the oil companies were not making enough money. At least the War on Education is going well!
I agree with Craig that neither President has that much to do with fuel prices. The sad fact is that Bush made promises regarding energy policy that he didn’t deliver on.
In case you can’t tell, I hated the President way before it was cool.
Our influence on the oil market and OPEC disappeared long ago! Although the US is the largest single consumer of a lot of things, oil, nickel, diamonds, coffee, etc., it does not determine their price or supply.
When Saudi Arabia in 1973/74 nationalized the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), now Saudi Aramco, which was a joint venture of 4 US majors, it marked the end of the Western donimation of oil production. The Dutch (Shell), British, Americans, French were all booted out of the developing oil countries and their assets nationlized.
OPEC has not always wielded a lot of power. With overproduction in the mid eighties, they could not prevent oil from sliding to $10/barrel, since their was lots of extra capacity. Right now, OPEC cannot keep the price from going up, since there is no spare capcity because all those national oil companies have done insufficient exploration and reserve development.
Aye, Mike. There’s the rub which most people forget about. In the 70’s I was in college during that fuel crunch. While all the liberals were demanding five dollars a gallon taxes to discourage using our last three day supply of oil (sarcasm intended) one writer pointed out that the economic setback caused by high fuel prices also meant the stopping of research and development, and building new facilities of any kind.
The market itself, I mean individual decisions how to deal with a problem, have always produced the best results in the long run. Today, a few people are moving closer to work. Trucking companies are telling trucks to drive a little slower. People are combining trips to reduce mileage driven. Old super-economy cars are being refurbished. New car buyers are going for more economical models, and there will be more, if we don’t get the government involved to screw things up big-time.
I see today Ford sales are down 28%. So how much R&D will Ford be doing next year on new models or new technology?
By the way, anyone who has access to the National Geographic CD’s of back issues, y’all need to know there was great concern in the last years of the Nineteenth Century about a fast melt-off of glaciers. Within a few years the problem went away. I must wonder why this easily verifiable historical fact is so blithely ignored by our main stream media and Algore types?
In 1975 I think it was Isaac Asimov wrote a book on science. I obtained a discarded copy from the McAllen public library, that book sat in its shelves all those years, and not long ago, it was suddenly pitched. He wrote that glaciers do not grow and melt from temperature changes as such.
Glaciers grow under the following conditions: When more snow falls in the winter than melts off in the summer, they grow, period, and this is true whether the temperature goes up or down. (Don’t get confused by extreme examples; as long as more snow falls than melts off in summer the glacier will grow, period.)
Glaciers shrink (melt off) under the following conditions: When more snow melts off in the summer than falls in the winter, they shrink, period, and this is true whether the temperature goes up or down.
So, where does the snow come from? IN the winter, when the non-sea part of the planet is frozen, moisture for snow tends to come from ocean that is not frozen over. More bare ocean; more snow; glaciers grow.
So, glaciers tend to grow as temperatures go up, not down. When more ice covers the ocean, less moisture; less snow; glaciers melt back more in summer.
THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, 1975, Isaac Asmimov. He also explains why extreme cold is not always at the very far north. See winter temps at Coldfoot, Alaska, vs. at Prudhoe Bay (which I have visited, but in the summer.) Even as the ice cap melts, the temps where the glaciers are, may be totally different.
Right; in the late 60s I bought my first house (small) for $20,000 and a new car sold for $4000 or so. Gas was $0.40/ gallon in my area. T-bone steak sold for $0.73/lb!
An equivalent car is now about $22,000, an equivalent house $220,000, and gas is $4.50. The government publishes the Cost of Living Index and the increases from year to year. In general, prices have increased 500% since the late sixties; a $1 item now costs $6. So gas should be $2.40/gallon!!
You mean the non-existent WMD’s with which Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens?
In a way the US Government does influence fuel prices. The Federal Reserve flooded the market with cash to stem the credit strife last autumn. They haven’t stopped yet. That reduces the value of the dollar compared to other currencies and makes fuel more expensive since we buy so many petroleum products from others. Certainly the Administration doesn’t directly control the Fed. The President can cajole, but he can’t order the Board of Governors to do anything.
That is exactly what I meant by “fiscal policies,” in my previous posts. The fed has definitely contributed to the devaluation of the dollar, there is always a trade off between inflation and growth. The is likely to become more difficult to manage as energy costs rise, at some point credit will have to be tightened to control inflation; the trick is doing it without causing/accelerating a recession. How do you stimulate growth without causing inflation (especially wage inflation)? I don’t think this $30 (or whatever it was) tax rebate is going to do the trick.
An excellent idea that is long overdue .
Since a lot of problems have their sources outside the country, we will have a period of stangant growth/recession combined with high inflation due to the devalued dollar and rising energy prices. We had such a period of “stagflation” before during the first oil crisis.
Craig, I think you are confusing fiscal policy with monetary policy. Anything that comes from the Federal Reserve (run by the Board of Governors), like money supply and and interest rates, is related to monetary policy. Fiscal policy only comes from Congress and the President and is only related to discretionary spending and taxes.
Offshore drilling is a BAD IDEA!
- oil contributes to global warming
- oil companies don’t pay up when there’s an oil spill
…(re Exxon-Valdez, 20 years later they still haven’t paid, and the Bush-Cheney Supreme Court gutted the fine - it costs less to bribe the politicians) - it’s a lot cheaper to prevent environmental damage than to clean it up afterwards
- won’t help anyway: demand is going up much faster than supply. Peak oil production and China/India demand will rule prices.
- offshore oil (and Alaskan oil) are a drop in the bucket compared to US usage.
- 75% of US oil permits are not being used as it is.
- it would be 10 years before offshore and Alaskan oil started to flow anyway
- just delays the inevitable switch to renewable energy resources
- will just add to oil-company obscene profits, at the expense of the climate and environment
Excuse me if this sounds terse, I have to go pretty quickly and your items should be answered.
- The volcanic and tetonic activity under Greenland has been going on for literally millions of years. It is cyclic, but there were periods of higher activity even as the ice formed hundreds of thousands of years ago. Under the best of most agressive models GW is orders of magnitude higher in providing the energy to melt the glaciers of Greenland than the tetonic activity. It was studied and is in most models.
- The depth of the ice as measured by radar sensor planes and satellites is decreasing. The average temperatures are decreasing. The net ice loss is positive not net zero. This has been studied for years adnauseum. Even the hardness of the ice at various depths is lessening. I don’t know where you are getting your data, but there are many sources in many counties and I know of no results that are in disagreement.
- I don’t remember any specific number for 5M years ago, so I would have to look it up. But that seems high enough to have major effects on mammals and birds. An order of magnitude in PPM in CO2 also means major adaptations for breathing.
- Where did you get those stats? The averages have been moving up and in the last 7 years have spiked. One of the biggest issues is that the slope of the line is steeper than ever seen before, except for downward declines. I have seen no “shunting” of GW to “Climate Change”. But like any area people don’t always agree on the language. Trying to use socialogical data in a climate debate seems evasive also.
Food for thought. Much of the data is analyzed by scientists all over the world and most outcomes point one direction. Also, if they are wrong we wasted a few dollars. If they are right, and we do nothing, we are screwed, Like a planet that can’t support but a fraction of the human life we have now. I don’t know about you, but when I can I avoid risky situations. Especially ones that can kill me.
Concentrate time and money on developing Hydrogen fuel and vehicles. All off shore drilling will do is increase oil company profits, it will have ZERO impact on price.
Because it wasn’t even close to that price.
The term is TECTONIC. You lose a lot of credibilty when you throw out a technical term and can’t even spell it properly. I would guess tetonic would have to do with mountains in Wyoming.
Domestic drilling would have a major impact on oil prices. Here is a rather learned article concerning expectations and pricing:
Having our politicians get their hands out of most economic decision would help. The weak dollar accounts for a good bit of the problem. High business taxes drive some of this, also. We need refinery capacity to go along with the increased supply. If the OPEC people think that prices are likely to fall in the future, they will be lowering prices now.
Here is another thought. One of the major complaints is about the environmental impact of drilling for domestic oil. We are then essentially outsouring the environmental impact to other countries. These countries are willing to make the tradeoff to utilize the resources we have. It is hypocritical of environmentalists in the US to complain about “envrinmental damage” in our country while continuing to use oil from offshore sources.
Nuclear power contribute basically nothing to greenhouse gases. Good luck getting one of those built!
I certainly did not read all 100 postings. However, I will say that the internal combustion engine is twentieth century technology. Any forward looking person will not drill offshore because they will not continue to use fossil fuels. Stimulate American engineering looking for a clean alternative to fossil fuels and until then acknowledge that any reasonable country has to develop an energy portfolio and cut way back on consumption. Unfortunately, denial is not something this country has had much experience in since WWII.
What about all of the environmentalists who have been conserving fuel since it was $0.89/gallon? Are they hypocrites too?
It would be at least ten years’til we will have oil fron O.S. driklling. BY then , we should(must) have alternate energy sources, and vehicles that use other forms of nrg. There is oil available now, but the US does not have enough refining capacity. Don’t take a chance on spoiling our beautiful beaches.