Oil Prices and Supply - Manipulation from Within
The Truth about Our Gas Prices
Saturday 16 July 2011 - 2:47 pm.
As mentioned in a previous posting, America is the most mobile of nations. However, it seems that this element of our lives is under assault from a wide range of contemptible Liberal-Leftist Ass-Wipes (LLA), who’d prefer to see all of us jammed onto some train or bus. A train or bus that, in most cases, doesn’t fit our timetables or our destinations! These include the individuals and groups that I collectively refer to as “environmental whackos,” along with a host of highly-placed elected officials.
One of the greatest threats to our mobility is, of course, the cost of energy. The Obama regime tries to deceive us into thinking that ALL increases in the price of gasoline are caused by oil market speculators, countries in the OPEC cartel, increased demand in China & India, and the like. These circumstances factor in, to some extent. But, the fact remains, when he took office in January of 2009, the U.S. average for regular gasoline was $1.92 per gallon. Now, July 2011, it stands at $3.60, or so, an increase of 97.6%. It was well over 100% ($3.84) for several months. Hmmm. Make no mistake, U.S. fuel prices are being manipulated and held at artificially high levels by the Obama regime!
Before Obama was even elected, he’d made the statement that he’d like to see Americans have fuel prices at, and I quote, “European-levels.” Obama took advantage of the BP oil accident to close down almost all American offshore drilling. Or was it an accident? If the LLAs can say President Bush “created” 9-11-01, I'm allowed to contend that Obama’s “hit squad” blew up that oil platform! Look at the power and control that was placed in his hands! Just as with GM, he was telling a private corporation what to do, and how much they had to pay while doing it! Obama, who hates private business, must have been overjoyed that he, as an elected official, was issuing marching orders to BP!
In any case, the Executive Order he signed went further than just mandating a few months of “evaluation” to make sure things were safe. It appears it invalidated all existing offshore drilling licenses, and maybe some of the leases on drilling sites (for Federal land), as well. And, though it was claimed that the ban had been lifted, restoration of the drilling licenses has ranged from non-existent all the way to minimal! The Obama regime has even refused to renew some of our on-shore drilling licenses, for privately-owned land. This has forced producing wells, some of which have reliably delivered oil for more than 50 years, to be idled. By openly restricting drilling licenses, hence limiting the supply of domestically-produced oil, the Obama regime is still forcing the U.S. toward those “European-level” fuel prices.
European countries do have inordinately high fuel prices, that's true. This is traceable to government manipulation, done through punitive taxation. More than half of the cost of fuel in European counties is traceable to state-imposed taxes. Secondly, most of Europe has no significant oil reserves. England, Scotland, and Germany, along with a few Scandinavian countries, only discovered their own offshore oil in the last few decades. Prior to that, these countries had resigned themselves to oil importation as a fact of life, simply because they were convinced they had little of it within their borders.
The U.S. has never had a supply problem. Since Edwin Drake sunk his well in Titusville, Pennsylvania (1859), we’ve been well aware that, as with coal, we have huge reserves of oil and natural gas. Throughout much of U.S. history, oil tankers did not exist; no one was putting millions of barrels of oil onto ships and sending it across the oceans. There were a few oil pipelines in the world, but those were of limited range. Most nations were energy-independent by default; no one was going to sell oil to a faraway country, as they had no means of getting it there! So, if a country was to take full advantage of the “Industrial Revolution,” it had to do so with its own energy. The U.S. rose to prominence during this era (1880 to 1940, or so) by virtue of a mighty industrial base, fueled by our country’s abundant energy supplies.
In 1933, a joint venture was established by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a U.S. oil consortium. There are a lot of things we could discuss regarding this, but this small section of the timeline will tell us enough:
1933 -Saudi Arabia grants oil concession to California Arabian Standard Oil Company (Casoc), affiliate of Standard Oil of California (Socal, today's Chevron). Oil prospecting begins on Kingdom's east coast.
1936 - Texas Oil Company (which became Texaco, and now Chevron) acquires 50% interest in Socal's concession. The joint venture became known as the California Texas Oil Company, or Caltex.
1938 - Kingdom's first commercial oil field discovered at Dhahran. Crude is exported by barge toBahrain.
1939 - First tanker load of petroleum is exported. (Socal’s D.G. Scofield)
So, around 1939-40 we started receiving oil from Saudi Arabia. The story of how this small beginning ultimately resulted in the formation of the OPEC cartel is fascinating. Check it out! The bottom line is, until 1939, there were miniscule amounts of foreign oil in our country, and certainly no “dependence” on it!
I’ve watched & listened to politicians for many years, and they are particularly “strange,” when it comes to oil. Some, apparently, are in the pocket of the LLAs and enviro-whackos. These politicos demonstrate the greatest “flip-flop” tendencies when it comes to oil production and consumption. One day, they’ll proclaim that oil-drilling is a dirty and dangerous business, and we should “take advantage” of resources from overseas, keeping our reserves in the ground. The next day, depending on poll results, they’ll proclaim that our “dependence” on foreign oil is dangerous, and we need to consider changing our vehicle fleet, reducing ourselves to driving what one pundit referred to as “lawnmowers with two seats.” They don’t take a realistic, business-oriented view of our ability to produce and refine oil, efforts that could banish this manufactured “dependence!”
More sensible politicians realize that we have oil and natural gas, lots of it, with more finds coming to light every week. They realize that European-level fuel prices would impose enormous hardships on the US economy and all of our industries. Texas alone is 60,000 square miles larger than France, the largest country in continental Europe. We’re Americans, and we don’t live all jammed together; we’re spread out, and like it that way! Our production facilities are not concentrated in a few areas; our goods and services come from many locations in our great country! The fact that we travel a great deal is a part of our national identity; we don’t fight it, we embrace it! Proper elected officials know this, and work to free up our energy supplies.
We Americans can be major players on the world market, as well, using our production capability to at least “level the playing field” for international oil prices and production. “Drill, Baby, Drill” is not merely a slogan. The concept has great merit! Some of you may remember President Ronald Reagan’s request, to all U.S.oil companies, to increase production of our domestic wells (you can check it yourself, at the Heritage Foundation’s website). This was one of his first acts after he took office; the second (1979) Saudi/OPEC oil embargo was fresh in everyone’s mind, and American gasoline prices were too high. President Reagan realized this was a “put-up-job” by the OPEC cartel, limiting supplies to keep prices high. Mere hours after he spoke, prices on the world oil market began falling to levels not seen in years! Prices at the gas pump followed suit. There were no “embargos” during Reagan’s presidency, as he’d shown the OPEC crew he “knew their game.” That one piece of documented history tells us all we need to know. If we made proper use of our vast domestic resources, we could be energy-independent in a few years, at most, and tell the OPEC cartel to “go fly a kite.”
Cut to our current Chief Executive. Obama is hobbling our economy, on purpose, to “take us down a few pegs.” He doesn’t place America first; to him, we’re just “one country among many.” He is aware that low-cost energy is the biggest driver of our economy, so driving the price of energy up increases the economic hardships we must endure. He considers this, in his bent, perverted mind, to be some form of “character-building” that Americans need to experience. He feels Americans have “had it too easy,” compared to citizens of other countries.
Like most of the LAAs, he and the enviro-wackos forget, or refuse to acknowledge, we Americans have been handed NOTHING! We worked for it, every bit of it! The LLAs will never get that part straight! They are convinced that Americans are just born “well off.” They don’t want to recognize American citizens as the hardest-working, most-innovative, most-productive people on earth, but that's what we are!
This brings us to today; the most wretched LLA in memory holds the highest elected office in our nation, and he is no friend of those who value freedom and individual mobility. Obama would like to see all of us, except for him and other high-ranking government officials, reduced to driving those “lawnmowers” we discussed. Unless he could force us all onto public transit, which he’d like even more!
Oh, and while purposely holding down our domestic energy production capabilities, he travels to Brazil, praises them for drilling oil, offers them 2 billion of OUR dollars to help enhance their facilities, and proclaims America will be one of their best customers! He’s president of which country?? How can he look in the mirror at the end of the day?
A permanent, long-term solution is straightforward. First, we dump Obama in 2012. That has to happen, as he's detrimental to America! Then, we need to jettison the Environmental Protection Agency! The EPA’s "benefit" to America is in the 'less than nothing,' category. Needless billions go to fund this utterly useless agency.
Next, we need to drill and refine our domestic oil reserves. All those “scaremongers” we used to hear from, proclaiming that America had only 25 years of oil supply left (that statement was made in the late 70s) were liars of the first order! The recent finds in North Dakota, the huge reserves in Alaska! Texas is still a major producer, ditto Wyoming and Louisiana. Other U.S. states have smaller, but still significant, oil production capabilities. Our refinery capacity could easily be enhanced; the only real barriers are regulatory. If American business regulations were at about the level that Edwin Drake had to deal with (!), just watch us go!!
Premium fuel would be about $0.85 – other grades even less. The supply would be undimmed for hundreds of years, until each vehicle ran on something similar to “Back To The Future’s” Mr. Fusion! At that point, we could decommission the energy-producing facilities and use the land for other purposes. Don’t say that’s not possible, that land used for energy-production is polluted and “lost.” That’s just Leftist propaganda! I’ve been to beautiful recreational parks (check Salt Fork, in southeastern Ohio), built on re-claimed strip mines! Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But, there’s no way with government intrusion at current levels!
One comment
Obama declared, under authority granted to the President somewhere, probably the Commerce Clause, that all automobile companies must increase their fleet-average gas mileage to 56 mpg by 2025.
Problem solved!
Ralph Mudge - 02-08-’11 18:43