Fed Up With The Price At The Pump? View This

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I'm going to attempt to respond to your posts without adding to the partisan rhetoric SC. Don't know how successful I am going to be, but I'm going to attempt to respond using reason.

Oil may well be a diminishing commodity, and the cost of it will rise as it gets harder to find and more difficult to extract. However, this is not what is causing the cost to rise at the moment - not by a long shot. The price is rising at the moment because the reserves are not increasing at the same rate as the demand. Not because they are not there, but because there is a concerted effort by this administration to keep the reserves that we have from being included in the total. Whether it is a deep water drilling moratorium or simply an out and out refusal to open certain areas at all, those policies contribute to narrowing the gap between reserves and demand, which raises the cost of the commodity. Added to this is the devaluation of the USD as a result of both out of control deficit spending, particularly since 2006, and the monetizing of the debt through expansion of the money supply and allowing the Federal Reserve to issue the currency which it then uses to purchase the Treasury Notes issued to pay for the federal spending. When there is more money chasing the same amount of goods, the cost of the goods goes up. That is Economics 101. If we were our own little economy that didn't import or export any goods, such things would not matter - but we aren't and they do.

Climate change is real. The part that gets sketchy is attributing the cause of the current change to the activities of our species and our use of fossil fuels. Certainly we have an impact on the change, we might even be hastening it, but I fail to see conclusive proof that we could stop, reverse or slow the change simply by returning our emissions to earlier levels, which we all agree was still increasing the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. If we alone reduce our consumption it won't matter one bit, presuming less emissions actually could stop, reverse or slow the change. Raising the cost of living, raising the cost of manufacturing goods, raising the cost of growing, harvesting and transporting food by mandating the use of more expensive energy will not help us compete in a world market. It can, however, hurt us in that regard. If we were our own little economy that didn't import or export any goods, such things would not matter - but we aren't and they do.

The nice rant by Mr. Lee is entertaining, but not much else and it contradicts everything that is being said by the true believers about weather not being an indication of the changing climate when those who doubt make a quip about all the global warming costing them more to heat their home. A cold winter is local, not global. A hot summer is local, not global. Increased precipitation in one area is local, not global. The Mississippi River has experienced higher levels of flooding in years where the global climate was cooler; this too is local, not global. This particular stretch of the planet that we call the United States of America has been the site of blizzards that rival what we saw in 2003. Georgetown got over 60 inches in one day in 1913. Silver Lake had a storm that dropped nearly 76 inches in one day and over 90 inches over 3 days in 1921. I wonder if Mr. Lee has ever heard of the 1925 Tri-State tornado. On the ground for 3.5 hours, a mile wide and over 200 miles long - one tornado - killed over 700 people when population density was nowhere near what it is today. That climate change induced tornado activity we've seen this year is unprecedented in storm frequency or severity, yeah right. I'm sure they kept records that were just as accurate back in the days when they didn't even use the word tornado to describe the phenomena and it was entirely possible that one could form without anyone seeing it.

Nmysys wrote: SC:

The answer is not worrying about the weaning off of fossil fuels,( that takes time ) but drilling for what we have in the USA, and offshore. You and Pineinthegrass can reply with the Partisan canned responses, but I think the first thing on the video was His Highness telling the Brazilian people that we want to be their best customers after handing them a few Billion of our money in order for them to be able to drill.

Blame the GOP, blame Bush, blame everything except the Obama Administration. Typical.

BTW, why is Climate Change part of this topic?

TSDR (Too Stupid Didn't Read)

Blaming gas pump prices on this administration is unjust. While a less than embracing attitude towards oil companies, there is not immediate effect on the supply of hydrocarbons. We will reap the benefit :Whistle of the Gulf drilling moratorium in the next five to ten years. It takes that long to bring successful exploration leads to the market. Lost in the anger and finger pointing is the unexpected Arab instability and China's increased oil consumption. Both excite trader speculation and we have paid the price.

While HC discoveries require more demanding science, there have been incredible technological advances that make exploration far more powerful than the 70's-80's throwing darts at a map. We used to laugh about it because the success of wildcat wells was about the same as results from a dart game or random drilling. The science of today (geophysical processing, 3-d seismic, sequence stratigraphy, etc) have vastly improved drilling success by elucidating features that were mere ghosts in the past. The point is that while opportunities to discover HC elephants has diminished considerably given that few basins remain virgin territory, advances in drilling technology make even minor fields highly productive and profitable. So one can not really site oil being harder to find as a viable excuse for rising oil prices at the pump.

SC and I will argue over man's impact on global warming. I certainly see little evidence that clearly establish that man's activities accelerate global warming. Much of the information bearing on this matter is coincidental, stretched to the limits of credibility, etc. Furthermore, we really do not have a solid comparative record of the rate or variability in the rate of past climate changes. Consequently, I will not use it as an argument to go green. Instead, I'd like to see the green movement proceed on its own merits, that I think are good enough.