Bill Scher: Shall We Help Big Oil Get Bigger?

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:



Shall We Help Big Oil Get Bigger?
Submitted by Bill Scher on November 19, 2007 - 4:46pm.



Over the past seven years, crude oil prices have exploded from around $30 a barrel to nearly $100. With prices that high, you don’t need to give an oil company executive much financial incentive to drill for more fossil fuel.

Yet clean energy legislation is stalled in Congress because of opposition to curtailing oil and gas subsidies and investing the proceeds in renewable fuels. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley (Iowa), with a straight face, called on Democrats to be “reasonable” and support a package that “at least is not destructive to the incentives we need to produce more oil."

You may recall that President George W. Bush said it is a “serious problem” that “America is addicted to oil.” But he goes farther than Grassley, criticizing proposals to “raise taxes” on oil companies, preferring to leave the current tax breaks untouched and keep the oil needle in America’s arm.

This is not a debate between activist government and free markets. The oil industry that conservatives seek to protect is not thriving in a free market. It’s propped up by our government. That’s not what American voters want in their energy policy, and they tried to change it in the last election.

Concerned about environmental catastrophe in the future and squeezed by high gas costs in the present, voters installed a new congressional leadership that pledged a simple change in our government’s priorities: to shift our taxpayer-funded energy policy away from dirty fossil fuels and towards clean renewables. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/shall_we_help_big_oil_get_bigger?tx=3

[Solar_Power]

1. Actually, the less they drill, the higher the price, the higher their profits

[SpiralHawk]

2. republicons are into socialism: oil socialism for the rich

and scum buckets for the proles...

[Ezlivin]

3. The number of drilling rigs has tripled in Saudi Arabia and production is flat

The reason they're not building more refineries is that they don't have enough oil to refine to make them profitable (it's a long-term investment).

We've taken the easily obtainable light, sweet crude and what remains is the sour crude. It's heavier and cannot be run through the same refineries as the light, sweet crude.

There's no doubt that the oil companies are seeing record profits, but the price of the oil is rising because of supply constraints. We are at the point where the demands are outstripping supply. Saudi Arabia cannot "open the taps" to dampen price swings any longer; it's pumping as much and as fast as it can.

Regardless of what we'd like to believe, oil is subject to physical limits and we're seeing the results of butting up against those limits.

The wake-up call will come when people realize that there is no substitute for oil in our culture. Alternate energy will be unable to fill the same role as cheap oil. Our way of living must change and the resistance to this change is may doom us to a series of severe shocks from which we may not ever fully recover.