I agree that part of the answer to our energy and economic problems is to drill.  Any idiot can see that increased domestic production can only help our country.  At least McCain has decided that we can drill off shore.  If McCain were smart he would make energy the center of his campaign.  He could win on that issue alone.  Obama lives in the same fantasy world as Al Gore.  I'm all for alternative fuels and think we should continue to research and develop this technology but the age of oil is not over.  It is fossil fuels that allow my lights to come on when I flip a switch and get me to where I need to go.  That is reality. 

I could not have made a better presentation of facts myself. well done!

That may be true, but I think Obama is smarter than that (even if he does not articulate it well). He knows exactly what he is doing, and he is being honest about it. There are a few of them around. They want to wean us off of Oil, and they know the only way to do that is to drive the prices up. We will not move forward with weaning ourselves unless we have the pain.

That being said, I find most of the politicians, and especially the democrat leadership to be dishonest, duplicitous, conniving, deceitful and vindictive. They have no intention of alleviateing the oil, they do not know why they do not want to fix it, and they blame others for their faults.

Like I said, at least Obama knows what he is doing and is honest about it. Pelosi and Reid dont know what they are doing and are doing everything they can to remain morons about it.

The problem with congress and politicians in general is they only look at the short term impacts and primarily the impact to their respective parties rather than the long term issues and the impact on the American people. We can all agree that we need to deal with this energy issue the problem is that congress is stuck trying to find ONE solution to the problem. The Dems argue that drilling won't have any short term impact and is therefore not a good solution, whereas windfall profits taxes will have (they claim) an immediate impact and is therefore better. The Repubs argue that drilling will have a short term impact because the promise of increased supply will be enough to lower the price of oil and that a windfall profits tax will end up being passed onto the consumer thus increasing the cost of gas rather than reducing it. Naturally neither side willing to compromise and so we end up with nothing getting done and we the people are left paying the price.

What we need is a multifaceted approach to the problem. We need to increase drilling which will have an affect on prices today. We need to impose more regulation on the speculation market so that the price isn't adversly affect like it has been recently. We need to increase investment in alternative energies like synthetic oil (this should be first as the infrastucture is already in place), hydrogen, solar, wind, nuclear, etc. Eventually as the alternatives are made viable the infrastucture needs to be invested in to make them viable for the entire country (hydrogen refueling stations).

Then we can wean ourselves off of foreign oil, but it is going to be a long term approach which politicians don't like because they only focus on the time until their next bid for re-election. This is why I advocate that we need to send a message to our current elected officals and let them all know just how bad of a job we think they are doing. This can be done very easily, do NOT re-elect anyone for another term in office. It's that simple.

Obama thinks he can just state "the age of oil is over" and that makes it so. It doesn't. The man thinks that the oceans stopped receding and the earth began to heal the moment he claimed the Democratic nomination. He is delusional at best, dishonest at worst. I believe the latter. Not to mention that he has an ego that is bigger than the planet.

I have to disagree DocG, we can wean ourselves without all the pain involved. This taste of out of control oil prices has brought an awareness to the American public, we want alternative energy sources and we want them as soon as humanly possibly, but we also want relief at the pump and for once we can have it both ways. we have enough oil right here at home to sustain us for 60 years, if American ingenuity cannot get it together in 70 years {that's 10 years till the oil really starts flowing and 60 years of oil} then maybe America should just take over "our friends" the Saudis by force.

While I agree with everything you said, simple it's not.

 

The MSM has filled Obama head with such grandeur, that he is starting to believe it himself.

PS - MM, this was featured. 

It's a plot I tell ya a plot to drive me insane.....

Thank you Powers that be for the feature.

It is a great article, MM.  The problem of the ten year lag time is compounded to the ridiculous when you consider the congress was making the same argument TEN YEARS AGO.  But drilling alone will not solve the mess.  We need more refining capacity, and we need them in places closer to the source of the crude.  It is very telling that the majority of our refinery capacity is in the vicinity of seaports...you know, where the tankers from the middle east tie up?

I see the greatest transfer of wealth as that from our pockets to Exxon.  Did you see there last profit/loss statement?  Good grief.

I do not believe adding wilderness areas and offshore areas will help.  We do not have the refining capacity period and it would take years to develop it as well as build the infrastructure to bring oil from any new drilling sites to any new refineries.

I do agree with you that we really need to invest in some serious R & D as regards alternatives. Including alternatives to cars themselves.  I like the fact that some cities are making golf carts legal for travel on suburban roads with speed limits at 25 mph.  Perhaps we could make city lanes for electric cars powered by solar energy?  This energy crisis will not be over until we revamp our thinking and infrastructure systems to move away from petroleum and internal combustion vehicles.

See ya.

It's going to take even longer to develop the infrastucture for the alternative fuels, like hydrogen. There are currently like 150,000 gas stations across the country, there are 3 hydrogen fueling stations all in southern california. If we want alternative fuels to be viable we need an infrastructure. This is where the catch 22 of alternatives comes into play, companies don't want to invest in the infrastructure until there is a market for the fuels, and auto companies don't want to manufacture the vehicles until there is an infrastructure in place. No vehicles = no market, no market = no infrastructure, no infrastucture = no vehicles...

We do need more refining capacity but if we were keep our oil usage stable and increase domestic oil production then our refining capacity could potentially remain the same. So the only infrastucture we would need is how to ship the oil from the new rigs out to the current refineries. That's not as major an undertaking as building enough fueling stations for an unproven alternative energy.

Keep in mind I'm not saying that we shouldn't invest in alternative, quite the opposite, but in the short term we need to increase domestic production of oil to ease the pain as we wean ourselves off of oil.

 

Agreed. I understand that we currently have rather large fiends that are untapped.  What is this push to open other areas except to give Exxon and the like more domain to choose from?

When I talk about alternatives, I am including internal combustion engine alternatives. Hydrogen, I agree, has clear infrastructure issues.  But electricity have less so. And solar re-chargers for 12 volt systems are very effective.

 

My house in the mountains, for example, is solar powered and uses about 10 percent of its stored electric power on any given day.  Each morning as the sun rises, the house batteries are recharged by 10 or 11 o'clock.  A solar panel on top of a small electric car would do wonders toward recharging itself, reducing the impact on power plants.  Current hybrid technology allows batteries to recharge while decelerating to stops. Add a panel or implant the car roof with our newest solar cells and we just might have something, especially for smaller cities and small towns. 

Just a thought or two.

Be well.

 

The problem is that the millions of acres currently leased to the oil companies have little to no oil in them making them unprofitable at best so why would the oil companies drill there? It's like telling someone to go into the desert in search of water, sure there's some oasis' out there but they are few and far between.



So am I. The problem is that there simply isn't enough infrastructure in place or the alternatives aren't cost effective yet.

Compressed Natural Gas would be a great alternative to gasoline because there aren't many changes needed to the currently available cars (Honda has a CNG Civic currently available) the problem is that there aren't many fueling stations. However you can get something called a Phill to attach to your home natural gas line and use that to fuel your car it just takes 16 hours to go from empty to full.

Solar power on cars is possible but the current solar panels are rather expensive, although Toyota will be coming out with a car (I think a version of the prius) in either 2009 or 2010 that will have a solar panel on it to power the heating/air conditioning system in the car to increase fuel efficency.

And I completely agree the auto industry should really put out many more hybrid model cars (like one for every model car produced) as they are going to be of the most benefit in the short term.



That's awesome. Someday I would love to have a house that was off the grid completely, but at the moment I can't afford it. And I'm not so sure that current solar tech can be adapted to cars very easily. Part of the reason is that the solar panels on a house can be angled to capture the most available light depending on your lat/long location and the time of year, that would be hard to do on a car. Also the panels on a house tend to be rather large, they would have to be shrunk considerably to be viable on a car. Certainly something they should be research but it's not quite there yet.