As both the right and left engage in their favorite pastime – The Blame Game – when it comes to assigning responsibility for the mess we’re in with gas prices, I’ve been doing a slow burn about both sides’ singular avoidance of placing blame on the one group who truly deserves it.
Every red blooded American who has voted over the past 30 years – Republican and Democrat – for federal lawmakers who promised, in effect, that this day would come bears the primary responsibility for high gas prices.
We the voters made concious and deliberate choices to elect presidents, members of Congress, and state legislators who ran on a platform that condemned nuclear power and swore to oppose the building of any more plants. If, over the last 30 years, we had replaced the majority of our oil and coal burning plants with nuclear powered generators, we could have saved about half a million bbl a day or 5% of the total imports of 10 million bbl a day.
That doesn’t sound like much but the “speculation premium” added to the current price of oil – about $40 according to the Wall Street Journal – is based on a perceived tightening of the market by 2-3%. There’s a good chance that premium wouldn’t even exist with the savings realized by using safe, clean nuclear power.
We, the voters, also made conscious and deliberate choices in electing everyone from members of Congress to local selectmen who would oppose the building of new refineries. “Not in my backyard” was the refrain of the last 30 years which has seen exactly zero refineries built in this country and 50 refineries closed down. Incredibly, we import about 3.5 million bbl of finished petroleum products every day. This lack of refining capacity has put pressure on our ability to stockpile gas, deisel, and other products that would also dampen speculation and give us a much needed cushion in supply that would stabilize oil prices.
We the voters also made conscious and deliberate choices to elect members of Congress, governors, and state legislators who promised not to drill offshore of all but a handful of states. How much oil is there just waiting for the drill bit? The government estimates around 20 billion bbl which sounds like a lot but only represents the amount of oil we would use in about 3 years. But other estimates from oil companies and other energy experts puts the amount of oil offshore considerably higher. The point isn’t that it would supply ALL of our needs for just a few years. It could never be pumped out that fast anyway. But no one doubts that it could make a sizable dent in our current 10 million bbl a day fix we need from other countries.
A word about the Bakken field which has been receiving some press lately (for obvious reasons). There is a huge disparity between government estimates of how much oil is under South Dakota and Montana and how much there is according to independent energy groups. The government says 21 billion bbl. Other scientific studies put the number at 500 billion bbls. As contrast, Saudi Arabia has proven reserves of about 260 billion bbls.
What has scientists and drillers so excited about this huge field of oil is that recent advances in oil drilling technology may make a large part of that field available for exploitation. To give you an idea, as recently as 1995, the government claimed the field contained only 150 million bbls of recoverable oil. To raise that estimate to 21 billion bbl astonishing.
The key is a breakthrough in drilling technology known as “sideways drilling.” Apparently, most of the oil is unavailable unless that technology is used to exploit the find. At the moment, no one knows how much of this light, sweet crude could contribute to our stocks of oil. But they are finding ways to extract more and more of the find all the time which can only bode well for the future.
This doesn’t help our immediate pain which brings me back to where the blame should lie for this fiasco. We voters made perfectly rational and logical choices to elect politicians who refused to drill offshore, in ANWR, on federal lands – anywhere one spotted owl or caribu might be affected.
There is nothing wrong with this, I might add. There are many among us who continually pat themselves on the back for being good stewards of the land, fighting the good fight against greedy oil companies who would rape the land and coastline in the name of profit.
These same people are much less willing to pat themselves on the back for getting us into our current dilemma. Again, there is nothing basically wrong with being in favor of protecting the environment at all costs – the most obvious cost being cheap gasoline. The question is why are we not accepting responsibility for what is clearly something that is our collective fault.
It has been proven that environmental protection is a luxury that only rich nation’s can afford. We have been willing to pay this price both because it is the right thing to do and because we could afford a small loss in economic growth in exchange for cleaner air and water as well as protecting wildlife.
But times change. The world is changing. And unless we can find a way to balance legitimate concerns about the environment with our need for more oil, the present situation will continue and get worse. This means that environmentalists have to acknowledge that the policies they support are leading us to ruin while the pro-drilling crowd must acknowledge that we can’t go drilling everywhere there’s a drop of oil to be found.
And we the voter have to start electing politicians to office who are realistic about what needs to be done. Can we maintain our committment to a clean environment while increasing our domestic oil supply? I think it can be done – if the political will to do it can be found.
10:02 am
[...] Next time your spending $120 to fill up your minivan, thank Al Gore. Or blame yourself? [...]
1:38 pm
The policies you speak of environmentalism at all costs may have made sense prior to 911, however, post 911 they no longer make any sense. After 911, we should have begin drilling for more of our own oil and we should have immediately began building more refineries. Had we have done so we would be much closer to energy independence than we are now and we would have more leverage in dealing with Venezeula and other OPEC nations.
Btw, we can go drilling every where there is a drop to be found and we should do so without delay. It will have to be done cleanly and American oil companies are among the best in the world at this.
2:00 pm
One good thing about a presidential election is that it allows the voters to decide who should be blamed for mistakes and who should be credited for best serving our national interests. Oil, or lack of it, has been an important issue for over thirty years. Oil transcends other issues in that it directly impacts our national prosperity and security like no other.
We’ve had warnings and we’ve had proposals, for example who said this:
__________________________________________________________________________
“Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.”
“It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.”
“We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.”
“Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the “moral equivalent of war” – except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.”
__________________________________________________________________________
Great speech, taken from Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Proposed Energy Policy in which he outlined his ten guiding principles. One huge benefit from Carters dedication to the energy crisis is the fact that the US uses very little oil in generating electricity. He recognized that we needed to reduce our dependence on oil and made sure we used it only where absolutely needed.
Imagine what we would be paying for electricity in the US now had he not had this great foresight. And imagine where we would be today, over 30 years later had we implemented his entire program.
We can’t go back but we can appreciate that we have had visionaries, like Carter, who were up to the complicated task of solving this huge problem. The Bakken formation that you mentioned is an excellent example of politicians who get it and those who don’t.
A recent (April 2008) study done by US Geological Survey estimated 3.65 billion barrels of oil, 1.85 trillion cubic feet of associated/dissolved natural gas, and 148 million barrels of natural gas liquids in the Bakken Formation of the Williston Basin Province, Montana and North Dakota.
Dick Cheney helped sponsor a recent energy bill to help companies develop and utilize the new horizontal drilling equipment to make oil fields like the Bakken practical. John McCain voted against the bill while Obama voted in favor of this important legislation.
Obama is clearly the choice if you take energy independence seriously.
6:25 pm
Clueless moonbat- urkel WANTS high gas prices and wants to penalize oil companies for “obscene” profits. Who benefits from said profits? Maybe people invested in oil companies? The price is currently largely skyhigh due to commodity speculators. Did government do much of anything to help the domestic oil industry when it was in the doldrums in the early eighties and cities like Houston were suffering grievously? And now you want to praise Carter who is one big reason we are kissing islamomutant arses. Blame everything on the Jews and Dubya. New Congress has watched prices double since they took control. Yes, Obalalamdingdong will be an even worse version of Carter. And yet you and he want Americans to sacrifice to win the good graces of the UN and Euroweenies? Are hypocrites like the goracle, obambis, the breck girl, lurch skerry, Fat Teddy K, arianna huffington and the rest of the hollywood scum sacrificing ANYTHING at all? Seems to me that algore’s bogus AGW is fattening his own carbon credit boondoggle accounts. And of course even McCain goes along with the BS- ANWR off limits, up to states to ok drillingt offshore, but fine for the Chinese to drill in the Caribbean. You liberals want some of us to suffer as you prosper and have control over others through government dependency. Oh, I see seven NEW oil refineries are being build and there have been none built in good old USA since 1976. Unfortunately those seven plants are for Irani consumers. At least they recognize where they are vulnerable while Reid and pelois have their fingers up their dupas as usual.
Let’s follow Jimmuh’s advice this winter and wear sweaters while turning down that thermostat or better yet allow Urkel to make new rules like the California gummint cretins tried by have the state control your thermostats by remote control. Maybe then we’d use less and then the excuse would be we should pay more because utility profits are falling?
8:38 am
Subject: We are committing suicide
The world currently consumes 87 million barrels of oil per day and produces 85 million barrels per day. The U.S. dollar is very weak which makes oil even more expensive on the world market and futures speculators are driving the price even higher yet.
This magnificent country is blessed with tremendous natural resources. We have an estimated 1 trillion barrels of oil in the form of oil shale, 70% of which is on federal land, on the western slopes in Colorado,Utah,and Wyoming. We have oil in Alaska and off of our southern and western coasts. If we add all of this together, we have 5 times the known reserves of Saudi Arabia. At the current rate of use, these potential reserves could last us 200-400 years. We have some of the world’s largest coal deposits. There are technologies to liquefy coal and burn it cleanly with minimal effect on our environment.
I love this planet and wish to keep it as clean and beautiful as possible. But without energy, the Human Race will expire. I don’t wish to live in a cave. And without the Human Race, I personally don’t see much value in the Planet Earth.
And yet our Congress has placed every impediment possible to our extracting our needed energy from our own resources. To what end are we allowing our “Masters” to subvert our lives and our country? How many trillions of dollars a year must we continue to send to people and governments who hate and wish to ultimately destroy us? It is not too late. We must start now.
PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION:
http://www.americansolutions.com/
AND FORWARD IT TO ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS
Charlie Dorfman
5:01 pm
I agree with every one of your points, but you leave out one of the most critical ones—and the single biggest reason I have zero sympathy for anyone over 30 complaining about high gas prices.
Anyone who lived through the Arab embargo of the early 70s knows that gas mileage is important. For the past 15 years, Americans have said “gas mileage? Heck with that!” We’ve proceeded to drive 80 mph in our Tahonconeers 450 getting 12 mpg highway. Guess what? You’re part of the problem, Jacque! So every Congressman who voted for tax subsidies on SUVs and against gas mileage increases gets the blame to, as does every American who voted those tools into office.
9:31 pm
So, this is simply a matter of supply and demand?
How many of our Congressmen are in the pay of OPEC to prevent us from developing and drilling any of our oil fields? (Or a promise to pay, as in the secret financing of Bill Clinton’s Foundation?) No one can know for sure…
Suppose a hurricane were coming, and your local Home Depot and Lowes pulled half their supply of plywood and electric generators off the shelves, and hid them in the back. Some time passes; The hurricane is still a day and a half away, and the shelves are bare. “Do you have any plywood? Or electric generators?” “No, we have none for sale,” speaks the manager, snickering inwardly at his careful truth.
So, consider that under severe demand, OPEC has frozen (or even curtailed) production of oil. It’s the same situation. Quite frankly, they are f*cking with us, and perhaps turnabout would be fair play.
Never mind the report that OPEC countries have massive construction projects that could not be paid for when the price of gas sat at $3 per gallon. At $6 per gallon, with 80% of that going for the cost of oil itself, they’ll have an absurdly easy time meeting their goals. Due to the world-wide outrage, one suspects they overshot, however, with this blatant manipulation and outrageous wealth transfer. We’ll see.
As to Rick’s point about nuclear fission plants, I agree, especially since in the last twenty years its technology has advanced so dramatically. But I don’t view it as transformational. Now, if we ever solve the nuclear FUSION puzzle, that will be as transformational as any other human advance. It’s right up there with the creation of agriculture/farming, the written word, the printing press, and the discovery of electricity. Nuclear fusion would be so transformational you have absolutely no idea. And we already know that it is incredibly safe. There is simply no comparing fission and fusion. Maybe in 25 years…
10:01 am
Mike—to your point, I think it’s fair to point out that they may not have the inventory period. I have read that the Saudis are opening up some last ditch fields, and that the official figures of proven reserves haven’t changed for twenty odd years now. In other words, they may not be ramping up production because they physically can’t do it.
4:02 pm
Two items of blame were left unsaid. (I don’t disagree with the others, though please give efficiency more credit.)
(1) The weak dollar, which has to compete with strong Euros for oil, is to some degree an effect of the Republican borrow-and-spend fiscal policies of the last 7 years. We borrowed and continue to borrow to (a) pay for a war (and now occupation) of choice in Iraq and (b) to pay for tax cuts which mostly went to the very well-off (and pick your©,(d), etc according to ideology – the deficit is however very real).
(2) There is a mostly-unstated speculation premium related to talk about war with Iran. The bet is that a war with (or large strike on) Iran will result in disrupted world oil supplies and a very large oil price spike, to $250+ per barrel. (e.g. at 25 percent odds of war-related supply disruption during the remainder of the GWBush administration.) Oil shot up $6 dollars per barrel when some Israeli official recently simply mentioned the possibility of a strike. Some of the price we see at the pump, and on fuel-oil delivery bills, is due to war talk. IMO.
12:32 pm
We are irresponsibly running up deficits and obligations for social programs that our children will one day have to pay for. Our children just became obligated to pay back a debt for a stimulus check of $700 each. This, from income they don’t yet know how to earn. It seems somehow just that we suffer a bit while leaving vast wealth in the ground, untapped.
One day WHEN the oil reserves run low in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, those untapped reserves may be available for my children’s generation to use.
At that time, who will be funding the terrorist cells and Hamas? Maybe without huge sums of oil money to spend, the Middle East will be a more peaceful place.
We are leaving a world of economic desolation for our children… small price to pay to leave them a bit of our untapped natural resources.
We need to focus our attention on solving the problems at hand weather we drill now or later. Our energy policy needs to be MUCH more comprehensive than simply extracting our energy reserves. If that’s all we can figure out to do, then I say leave the reserves untapped.
3:30 pm
To blame Americans for the actions of special interest lobbies, misguided politicians and zealots is really, really laughable. Most Americans disagree with Roe vs Wade yet it stands. Most Americans supported the death penalty yet for a period the death penalty was ruled verboten. Do you actually believe that most Americans support the Supreme Court’s Gitmo decision?
Americans have little ability to influence many factors because of the corrupting influence of money, special interest groups and above all self serving politicians.
No politician should serve more than four years. We wouldn’t be in this fix if we didn’t have a professional political class devoted to their own self interests rather than doing whats best for the country.
4:55 pm
Assigning Blame (Correctly) for High Oil Prices…
Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse is one of my favorite political analysts. I have his website bookmarked in a category that I call thinkers, because he is one of the very few bloggers who consistently make in-depth, thought provoking…
5:01 pm
Rick –
I couldn’t disagree more with you on this issue. I think it’s abundantly clear which ideological side has endorsed the policies that you agree led us to where we are today. To lay that at the feet of “we the voters” is to let “they the liberals” off the hook. I posted extensively on it here:
http://www.conservatismtoday.com/my_weblog/2008/06/assigning-blame.html
I’ve never disagreed with you so strongly. Normally I think you’re dead-on. Keep up the good work.
1:32 pm
Have to agree that drilling, now, is part of the answer. All the set-asides were done for good (enough) reasons at the time. This is not THAT time. Allowing refining capacity to fall, largely as a result of the NIMBY syndrome*, is also something we can no longer afford (literally and figuratively). More domestic drilling and building up refinery capacity isn’t going to help short-term however.
——-
1:40 pm
[...] Who’s To Blame For High Gas Prices? Look in the Mirror, America Right Wing Nut House [...]
4:45 pm
Who cares who’s is to blame. What are we going to do about it. From my viewpoint, there are 2 or 3 options. Sell your car, buy a bike and take mass transit. Drive less or buy an electric car or a car powered by hydrogen. And option 3 is buy a pair of comfortable Nike’s and get ready for some walking. Since all of these options are out of the question for me, I decided to try and do something about it. While looking around, I stumbled across GasBankUSA, located at http://www.gasbankusa.com. The site talks about fixed price gasoline and locking in at a fixed price. An interesting concept and a little better than my magic 8 ball which continually tells me “try again later” everytime I ask it where are gas prices going OR will gas prices continue to rise. Looking through this site, it looks like a way to take control over something we had no control over in the past.
2:07 pm
Who’s to Blame for High Gas Prices?
For several decades, the Democratic Party has pursued policies designed to drive up the cost of petroleum, and therefore gas at the pump. Remarkably, the Democrats don’t seem to have taken much of a political hit from the current spike in gas prices. Probably that’s because most people don’t realize how different the two parties’ energy policies have been.
Congressman Roy Blunt put together these data to highlight the differences between House Republicans and House Democrats on energy policy:
ANWR Exploration House Republicans: 91% Supported House Democrats: 86% Opposed
Coal-to-Liquid
House Republicans: 97% Supported
House Democrats: 78% Opposed
Oil Shale Exploration
House Republicans: 90% Supported
House Democrats: 86% Opposed
Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Exploration
House Republicans: 81% Supported
House Democrats: 83% Opposed
Refinery Increased Capacity
House Republicans: 97% Supported
House Democrats: 96% Opposed
SUMMARY
91% of House Republicans have historically voted to increase the production of American-made oil and gas.
86% of House Democrats have historically voted against increasing the production of American-made oil and gas.
PAUL adds: It’s useful to keep this sort of thing in mind when we hear (on something like a daily basis these days) that the Republicans have run out of ideas or that Republican ideas didn’t work. The truth is that most major Republican ideas weren’t tried because the Democrats blocked them. Increasing the domestic production of oil and gas (a move so obvious it barely meets the standard for being an idea) is hardly the only example. Social security reform and school choice also come quickly to mind. Republican-backed policies for increasing the number of Americans with health insurance were also blocked by Democrats. And so forth.