Stop the Oil Speculators!

Drill a bit more in non-politically sensitive areas (like FL, the Gulf of Mexico and ANWR) and the price will come down.

Liberals are against domestic drilling for oil and they are against nuclear power, but then they blame investors for high oil prices. Laughable!

Yes, liberals are in favor of the several other options, ones that will allow the US safe independence from crazy countries and other adverse scenarios. The sun burning out, tides stilling, and winds stopping are not among those adverse scenarios. But the GOP (and investors!) have fought all of those options for 40 years or so, while China & Europe have pursued them, and now we're way way behind and suffering from it.

Ever-growing cars, sprawl and houses (without ever-growing insulation nor sensible sun-oriented design) haven't helped.

Why don't you blame OPEC!!!!!!!

Humans relies on many things to survive. In terms of urgency, they are listed as follows:

1. breathing air - Free. Unless you really want to breath canned fuji mountain air, or that sort of stuff. Too important to be allowed for speculative trading.

2. Drinking Water - In most developed countries, it is relatively very low cost. They are usually provided by some government controlled water authorities, because it would be too important to be allowed for speculative trading. Again, you can pay more for all kinds of soft drinks or bottled water and pay more. Orange juice is allowed to trade as commodity.

3. Food - People will die without food in a matter of days. Yet, the most popular commodities being traded speculatively are food items.

4. Housing or clothing - Both can be considered essential to modern humans. Again, housing and cotton are allowed for speculative trading.

5. Transportation or Energy - They are important but less so than the above catagories to most people.

It is a pretty easy arguement that if food, housing and clothing materials are allowed to be speculatively traded, then energy should not be exempted. Unless....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/oil/9867659/Why-the-world-isnt-running-out-of-oil.html

On the evening of April 18 1977, President Jimmy Carter invited television cameras into the Oval Office and portentously announced to the American people that “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 unprecedented problem was energy. Or rather, the lack of it. “We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources,” said the 39th President of the United States. “The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 per cent of our energy are running out.”

Carter’s talk was poorly received. Americans didn’t appreciate the apocalyptic message, still less his vision for tackling the situation, with its rather schoolmasterly demand for a collective show of moral backbone. But hardly anyone questioned his facts. And yet he was about as wrong as he could be. Far from running out, oil and natural gas reserves were, if not inexhaustible, then unfathomably vast. Nobody knew that then, but they do now.

Moreover, as well as bountiful oilfields in North America, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other producers in the Middle East, there are massive, barely tapped reserves in South America, Africa and the Arctic: not billions of barrels’ worth, but trillions. So the planet is not about to run out of oil. On the contrary, according to a Harvard University report published last year, we are heading for a glut.

Harvard University is stupid.

Most of those new discoveries, at least for petroleum, are much more expensive to extract and/or refine than what we've been used to for the past several generations. So it amounts to the exact shortage that Carter warned about, and the exact impact on our economy.

Similarly, most of the newer discoveries of natural gas require far more aggressive extraction techniques, like fracking and little earthquakes. The economic impact has definite quantifiable costs that are not being borne properly.