So we should just keep selling our souls to the arabs, and allow the caribou to frolic in thier undaunted landscape. Opec is one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet. The longerwe rely on them, the worse off we'll be, and, at this point, it may take years to recover. Whengas hits $4, mark my words;things will get bad.The enviromentalists' do have some good ideas that should be implemented............in the distant future. That's thier main weakness. They are by thier very nature idealists. Try telling some guy making $20k that he's going to have to buy a new car that works on [whatever]. For now, the best way to avoid short and mid-term economic disaster is to open up Alaska and Canada full steam. I don't have anything against the caribou. As a matter a fact, I've never met one, but, if it means them waking up to a landscape ofoil rigsevery morning to step away from opec a bit, fvk 'em.

 

There is good and bad on both sides, but we need to find something that is going to ease the burden on the American people. Corporate greed is a big factor in where we get our oil from, but I am also tired of hearing the enviromentalists telling me that I need to do all this crap because they know best. I am all up for conserving the resources that we have, but I am tired like every other American of being raped by countries that have somehting that we can get for ourselves here in this country. Sometimes you have to **** people off in order to achieve progress and some people do not understand that.

 

The liberals democrats in our federal government also play a large role in where we get our oil. Corporate greed is what finds oil in places like the continental divide and Alaska, and develops the processes by which to extract it. The federal government is what shuts them down. If we existed under a more constitutionally accurate government where states' rights carried the weight that it should, we would be using oil from Northern Alaska right now. With the exception of the tribes that hunt in the area, the majority of Alaskans' are for opening up the fields in the north. After all, every tax payer inAlaska gets a kick-back from oil production in thier state. With the added revenues, they could also fund a program to feed the tribes that hunt in the north filet mignon every night.

The worst part about the enviromentaliststhat whine about this is that the overwhelming majority have never been there, and have no plans to go.

 

Again, the point is that opening up every last drop of oil in the US will not have any significant impact on oil prices. The United States does NOT have much oil. The combined estimated reserves are only about 25bn barrels. Again, it WILL NOT affect prices, so the argument is meaningless.

 

From a purely economic standpoint, it WOULD affect oil prices. Just not in a meaningful way. What affect might it have? opec manipulates the barrel price of oil based on a myriad of very confusing bs much of which is purespeculation and has very little to do with what they should be charging for oil. It would be unjust as hell if it was our oil and the money was staying in our economy. The fact that it isn't makes it an epic travesty. Maybe if they saw that we weren't just a bunch of*ussies, and that we were serious about developing more ways to reduce our dependence on them, thier smoke and mirror speculation would swing more inour favor. That in and of itself is just speculation though.The bad part of corporate greed dictates that the oil companies don't give a ****. They base every thing on percentages. The higher the bbl price goes, the more money they make.

 

We are not talking about opening the reserves, we are talking about opening new wells and lessen our dependence of foreign oil. One of the other problems we have here in the United States is that we do not have enough refineries, and we would need those in order to also lessen our dependence.

 

and unfortunatly due to enviornmental laws we cant build any more refineres, hell we can barely upgrade the capacities of the ones we have. that being said how bout this

we cant drill oil in the gulf due to fears that hurricanes would destroy the rigs... yet Cuba is letting China drill 50 miles off the coast of florida. oil that we could be drilling. seriously even after rita and katrina, there were not the huge slicks that enviornmentalists led us to believe there would be. this is because there are several precautions that were taken when it was known that a hurricane would be coming close.

 

IIRC there are actually a number of different issues involved with building more refineries. These include but are not limited to:

[ul][*]NIMBY-ism[*]Environmental laws[ul][*]This actually has as much to do with air quality attainment/nonattainment zones...not really anything to do with "environmentalists" per se[/ul][*]Lack of competition[*]It is often cheaper to have it refined elsewhere (after all, we import 60?% of our petroleum anyway)[*]Ethanol and government mandates for blending mean there is less of a need for refineries.[ul][*]Bush's ridiculous push into this area actually served to kill any plans of building new refineries[/ul][*]Die hard environmental groups[ul][*]This is actually only a TINY part of it
[/ul][/ul]

 

Please go to youtube.com type in Lindsey Williams and listen to his 9 part series on the Energy Non-crisis, Its the world bank determining oil prices not opec, also he says they found a 200 year supply of oil off off the coast of Alaska on Gull Island and they have not tapped into it due to price control. Beware if you listen to his series on youtube it will **** you off to no end. I found out about it a week ago and my blood pressure is still high as heck!!!!!!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbakN7SLdbk

 

What it boils down to is the fact that our government is controlled by an oil tycoon, and the other problem is that we need to quit caring about what some people think about decisions we make in life. I say if you are elected into public office(such as the president) you should have to cut all ties with business intrests that could influence you while in office, and the other thing is that we need to take power away from the EPA so that they can still monitor but not the power as they do now. Other countries do not have to worry about people like enviromentalists and the EPA because they do not put up with the crap that we do in this country.