Bush's parting gift?Follow

can not speak on the loss of Israel, but i can say that we would not of stayed in a sustained depression. alternative fuels and power sources, that have been in the works since before '78, would of matured then instead of today.

Yeah, no they wouldn't have. Decisions don't happen in isolation. If we had cut ties with OPEC in '78, there would have been an almost instant proxy war in the middle east that we'd still be fighting. It's not at all out of the question it might have precipitated tactical nuclear weapons use.

I know that they waste an *** ton of money and could lower insurance rates by not being so stunned with their money. Same can be said for oil companies.

Lucked? You know what they say about luck don't you? And I'll most likely be retired by 40; all due to luck of course. But you're a liberal so anyone who takes advantage of the knowledge of their father is 'lucky'. By the time I was 18 I had watched more money squandered on bad business deals than most of the posters on this site have earned their adult life. But you keep right on thinking it's about luck it's what liberals are good at.

I don't even know what this means. I don't begrudge you lucking into a life of easy hand outs, man. Good for you. Facts are facts, though, you're as much of a "businessman" as Paris Hilton.

we should of cut our ties with OPEC back in 73 when the first oil crisis started and not waited until 78. FYI wasnt 78 under Carter and wasnt that also the year of the mass US kidnapings that had to do with islamic radicals that were mad about the "low" cost of oil?

Oil, of course. Allow me to revise, despite my qualifying my statement with a "that one of the main goals". Getting control over copious amounts of oil while establishing a military foothold in the middle east was nice. Also drawing attention from no Bin Ladin, a war in Afghanistan that the general population could not follow, a need to appear strong and draw attention away from the administrations complete inability to handle foreign policy and about a dozen other reasons. I didn't feel the need to address the 500lb elephant, forgive me.

Topic at hand,the quote in the OP has been on the plate since before shock and awe left us underwhelmed. Just like making sure that control of Iraqi oil fields was removed from the Iraqi gov't for the foreseeable future.

/shrug

in fact in FL there is a large hotel chain that will fire you for smoking even if you smoke out of work. in other words if you smoke at all, home, play, friends, bar, etc... you will get fired.

The analysists think we've hit "Peak Oil" production. Oil was ALWAYS a finite resource. And now there's not enough oil in the entire planet to keep raising production, oil production can ONLY physically decline, even if EVERY single oil reservoir inside the entire planet is tapped.

So we have a falling supply, that will STILL be falling even if we tap oilfields in nature reserves, in Antarctica, in the Arctic...even if we tap EVERYWHERE the oil supply will still be falling. And this is a commodity for which there is always an increasing demand, with the technology base we are running on at the moment. Supply falls, Demand increases, naturally the price HAS to rise, and given the projected graphs of oil supply and demand, it actually will skyrocket. Everyone knew this moment would come sooner or later.

So the price of oil naturally skyrockets, and this makes the price of alternate sources of energy competitive, even in small scale, developmental projects. These sources will naturally cheapen further when they are taken up widely and achieve economies of scale, as people flee high-cost oil.

Now, the question is, do we slow this process down, this INEVITABLE process, by trying to extract and use every last drop of oil from the Earth? Or do we accept the inevitable, and go for a faster changeover to new technologies, and leave some oil in the ground, in the places it's most delicate and damaging to extract it from? We have to go through the economic hit sooner or later. People are going to lose their oil jobs and get new ones in the new energy industries sooner or later. Why wait? The countries who make the changeover first will be selling their technical solutions to the countries who make the changeover last.

Edited, Jun 5th 2008 2:00pm by Aripyanfar

no you replace it with a renewable source of power, thus breaking the cycle.

What makes you think this "breaks the cycle", exactly? It's a free market. Your new "renewable" source becomes a commodity, immediately. Let's say it was sugarcane ethanol, just as an arbitrary example. You're still going to have to buy the ethanol from someone, and there's no mechanism to prevent OPEC from pricing oil lower than the cost of ethanol to cripple the market. That's what cartels do. So then you have to subsidize the sugarcane growers, because they have to sell ethanol below cost to compete with the price of oil. They have to go through a process to produce the end product that's pretty much always going to cost more than refining oil will. They also won't be growing food crops, which can cause problems in global food supply, something we're seeing right now when this is being done a much smaller scale than would be required for the US to convert to it as a fuel source.

Even if the "renewable" source was wind or solar, you still have to use a great deal of real estate for the amount of energy produced, etc.

There's one option here. If we had undertaken a massive building program in breeder reactors for electric power, and could reliably generate massive amounts of electrical power cheaply THEN MAYBE we could have cut ties with OPEC.

Now if you will excuse me I'm going to get back to lucking out.

I don't see what other choice you have. Someone with balls or talent would have long ago struck out on his own. It's too late now. Go for the quiet life of hand outs and laziness.

You really are a thick c'unt, aren't you. Been years since I paid attention to anything you wrote, good thing I am pessimist or else your continued inability to make an argument worth responding too would be another in a long line of staggering blows to my faith in humanity.

DeBeers is a cartel and we deal with them too. Neither maintains offices in the US.