RedPhoenixxx wrote:
Also, maybe I'm completely wrong on this, but isn' the oil market international? So, all the oil drilling in the US won't actually make any more of a difference than if Brazil starts to extract some of their new-found oil, right? Or if Saudi Arabia decides to up its production by a few hundred thousand barrels?
Yes. It is an international market. However, there are two significant differences:
1. We control when and how much (or less) oil is added to that global market. The lower the total percentage of oil we produce ourselves, the less control we have on the market.
2. The profits all the way accross go back into the US. Yes. It's iternational. But from a tax revenue point of view, it doesn't matter if we sell 500k barrels a day to Japan, and then buy 500k from somewhere else or if we produce that 500k and buy it from ourselves. Both conditions are better then simply buying 500k from somewhere else and selling 0, which is what we're doing today.
Also. It's amusing that you metion SA and a "few hundred thousand barrels". They agreed to do exactly that a few weeks ago, and magically the price of oil dropped by $20/barrel. Kinda blows the whole "It wont make a difference in the price of gas" argument out of the water, doesn't it?
Quote:
Are you guys arguing the the US has so much unextracted oil that if it decided to drill prices would go down because supply would catch-up on demand? Is that the rationale?
It's a combination of factors. Yes. Putting more oil on the market would increase supply and therefore decrease cost, everything else staying the same. Certainly, that doesn't preclude some other nation dropping their production rate a bit to keep prices up, but then it's the US that's gaiing from that process, not the other nation(s). Right now, we're pretty much at the whim of the other oil producing nations on this issue, as shown dramtically by the price increases of the last couple years.
When one of the hotbutton issues is to reduce reliance on foreign fuels, this would seem to be significant, right?
How about a counter argument. Why *not* drill? Aside from an incredibly inflated environmental impact, what reason is there?