[clue-talk] oil...

[Brian Gibson]

You mean like the land they already own, but don't drill it because they say it's too expensive to drill there?  Seriously, I'm not against additional drilling either, but the USGS survey not withstanding, we currently still consume more oil than we could ever hope to produce domestically.  It's high time Big Oil loses its government subsidies and they get reapplied to energy industries that can benefit more from them.  Oil prices go down most dramatically as a result of less demand, and one way is use less of it, another is to use it more efficiently, and lastly is to have it compete against other forms of energy.  Let demand determine the best allocation of all energy use, but when you don't have options, it's either you go without or you go with the defacto standard.

I just don't understand this love affair with oil.  This singular dependence of a homogeneous energy mix is a far greater national security and economic threat than all the other security theater initiatives against drugs, terrorists, and the other boogeymen out there.  Because our recent dealings with Iraq and Georgia are really about exporting democracy and securing the rights of non-US citizens.



----- Original Message ----
From: Angelo Bertolli <angelo at freeshell.org>
To: CLUE talk <clue-talk at cluedenver.org>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 1:12:46 PM
Subject: Re: [clue-talk] oil...

Nate Duehr wrote:
> I thought this was interesting.  Someone forwarded it to me this morning.
> 
> http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
> 
> While I know it's politically incorrect to even talk about burning petroleum these days (while "clean" coal burning doesn't seem to bother anyone), I thought it was cool that USGS says they found this in the Dakotas and Montana:
> 
> "The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest "continuous" oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A "continuous" oil accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized occurrences. The next largest "continuous" oil accumulation in the U.S. is in the Austin Chalk of Texas and Louisiana, with an undiscovered estimate of 1.0 billions of barrels of technically recoverable oil."
> 
> Drilling may not fix anything long-term, but we're not exactly resource-poor here.

Let's see, if I were an oil company... I'd hold some drilling opportunities "for a rainy day."  The oil companies definitely want to "cash-in" when there's a crisis one day.  I'm not against drilling for more oil here, but I am against just letting companies do whatever they want.  If they want us to open up more land for them, they need to have some obligation to use it for the benefit of the country and not solely to maximize their profits.  If not, I say start a public drilling program.

-- Angelo Bertolli
http://angelo.bitfreedom.com/

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