Gas Price Increases to Open Anwar?

[txaslftist]

Hey, what the hell is going on here?

Who sets the price of gas at the pump? The gas companies. Who refines the gas? The gas companies. Who runs the gas companies? The Chimp and his pals, right?

What major initiative (apart from his social security fiasco) did the mad monkey promise his rich donor pals and his BFEE cronies that he's been unable to fulfill? ANWAR. "We'll develop ANWAR and leave only footprints..." Wasn't that his promise?

Hannity and Rush and Reagan are doing a full-court press on how high prices are the librul's fault, because they won't let the prez "develop our own nation's resources" like ANWAR (Rush says it's a sea of oil that would fill all our energy needs for 30 years) and offshore drilling in California (Because all them liberal Hollywood types think it will ruin the view).

The Veep is doing a big dance about how the Iranians have nukes (they don't, but what they do have is a "bourse", an official office that will be converting the sale of Iranian oil into petroeuros instead of petrodollars); how Venezuala's Chavez is threatening to sell all his oil to the demon Chinee; how our Nigerian friends' supply is threatened by revolution; Chinese demand is rapidly expanding...

But really, aren't the Saudis still sitting on an ocean of oil, isn't the strategic reserve still fairly stable and aren't our Nigerian and Venezuelan friends still selling us oil?

If Bush promised his pals he'd open up ANWAR, and he needs the Murkan people to put pressure on congress to allow it, wouldn't $2.99 / gal. gas do the trick? And don't his buddies have the power to pretty much set gas prices where they want them? And isn't it his buddies who will make lots and lots of money assuming ANWAR doesn't prove to be a bust?

Who is this sumbitch working for, anyway?

[Lefty48197]

1. I'll bet his TX oil buddies like getting $65 for a barrel of oil

They probably don't even want the competition from the ANWR.

[txaslftist]

6. Competition?

Who do you think is gonna develop (and profit from) ANWAR?

[MadisonProgressive]

2. ANWR will replace all imported oil for about a year. (period)

[Solon]

3. After about 20 years of development of course.

Don't forget that it takes a lot of time to make the infrastructure.

[MadisonProgressive]

4. I hadn't forgotten that small detail...

[txaslftist]

5. Oh sure, that's reality.

But isn't this the administration that makes its own reality?

[ComerPerro]

7. And who controls the oil companies...

Satan!

[kenny blankenship]

8. ANWR will do nothing to decrease price of gas

Unless we had a state-run oil company (as opposed to oil companies running the state). A state owned oil company such as they often have in the middle east would be commanded by the Gov to sell domestically drilled and refined oil to US consumers at a preferential price, like 5% over cost. This is what we don't have and this is what allows Iraqis even in the shambles of their ruined country to fill their gas tanks at just 5 cents a gallon or whatever it is. We don't have new finds of easily extracted oil anymore. It's all been found and what's left is being used up or if newly found, it's prohibitively expensive to extract and refine. ANWR's oil is less than half of Prudhoe Bay's reserves, over half of which will never be pumped because it's in too small&scattered pockets to extract (until petroleum hits $100/bbl. or something insane). ANWR's oil is EVEN MORE SCATTERED AND DIFFICULT TO GET AT THAN PRUDHOE BAY'S. That's why all that shit was set aside as nature preserve to begin with. It wasn't worth anyone fighting to get it with cheap oil coming from Texas and floods of even cheaper oil out there in the middle east. Even with improved extraction technolofy, it still isn't worth violating the natural preserve status of ANWR today, but for slightly different reasons. What's changed since the dedication of ANWR back in the 1950s is this: our domestic price of oil is now inextricably tied to the WORLD price of oil. There's no real separation between these markets because we are now obliged to import so much of our oil (only about 35% back in the time of the 1973 Oil Embargo, but well over 50% today), and of course there is NO chance that Exxon-Mobil would accede to a socialist demand to sell domestically pumped oil to American refiners at less than the world price per barrel. If it were suggested to them, let's say by a non-binding resolution of Congress, it would be ignored. If demanded by Executive Order it would be rebuffed by the imposition of a "market friendly" government determined to act only in accordance with the "free market principles of our Founding Fathers" that would make Bush&Cheney look like McGovern era Democrats.

What is in ANWR--even if it could all be got to easily, which it cannot--would not be enough to affect the global price per barrel of petroleum. Even if it could be extracted easily, the trans-Alaskan pipeline would bottleneck the flow to refineries. We aren't going to build another trans-Alaskan just to get the last little fucking drops of oil from the North Shore. And even IF WE DID, there's still not enough oil there to dampen the rise of oil prices globally. Without a staterun oil company providing the oil cheap to consumers for a couple of decades before depleting the reserve, ANWR makes no difference to the big picture. In the big picture, massive reserves outside of the middleeast --like the North Sea-- are beginning to deplete. That's the Big Picture, and there's fuck-all anyone can do about it.

ANWR is just a wedge issue--and a perfect example of the kind--used by the Republicans to try to split "DLC" Democratic voters (the kind of people who care mainly about insulating and augmenting their middleclass suburban lifestyle) AWAY from their Liberal-Progressive wing allies in the Democratic Party, who place more value on the environment and are willing to sacrifice economic values (hedonism) for moral ones. There is only a tiny economic interest in ANWR, and that is held by equipment suppliers to oil drillers--our pals in Halliburton/Dresser Industries for example. The real motives of the GOP aren't economic but ideological--to bludgeon everyone with the idea that environmentalism(-ists) must be liquidated for our capitalist economy to work and spread prosperity, and also political-- to wedge the hedonistic, bourgeois "centrist" Democrats away from their progressive-liberal allies who act as their environmental conscience, with the idea that this alliance is ruining or endangering their comfortable standard of living.

[wli]

9. they'd be better off with Fischer-Tropsch n/t