Republicans rescue Big Oil - Page 2

I have no opinion of my own on this subject. However, my opinion is for sale. The highest bidder will have me watching their back by posting "yeah, that!" to whatever they say!

How many gallons of gas are you asking to bribe you?

That is just cruel and unusual punishment. At these prices I am sure there are people questioning themselves.

An interesting thread. But a few points:

1. I don't remember anyone crying about us in the oil business in 1983, when the business went through a huge recession.

2. Eight percent profit is pretty typical in American business, and higher than the oil companies have been making, but back then, they were well below national averages in their profit levels.

3. How do you plan on generating the power for electric cars?

4. The drilling in the oil fields is finally picking up, but not to drill where we know we have oil is just stupid, and history will find it really funny.

5. The last time a windfall profits tax was instituted, oil production immediately fell off 13%.

6. Does anyone really want to put, say, a 100% tax on anything over 5% profit? Are you willing to apply that to your IRA or house? Why not?

Generating power for electric cars? Batteries, the same type they use in the Tesla. The charge lasts for well over 200 miles. However, there are ways you can make an electric car that would not need charging most of the time, because it could charge itself as you drive down the road. You can also use a small gasoline powered engine to run a generator that would run the electric car. Yes, this small engine would still require gas, but so very little that the oil companies would see a glut of oil due to the huge reduction in consumption. There are many ways to generate electricity without the use of oil. Don't believe that an electric car is not possible, because that is a lie that has been told to us. There is still way to much money to be made with oil. Electricity will always be here with us, but oil will not. Electricity can be generated without the use of fossil fuels as well.
As for drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge, where there is oil, but not enough to make a difference, history may not find it funny after all, when they realise that we destroyed the last remaining pristine wilderness for our own selfish reasons. It will take years, even if we did drill there, before we see any oil. We can start building electric cars and greatly reduce our use of oil, this will have a greater impact on the price of fuel than drilling in Alaska will ever have. I have read, (of course all this may not be 100% true as well) that if we just increased the MPG fuel rating of our cars by x% (I can't remember the percentage number), this will have a greater impact than if we started to bring in oil from the ANWR. ALso, if you think drilling for oil in the ANWR will bring down the price of gas, you are mistaken. The cost of drilling there will be high for many reasons and that cost will be passed on to us, the consumer.

I think that the question asked was how to generate the electricity needed to charge the car's batteries. There will never be an electric car that charges itself as you drive down the road simply because of the physical laws of conservation of mass and energy. Energy is expended to propel the car. Energy is converted into heat and motion. The energy output of the internal generator would need to exceed the energy consumed by the electric propulsion. Even if some technological advances could produce such a generating unit, the generating unit itself would need to consume more energy than it provides to the batteries due to internal losses.

In other words, a vehicle is a way to convert energy into heat and motion, and the energy input into the system will always exceed the energy output because some of it gets converted, and therefore lost.

Solar would be one way of inputting additional energy into the system to make up for the conversion loss. But even if technological advances produce a solar generator efficient enough to produce the amounts of energy a vehicle needs, there would still be plenty of times you have to run on batteries.

1982/1983. Penn Square Bank was 7/5/82
We lost all of our payroll for the middle of July. The domino effect of companies not paying their bills hit our company in November - two months before my husband was schedued to sell his part of the company. He went from looking at retiring before age 30 to having his company go bankrupt because the companies we had done work for couldn't pay us.
My father was all over the news as he shutdown banks.

I'd like to correct a factual error that I was party to propagating in this thread. There are no Chinese oil wells off the coast of Florida. Apparently, this was asserted by George Will, and taken up by VP Cheney, whence he stated it as fact in a public speech, from where it was distributed by the news media. See MSNBC story (only one of many corroborating) here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25129200/

Why am I not surprised that Cheney put that in a speech?
It's hard to say whom or what to believe anymore.

At least I did it unwittingly and unintentionally. I have to wonder about Will and Cheney, though. You'd think with all the resources at his disposal, Cheney could make a phone call and find out in minutes whether such a claim is true or not. So, the question is was it intentional, or just a slip up? Seems to be quite a glaring slip up, if that's what it was. Hard to believe.

I think it's important to note that 60 miles off Florida's south coast is only 30 miles off Cuba's coast, and well within the 200 miles that most countries claim.

And as you can see about three miles on the surface of the earth, the statement that you could see the Chinese drilling from the Florida coast would only hold if you quite high up in the air. I don't have time to do the math here, but if memory serves I think it would be between five and ten thousand feet up.

I just linked to this article in the habeas corpus thread, Report Questions Pentagon Accounts Although it is about Rumsfeld, it exemplifies how the current administration has been all about "disinformation".

I haven't read all of the posts in this thread, but after having a discussion with one of my professors, a geophysicist who formerly worked for an oil company... I have the following to say:

Dipping into our known reserves is by no means a solution, and would not enable us to send foreign oil packing. At the rate at which we use oil, we would have enough for 3 years (21 billion barrels according to Department of energy). So the next time you hear someone say we have long-term reserves in shales and offshore- don't believe it.

What's really to blame is the rate at which we consume petro-products and the increased demand by countries moving to industrialize much the same way we, in the U.S., have. Another issue to consider is the value of the dollar (less buying power).

The problem is really much greater than high gas prices in the U.S. Oil is not renewable on the scale of a human life, and there's speculation by scientists that oil production may have peaked or may be near peaking. We need to really move toward alternative energy sources, and reevaluate the way in which we use the resources we have available.

Well, no, it's not a solution on its own. We'll have to combine demand-reduction/conservation and alternative sources with increased production. And all this just an interim step toward nuclear fusion.

BTW, does that figure of 3 years include just known oil reserves? Or does it include potential sources such as oil shale and coal gasificiation?

That's, ultimately, what I want to do.

To be honest, I haven't looked through the whole document. I know that it includes offshore oil, but I don't know if it includes shale/coal. More detailed info can be found here:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html

and here:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/n...ch3.pdf#page=2

ya, I dunno -- I don't really trust gov't stats, yet sometimes that's all we've got. What I do know, is how many times experts have proclaimed the world is in danger of running out of oil in x years, y years, or z years, and they always discover more oil or new ways to get oil out of something else. Peak oil? bah humbug. What is true is that gas at $4 and crude oil at $135 IS really hurting, and how bad it's hurting has yet to be seen.

Don't you think they have to be right sooner or later? The amount of oil has to be finite doesn't it?

Ya, but it's a big world.