Posted on 10/19/2019 9:46:01 AM PDT by Kaslin
Proving a negative -- proving that the absence of something is definitively due to very specific reasons or circumstances -- is an inexact science at best. There is a hugely significant “negative” that has occurred recently, one that is quite plausibly due to some very distinct actions and clear-cut decisions made by the American oil industry and the Trump administration: the non-event that has happened is world crude oil prices not rising in spite of the cruise missile and drone attack on the Saudi oil fields on September 14th, 2019 that destroyed a significant portion of Saudi oil production, the missile attack on an Iranian oil tanker in waters off Saudi Arabia on October 11th, 2019 and new Mideast unrest in the form of Turkey’s military incursion into Syria in mid-October. In years past, any one of these incidents would have spooked the world’s oil market into n hysterical price spike; today, the cumulative effect of all of them is not even a murmur on the radarscope. U.S. retail gasoline pricing has not really gone up at all in the face of these episodes.
Why? What is different now?
Remember a few years ago during the Obama administration when oil/gas pricing was high? The popular line among the Democrats -- obsessed as they were about not offending their Green voting bloc -- was, “We can’t drill our way out of this [high oil pricing].”
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Even if we tried to build the Keystone pipeline, it wouldn’t lower prices for at least five years!
I can prove I’m not dead.
Can you?
Current vicissitudes loom large, of course, but many other influences' weighting fluctuate dynamically surrounding the likelihoods of those future events coming to pass, without waiting for an actual event itself to come to pass before it shows an affect on the current price.
Yep, but the totally-incapable-of-foreseeing-even-the-most-glaringly-obvious-of-consequences liberals tried to make the case that being able to move crude oil from Canadian oil sands to US refineries wasn’t worth the effort.
The pro-drillers stated a hypothesis: that increased domestic supply would be a cushion against the terror premium. Under Trump, they were able to test that hypothesis. The real-world provided a natural experiment. Supply had been increased. Iran provided a terror event. The price of oil did not spike. Therefore, the hypothesis has not been disproven.
That's as good as it gets for any scientific theory: not yet disproven. It's unnecessary at best, and sophistry at worst, to trundle out the impossible standard of "proving a negative".
OTOH, the anti-drillers hypothesis (can't drill our way ...) has been conclusively disproven.
Airlines, truckers, commuters used to be dependent on volatile pricing due to volatile supply. But now so many have contracts that lock in a price that it doesn’t fluctuate like it used to.
Currently we have 43+ EPA and DOT approved blends of gasoline. But some are only approved for certain time periods or certain locations.
If we let the consumers, the marketplace, decide what they want to buy rather than the slow bureaucracy, we would have cheaper prices.
(-2)-(-1)= -1
“I can prove I’m not dead.”
Not really, you can prove that you are alive (which is a positive) and means that you cannot be dead at the same time. You are still proving a positive.
Seriously? We are up to 43 now?
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