Correct:
“the oil and gas business - exploration and production companies need a market price that makes future drilling and production economical”
Not correct:
“Beginning with Reagan, Republicans encourage foreign suppliers to oversupply the market with cheap foreign crude, which kills the domestic industry.”
Not correct, because:
Encourging foreign suppliers is not an exclusively a chronic “Republican” thing; there are always shifting considerations and decisions made by a variety of political bases.
Also subject to a variety of considerations made by a variety of bases:
“government [or others’] policies encourage self-destructive overproduction”
Presently, there is a glut of available oil in the U.S.A. - this summer, there was almost a panic to find storage space. (Would have helped, if the Biden Admin. had been buying/storing some of that glut - the petroleum reserve holding half the volume that existed at the start of the Biden Admin.)
Correct:
“the federal government, regardless of who is in power, would do well to leave the industry along and let the market correct itself”
IMHO
Corrected:
leave the industry *alone* and let the market correct itself
It is well documented that one of the principal ways Reagan won the cold war was to starve Russia of oil revenues. Oil was the main source of hard currency of Russia that allowed it to prop up satellite states and finance its despotic military.
Reagan made a deal with the Saudis for the US to sell them weapons and jets and prop up the Saud dynasty, in exchange for the Saudis opening up the tap and selling basically unlimited volumes of oil at stupid cheap prices. The sacrificial lamb to win the cold war was the domestic oil and gas industry. In the mid 80’s oil dropped below $10.00/barrel.
The results were catastrophic for oil and gas states. In the town where I grew up, every oil field service company laid off nearly its entire work force, companies went bankrupt, office buildings that had been full were suddenly empty and all the related businesses (restaurants, hotels, grocery stores) suffered hugely. During the lunch hour, the streets that had been full of office workers, were deserted.
When the industry recovered, in the days of cheap long distance, fax machines and later cell phones, the internet and email, the industry consolidated to the large metropolitan areas (Houston). We still have not recovered from that set back in smaller towns that were reliant on oil and gas.
There is no question Reagan’s calculus proved correct. He starved Russia of oil revenues and in the process the iron curtain collapsed. But the US industry was scarred forever. Many, many good-paying, steady, and very productive jobs were lost forever. This was all due to republican policies.
Conservatives always seem to assume that the oil and gas industry wants unlimited drilling opportunities to produce cheap supplies of energy. The truth is we want a market price without outside interference. It is not a matter of US energy “dominance” like I always hear in the conservative media.
The oil and gas markets are global in scale and left alone, will provide ample supplies at market clearing prices. If people consume less, prices come down. If people consume more, prices go up, until the industry increases supply. But the politicization of the energy market by people who basically know nothing about it, is always a bad thing.