Posted on 03/20/2005 5:09:02 PM PST by West Coast Conservative
**Exclusive**
President Bush's inner circle has become preoccupied with soaring gas prices and its toll on the economy, a well-placed White House source said over the weekend.
Bush has quitely asked for a review of any and all economic fallout on the nation if gas prices continuing racing up and over the psychological line of $3 a gallon, as they have in recent weeks in some locations, the source explains.
Bush's top economic advisers have conveyed to the president that a "nightmare" scenario of $4 a gallon is extremely unlikely in the short term.
"The seasonal run-up of gas prices has been tough this year, but like every year in the past two decades, we expect we will will see some easing," the source claims from Washington.
Developing...
My son, who used to live in AK, says even with the drilling in ANWR, the oil will be pumped onto Japanese oil tankers. WE need more refineries opened back up in the good ole USA. President Bush needs to get busy and go after those wackos who closed them down.
We're going to buy a smaller car so we can save gas. I have to go to dialysis three days a week, plus doctors' appointments, etc. so we need to have something a bit more economical than the van. Sigh. We'll all be sacrificing and perhaps we need to anyway.
The dirty little secret here is that there's a lot of left-wingers in America who WANT the price of gasoline to go way up, which is one of the big reasons why they work so feverishly to do everything possible to restrict the supply side of the equation.
BUT, will the US get the oil or will Japan and other countries? I don't trust any of this. If WE get the oil, I'd let them drill in my backyard!
Oh, yeah. Bicycling in CNY in the winter would be a real hoot. Try it sometime.
The petro-centric Bush Administration only considers military options.
They have deflected serious discussion of petro-dependency with exagerated hype about the junk-science "hydrogen economy" while stonewalling obvious remedies such as construction of electricly powered mass-transit systems in our nation's most densely populated regions and urban areas. They have focused primarily on increasing our dependency on foreign oil through trade, and now we're going to be screwed by that myopia.
The shortages, and the prices are the result of government regulation, which only protects the big players in the market, ensuring record breaking profits year in and year out. I notice little or no complaining coming from the big oil companies. Do you? Their profits are protected, and pretty much guaranteed by government regulation.
100 years ago, you or I with a few hundred bucks could be an oil company. Now, we need a few hundred million dollars just to get past the red tape, before we could put a drill bit to the ground, if we ever made it that far. If you don't think oil companies like it this way...
Nothing will change until they cause an economic collapse, and that might just be the best thing that happened to America since the Revolution. The system is far too corrupt to ever fix it as it stands. It will take a MAJOR disaster to force the people to make a positive change.
It is, in a way. Free enterprise is guaranteed, and with free enterprise comes low prices. But since America is no longer allowed to engage in free enterprise, we pay out the ars.
$4/gal gasoline translates into Dem control of Congress in 2006.
What's he been doing for the last five years? I though he was going to get busy with this right after 1st election?
I don't wanna hear the terrorist excuse. If a president can't multi task, he should resign, not run for re-election.
That's the beauty of the Israelis testing the bunker busters we sold them on Iranian nuclear faciltities. We don't have to do a thing.
Much of the fault lies in the CAFE standards.
The tight car standard makes it essentially impossible to sell a large car. If you want a large vehicle, the manufacturers can't sell you a 20mpg Caprice wagon type because it would drag their car average down too far, but they can and will sell you a 15mpg Expedition.
On top of that, the EPA tests to determine mileage for this are so divorced from real world driving as to be essentially useless.
The Dems will be unable to do anything substantial about *making* price of gas go down - they would be selling out one of their core support groups.
One of our vehciles is a Ford F-250 diesel - need to haul hay and livestock. Diesel was at ~$2.30 yesterday. I fully expect it to be above $2.50 by labor day and perhaps $2.75 by the end of 2005.
But... that's the way it is for now. The US government has taken a big first step by working to open up ANWR.
If Florida's not your cup o' tea, surely there are smaller and/or more energy-efficient homes in your area.
At the risk of sounding Stuart Smalley-ish, life's full of choices. If I don't like the results of my choice, I can next choose between complaining and making a course adjustment to improve the situation. Admittedly, complaining is sometimes the better choice. More often than not, I'll complain AND bump the thermostat down another degree (but, that often brings complaints from others in the house who, for whatever reason, don't seem to derive nearly as much enjoyment from the cost-benefit optimization exercise as I do).
Having been in this business all my life, let me explain some things that often get overlooked:
Our oil and gas industry was decimated in the mid-80's when the price of oil hit $11. a barrel.
Companies which had been in business since the forty's went under.
Our infrastructure which had been building for forty five years was completely destroyed.
No one has any idea of the complexity of this infrastructure or the problems of trying to rebuild it. We have not achieved this rebuilding today.
We are short of equipment and people. We cannot handle the oil boom necessary to assure a secure energy supply even if the enviros all had a heart attack and died tomorrow, but the last nail in the coffin of our security would be price caps to destroy the small amount of confidence being generated by $56. a barrel oil.
The oil and gas industry is not Mobil and Exxon. It's the thousands of independent producers scattered across this country, and those independents depend on investors.
When investors see a secure future for their investment dollars, we will see an accelerated growth of the infrastructure necessary to promote a domestic boom.
The confidence is growing. We certainly don't want to hamper it.
If we couple this with the ideas proposed by cpdiii, we can achieve a level of independence we have not had since the early '80s.
people will begin to work from home, get a job closer to home, carpool, plan travels far in advance, purchase smaller cars, scooters and motorcycles. heck, families cold begin to move closer together to help eachother out. wouldnt that be nice...
Good point I didnt think about!
The process is called thermal depolymerization. Changing World Technologies is working a plant in Carthage MO converting turkey waste into oil. Like other tough technologies (see Nucor and continuous casting) there are still many bugs to work out. The process is putting out fuel at eighty dollars a barrel while converting waste. Undoubtedly, there is technological progress to be made, and this looks quite promising.
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