Dear AxelPaulsenJr,
"What would be your estimate of domestic oil sources that we have in this country that the environuts have kept us from tapping?"
Me?? I don't know.
It's not just the environazis. There are cost issues involved, too, like with the shale oil discussed herein.
But with a modest tariff on imported energy, and a slap-down of the environazis, we could tap the shale oil, we could tap off-shore of California, and Florida. There's ANWR.
As well, it's not just oil. If you add a tariff to imported energy, other alternative sources of energy become profitable. If you slap down the environazis, you can build more nuclear power plants.
It's nice to talk about "well, we can do all these things when the Saudis run out of easily-pumped crude," but that misses a few points.
The first is that peak world oil may sneak up and surprise us. We may find the easily-pumped stuff declining before we can get the infrastructure in place to mine and process shale in large amounts.
The second is that usage in the rest of the world is still increasing, and thus, when we get to peak world oil production, we're going to have two curves going in opposite directions, supply heading down and demand heading up. For a while, it will be pretty ugly.
The third is that we're entirely discounting the effects of oil shocks on our economy, and how it distorts our foreign policy. The US imports somewhere around 30% of oil sold on the world market, not used for domestic use. Reduce that to 0% over the course of ten years, and all of the sudden the Saudis go back to being camel drivers, the Iranians no longer have the cash to build nukes, and old Hugo Chavez down in Venezuela can drink his crude.
Some folks are saying, oh, well, when their oil runs out, we can do this stuff. I've seen estimate that it could be 30 - 50 years or more before the Saudis and some of the others go into decline. So, we want to incur all the external costs to our economy and society from getting a big chunk of our energy from these crackheads for another 3 or 5 or more decades? Yikes. Those costs are not just dollars and cents. They are also instability, and blood. American blood.
We would no longer have to worry about disruptions in the Persian Gulf, or wacko neo-Communists in Venezuela, or corrupt kleptocrats in Nigeria. The Russians oil leverage would no longer give them great power leverage over others, including us.
At least, we wouldn't have to worry about these folks and events crippling our economy in the short and medium term. And these folks wouldn't have quite as many petrodollars with which to whack each other around, or threaten other folks. Think Saddam with no significant oil money for the last dozen years. Or with no significant oil money for the dozen years before that. Probably no Gulf War I or Gulf War II.
And the costs to us aren't astronomical. We're talking about adding enough of a tariff to keep the price of energy at around the equivalent of $30 - $35 per barrel of crude oil.
Think where gas prices would be right now if crude were at $35 per barrel. That's 85 cents per gallon. And from Monday's price, not today's price, which has a 50 cent or more FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) premium built in.
sitetest
Government intervention in the market is doomed to failure and has never worked long term. It is folly. Not to mention anti freedom.