This might interest you.
1. Terrorism isn't tied to oil. Terrorists can still kill on a budget.
2. Alternative fuels will not replace gasoline anytime soon. The currently viable fuel supplements aren't actually viable.
3. If we don't buy oil from the Middle East, China and India will. We don't control the flow of cash to the Middle East.
4. The Muslims didn't reform with $10 oil, they are probably more likely to reform at $100 a barrel resulting in global investments that will be hurt by terrorism.
5. Isolationism isn't just impossible, it's impractical.
Think of this everytime someone demagogues energy policies that will cost you money and take away your freedoms.
The US should be exporting oil and not importing it. Simplest/best would be to simply ban the importation of oil in a single day, same as stopping smoking. That would mess us up about as badly as we were messed up in WW-II for about a year. A year later, we’d be ten times better off and most of the arch villains in the world would be riding camels and living in tents, as they should be. The wapost is fubar on this one as usual.
If we put a fraction of our effort to go green toward better coal or oilshale technologies, we’d solve our problems pretty quickly.
In a speech last year, former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr. had some advice for American motorists: "The next time you pull into a gas station to fill your car with gas, bend down a little and take a glance in the side-door mirror. . . . What you will see is a contributor to terrorism against the United States." Woolsey is known as a conservative, but plenty of liberals have also eagerly adopted the mantra that America's foreign oil purchases are funding terrorism.
Woolsey is not a conservative, and describing him as the former CIA director doesn't accurately portray his stance on this issue.
He now works for an organization called the National Commission on Energy Policy. The NCEP is a Beltway front group for left-wing environmental lobbyists that gets most of its funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation -- a non-profit foundation that finances all sorts of leftist causes related to government policy, environmental regulations, etc.
So Woolsey is basically using his CIA and "anti-terrorism" credentials to mask the left-wing agenda of the organization for which he works.
This is the article that Rush mentioned that he couldn’t find. Did you send it to him?
But see, also: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1958548/posts
It comes from all those and oil. We need to do what we can where we can. We are trying to do something about all those other factors, too.
Two and a half decades elapsed before annual corn-ethanol production reached 5 billion gallons, as it did in 2006. But now Congress is demanding that the cellulosic-ethanol business magically produce many times that volume of fuel in just 15 years. It's not going to happen.
That's because it's mostly dependent on private enterprise that needs to see profit on a short-term basis. You're all going to scream at me for this, but ...
Fans of energy independence argue that if the United States stops buying foreign energy, it will deny funds to petro-states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Hugo Ch¿vez's Venezuela. But the world marketplace doesn't work like that. Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set globally, not locally.If the U.S. develops alternative energy sources, then the demand for oil drops/the supply of energy increases, and the price drops. And that means less money for people selling oil, many of whom are against everything we stand for. So in this case, I consider energy a national security issue and believe that government expenditure to improve our energy supply is justified.
Remember that oil is not a purely rational market. Much of the supply is regulated by people like Chavez and the OPEC rulers who maniuplate the supply for non-economic reasons. They can choke off the supply and take losses - the people they rule are subjects, not citizens, and thus their rulers don't have to act rationally from either a political sense or an economic one. A purely economic analysis of this issue is not valid.
5 To see why [Energy independence will mean a more secure U.S. energy supply] is a myth, think back to 2005. After hurricanes ravaged the Gulf Coast, chewing up refineries as they went, several cities in the southeastern United States were hit with gasoline shortages. Thankfully, they were short-lived. The reason? Imported gasoline, from refineries in Venezuela, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Throughout the first nine months of 2005, the United States imported about 1 million barrels of gasoline per day. By mid-October 2005, just six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, those imports soared to 1.5 million barrels per day.
And prices jumped up. And they haven't come down as much as they went up. Sure, we were able to get gasoline from elsewhere. But we paid for it. Wait until China and India's demand for oil really spins up. See how easy it will be then to get more gasoline then if another hurricane hits N.O. or Houston square on.
So we're woven in with the rest of the world -- and going to stay that way.
Exactly my point. We are tied in. So when our supply goes up faster than our demand, it affects the rest of the world. Energy becomes a little cheaper for everyone. Other energy producers make less money and require less extremely expensive intervention on our part. And our energy supply becomes less dependent on non-rational decisions by foreign leaders.
No longer a true statement. We imported more oil from Saudi Arabia than Mexico for the last 6 and last 12 reported months.
The following is the last 6 month average:
5,417 MBPD from OPEC
4,675 MBPD from Non OPEC
2,147 MBPD from Persian Gulf
1,882 MBPD from Canada
1,465 MBPD from Saudi Arabia
1,386 MBPD from Mexico
1,173 MBPD from Venezuela
U.S. [Crude Oil] Imports by Country of Origin
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epc0_im0_mbblpd_m.htm
I think increasing the supply of energy in all forms will decrease the value of oil. This will help economies everywhere. This will give less power to thugs.
The problem of foreign oil is not so much that it funds terrorism, but that our dependence on foreign sources of oil leads us to be beholden to the national interests of those countries we get it from. Instead the US government should be led by the interests of the American people, rather than the interests of foreign nations.
And completely wrong except for the correct assessment that the “alternative fuels” obsession is a diversionary boondoggle that will not solve anything.
Economics 101: It does not matter if we, the world’s largest consumer of oil, don’t get our supplies from the Persian Gulf primarily; if we become a net exporter and overall demand drops dramatically, funds to Saudi Princes who fund Wahabbism and to the Ayatollahs of Iran and to Chavez drop dramatically. They also drop for Mexico so that it, finally, will have to become more like us and actually stop being a failed state dependent upon oil revenue and remittances that lives by exporting its poverty to us. They then become desperate to keep up the easy revenues to which they have become addicted and depress prices further. Since they have either, as in the case of Iran and Venezuela, damaged and even destroyed the rest of their economies and put everything in the oil basket, their populations work assiduously to get rid of them because they know their dictatorship is heading they, the people, for want and scarcity. In the case of Saudi Arabia, they never had an economy, so the oil is their only tool of dominance. As the oil revenues fall they have to either modernize or lose their leadership role. The power of the Wahabbi clerics diminishes as entrepreneurs in the Islamic world begin to outdo the oil barons.
This author is simply wrong. There is a huge difference between starving terrorism and letting it enjoy wealth that increases with every increase in our need for fuel for our military.
We point out again, and this author does not discuss, that the proposition that Allah gave them the oil to use as a sword against us, fuels the terrorists. The delusion that Sharia law works and that it would be better if mankind were ruled by it in its form from the 600’s is completely enabled by the illusion of wealth from the single crop economy of oil. Take it away by reducing aggregate demand to the point where oil income is way below what these nations are spending and their power is broken. They have to accommodate to the modern world.
The Washington Post is only interested in losing the war to enhance and preserve its own illusion of power, the house organ of the bankrupting welfare state.
No Food For Fuel !! ..bump
Whether we get our oil from Canada or from Saudi Arabia, the fact remains that the price of crude can be greatly influenced by fluctuations in OPEC supply. OPEC can influence US elections by squeezing supply and thus the price of gasoline and thus the world and US economy.
The net result is that American politicians tend to suck up to OPEC nations and Islamic causes at the expense of free countries like Israel.
The last point, point number 5, seems incorrect to me.
Bump for later.
How much heat-money do you pump out of your windows, skimpily insulated walls/ceilings/floors every winter? What would it be if you had a 2 foot thick layer of high density urethane foam insulation all around your 1500 sf house?