Posted on 03/10/2013 5:30:51 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I HOPE the president turns down the Keystone XL oil pipeline. (Who wants the U.S. to facilitate the dirtiest extraction of the dirtiest crude from tar sands in Canada’s far north?) But I don’t think he will. So I hope that Bill McKibben and his 350.org coalition go crazy. I’m talking chain-themselves-to-the-White-House-fence-stop-traffic-at-the-Capitol kind of crazy, because I think if we all make enough noise about this, we might be able to trade a lousy Keystone pipeline for some really good systemic responses to climate change.
We don’t get such an opportunity often — namely, a second-term Democratic president who is under heavy pressure to approve a pipeline to create some jobs but who also has a green base that he can’t ignore. So cue up the protests, and pay no attention to people counseling rational and mature behavior. We need the president to be able to say to the G.O.P. oil lobby, “I’m going to approve this, but it will kill me with my base. Sasha and Malia won’t even be talking to me, so I’ve got to get something really big in return.”
Face it: The last four years have been a net setback for the green movement. While President Obama deserves real praise for passing a historic increase in vehicle mileage efficiency and limits on the emissions of new coal-fired power plants, the president also chose to remove the term “climate change” from his public discourse and kept his talented team of environmentalists in a witness-protection program, banning them from the climate debate. This silence coincided with record numbers of extreme weather events — droughts and floods — and with a huge structural change in the energy marketplace.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
By the looks of that 1% mansion, Tom Friedbrain won’t have to worry about $8/gal gas.
Pray for America
I believe it was Jonah Goldberg that said the Friedman proves that well just about anyone can be a climitologist.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were tom Friedman.
But I repeat myself...
Or maybe a synonym if ‘introspection’ = "naval gazing".
Uh, Tom - - - . Mind if I call you Tom? Good! Thanks!
Tommie-Boy, your Dad Milton Friedman knew that any kind of crude oil was just money in the ground waiting for someone to refine it so you could build such a fine home, travel by limo and jet, make credit cards, tar for your driveway and heat, electricity - - .
Yeah, I will get to the point, thanks. The whole World runs on crude oil! Without it - - - okay, OKAY!
Wait Tom, just answer this question: “For the sake of the least global pollutants poured into the atmosphere, would you rather have minimum pollution standards China, or strict pollution standards Houston, Texas refine this nasty, heavy Canadian Crude Oil?”
Tom, Tom! It is just money in the ground! It will be refined and the pollution you choose will - - - .
Tom- - - ? Huh?! He has his hands clamped over his ears. Must have been a rough childhood that Tom went through, back in the day.
This is the opposite of my understanding.
U.S. national security is enhanced by having new Canadian supply, now 1.7 million barrels per day and increasing to 5.0 million in twelve years, of which 800,000 will be Keystone. This will suppress world oil prices and replace Venezuelan and Middle Eastern sources with Canadian sources, decreasing revenues to hostile regions and countries.
Are you postulating that the U.S. wants to enrich Middle Eastern countries at the expense of China (and Japan, Korea, etc)? That's a new one to me and doesn't make much sense.
Could you please elaborate.
I see Tom’s algae for energy pond in the upper left of the photo.
I wonder what his heating bill is during the winter? Don’t see any windmills do you??
Friedman is not a wart on the nose of civilization. He is, (from the movie “Topaki”), “A carbuncle on the backside of society”. In plain English, that means a pusspimple.
Yes. Most of the “conventional wisdom” about oil pricing is wrong. In fact, it is upside down. US policy and strategy since the late 1990s have been to drive up Chinese input costs, lower the US dollar and squeeze China on its mercantilist export growth strategy. At the same time, we have been bolstering Russia, China’s most important strategic rival. We of course want to help the Saudis.
You have to realize that the US itself is relatively indifferent to the cost of crude oil from a strategic perspective. We supply half our needs internally and buy the rest almost tirely from friends and neighbors who we would have to support in any case. China buys from strangers, pays top dollar, hauls crude halfway around the world and gets much less value per barrel. It is one of the few economic pressure points we have against them. Granted, it is a very imperfect and long-term economic weapon against China. But we used it in reverse (low oil prices in the 1980s) to great effect to weaken and destroy the oil export dependent Soviet Union. This is the nature of modern superpower warfare.
You allege US oil price manipulation of oil prices to first bankrupt the Soviet Union, an exporter, with low prices in the 1980s and then humble China, an importer, with high prices, currently. I visited the link you gave me to the book published in mid-2008 when spot crude was over $140 per barrel. Here is a comment by a reader with “Bic” as a screen name:
This book was recommended to me, but I found the theme all too conspiratorial for my liking and factually wrong in many instances (or at very least, facts taken selectively to shore up a shaky theory).
As others have noted, the idea that the US and its allies used low oil prices to drive the Soviets into oblivion is convenient theory, but doesn’t pass the smell or facts test. You’d have to “forget” the OPEC embargoes in the ‘70s (when the Cold War was in full force) and how oil prices rose ~10 fold in the decade - just how was that helping drive the Soviets into oblivion? Methinks the Soviets collapsed on their own accord - they rotted from within.
A few facts. Oil averaged $3.39 bbl in 1970. When the Soviet Union collapsed in ~1990, it averaged $23 bbl, but that was down from $37.50 bbl it averaged in 1980. So yes, oil did have some wild gyrations, but in the ~20 years before the USSR collapsed, the Soviets enjoyed vastly higher earnings. At the same time, Soviet oil production was rising. As a result, they enjoyed the dual benefits of strongly rising prices AND production. Yet the author concludes that “low prices” were the cause of the Soviet implosion? Methinks history/facts clearly show otherwise.
While the author points to Reagan and steadily falling oil prices during his 2 terms (from a inflation wracked/OPEC embargo/Jimmy Carter high in 1980 of $37.50 bbl), he blithely ascribes the decline in oil prices to a conspiracy of the US and its allies. I find that idea preposterous.
The author ignores the role that inflation had on USD fx rates and how that would have driven prices higher (and lower) as inflation rose/declined, absent any other reasons.
However, there is a more obvious/glaring reason why prices fell in the ‘80s - vast over capacity within OPEC and lack of production discipline. This intellectual “oversight” effectively crushes the author’s conspiracy theories.
How did prices fall from $37.50 to $23 in the ‘80s? It was simple - supply and demand. OPEC failed to heed basic economics (should have got a few copies of Adam Smith’s Rise of Nations) - they failed to realize that if oil spiked from $3.39 to $37.50 bbl in just 10 years that there would be huge shifts in usage/efficiencies by the consumers as a result. OPEC simply got greedy - they saw the huge rise in earnings due to rising prices. As a result, they all added capacity to drive revenues even higher - or so they (wrongly) hoped. OPEC spent hundreds of billions building new capacity. But when the bills and interest payments came due, coupled with less than anticipated demand (exacerbated by a deep recession in the early ‘80s and concurrent 20% inflation and rising energy efficiencies in the West), OPEC was forced to sell ever-more oil into a buyers market. There was no conspiracy to drive oil prices lower to gain some sort of economic advantage over the Soviets - it was just simple supply and demand at work.
Prices only rebounded after the Saudis got serious about enforcing OPEC production disciple. The Saudis did so by opening up their taps and drove prices down to $10 bbl. That caused so much economic pain in OPEC that they (finally) took production quotas seriously, balancing an over supplied market. As a result of OPEC’s new-found production discipline, coupled with the unexpected demand from BRICs (and consequential reduction of excess capacity), we saw oil rise 10 fold this decade...
For all the conspiracy theories this author offers us, the simplest explanations (i.e, supply and demand) seem much more rational explanations for oil prices. But hey, if you tend to believe conspiracy theories, facts rarely get in the way...
ROFL!!!
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