On MTP, Obama’s decision to opt out of public financing is topic #1, and I have to admit it amazes me the way the Republicans are able to pivot on this issue. To start, I have long held that I have no problem with the money in politics, and that what I wanted was openness. My ideal system would be immediate disclosure- let the money flow, so long as people know where it is coming from. I was never a supporter of McCain-Feingold, and unlike the Republicans, apparently, I still am not.
But what gets me is that McCain has completely gamed the system- his loan scheme with public financing then opting out is currently not even an issue on the show, and it would seem to me that would be at least mentioned. Of course, it is not, for whatever reason. Additionally, this is even more egregious when you consider that this is McCain’s signature issue. His name is on the damned bill, and the message he has sent is that the bill is a joke. Hell, aren’t there even lawsuits against the man on the issue?
I never much bought into the notion of liberal media bias (and you can search the archives for my past thoughts on it, I am too lazy), but the longer I am outside the Republican hive mind, the more I recognize that liberal media bias may be the biggest fraud the right-wing has ever gotten away with. It is absurd.
*** Update ***
One more thing regarding oil drilling, has it been mentioned that there is no refinery anywhere lacking for crude to produce the finished product? I was under the impression that refining capacity was pretty much maxed out, and were there refineries sitting around idle because of insufficient oil supplies, wouldn’t we hear about it? Wouldn’t that be a tailor-made talking point for the GOP, particularly with gas prices where they are?
So, if I am right, and there is no shortage of oil, but the bottleneck is refining capacity, why are we not hearing about it? Or am I just flat out wrong?
*** Update #2 ***
I have to say, Brian Williams is doing a fine job.
smiley
I don’t get Bill Richardson. How could he be so successful when he has so much difficulty in talking coherently? I didn’t watch the whole thing (FTN) but it sounded like Fiorina kicked his ass.
4tehlulz
>>why are we not hearing about it?
Because it’s hard to argue that we have to drill every square inch of the planet if refining bottlenecks are the main issue in gas supply.
Just Some Fuckhead
Brian Williams will be the first one up against the wall after the glorious revolution. His infrequent bouts of competence won’t save him.
Cap and Gown
Since gasoline usage is down this year from last, I kinda doubt that refinery capacity is the issue. Also, it is possible to import refined products. So U.S. refinery capacity is not completely determinative of U.S. gasoline supply and therefore pricing.
The Commander Guy
Brian Williams may have done a fine job, but Lindsey Graham really gets on my nerves.
Wilfred
That’s because he’s a maverick, goddammit. And if it’s necessary for him to go against his own bill why then that’s just him being even more of a maverick.
Octavian
The Politico is reporting that Brokaw will do MTP through the general election. Looks like Williams only had it for one week.Read here.
El Cid
The notion that openness alone would somehow curb the real and measurable influence of big money flow into political campaigns is another one of the pathetic giant frauds of the right wing hive-mind.
martianchronic
First rule of The Village: IOKIYAR.
funfunfun
what you’re going to need is a hillarious youtube video for a political cover song. think “since u been john”. the kids still like avril & ted leo, right?
Incertus
Refinery capacity isn’t really the issue either–they’re running at about 85% I believe, but that’s the highest they’ve run ever. Something else that rarely gets mentioned is that while there haven’t been new refineries built in the last 30 years or so, there also haven’t been any applications submitted to build refineries in that same period. That’s because until very recently, the refinery game had very low profit margins compared to the rest of the oil and gas industry.
So why all the ducking of issues and passing it off on other problems? My instinct–and it’s pretty shitty at times–is that we’re a lot closer to peak oil than anyone in the industry is letting on, and they’re shitting themselves over it to keep it quiet.
John Cole
The notion that you can control the influence of big money in elections is one of the signature frauds of the left wing hive mind. And, as proof, I have every election ever run in the United States, particularly in the modern era.
malraux
I don’t want to sound too out there, as I haven’t really researched this with anything approaching comprehensiveness, but I find it suspicious that McCain only began strongly supporting campaign finance reform after getting involved in the Keating 5 scandal. To me, McCain Feingold seems like an attempt to salvage a reputation rather than being based on fundamental beliefs in anti-corruption.
Alan
The disgust over liberal media bias is a holdover gripe from the past before the internet and FNC. Back in the old days, conservatives use to fantasize about an objective news media. But instead we got Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, etc. and FNC. Today’s RW media makes the MSM seem objective. And the RW media makes the Right seem stupid and silly.
RandyH
Mimsy Graham can’t smile and she looks like she’s going to cry.
Alan
A new refinery is supposedly being built in South Dakota. But it’s not being built by the usual suspects. From this article:
The usual suspects are busy ringing the cash register and blaming environmentalists for lack of capacity. And not drilling and pumping from their current leases.
Downpuppy
Refinery capacity was an issue through mid 2007, when there was a rash of refinery fires & explosions. Crude production hasn’t risen since 2005, while worldwide refinery capacity has grown a fair amount. As a result, we’re importing less crude & more refined product, refiners margins & utilization are way down, & our crude stocks are shrinking.
Like most things though, the story hasn’t kept up with the reality, which is that we have all the refining capacity we’ll ever need.
smintheus
The obvious solution to the inevitably corrupting influence of big money is to take away the need for obscene sums of money. The best way to do that is to limit the usefulness of money where most of the money is spent – broadcast advertisements. The courts wouldn’t allow limitations placed on the amount that campaigns could spend for advertisements. But I can see no credible objection to prohibiting broadcasters from selling air time for campaign advertising. We should adopt the position that the UK and so many other developed nations have, that airwaves are not for sale to political candidates, and cut this Gordian Knot.
west coast
So, if I am right, and there is no shortage of oil, but the bottleneck is refining capacity, why are we not hearing about it?
Because the term “refining capacity” has too many syllables.
Splitting Image
Word.
Basically, the real bias in any media outlet is to their customer base. If people want to see 24-hour Anna Nicole Smith or Britney Spears coverage, that’s what they happily provide. Anyone decrying that situation is assumed to be the sort of person who doesn’t want to watch the news anyway.
In politics, a lot of news organizations have come to the conclusion that their customers want to see stories about Democratic corruption but not Republican corruption, and especially not McCain corruption. So once again, they happily provide what they think people want.
I think what the Republicans did to help this along was create a pundit class whose job was to tell the news companies what Americans think. So instead of using demographics or otherwise trying to find out what sort of people are watching and what they want to see, they just go to the pundits, who tell them that no one is interested in McCain-Feingold, but everyone wants to hear about Obama “breaking a promise”.
Kiran
The issue with refinery capacity is diesel capacity, and the capacity to refine heavier, more sour crudes.
Currently the spread on gasoline is so small that refiners are simply selling gasoline essentially at cost. Diesel (and jet fuel) is where the money is being made. Rich world Diesel demand is still rising (or at least not falling) while gasoline demand is falling. Refineries in the united states have long been optimized for gasoline.
On top of that, new regulations on sulfur in diesel means that the most sour cuts of diesel end up getting sent to bunker/marine fuel because upgrading it to meet regulations isn’t worth it.
To some degree the expansion of Reliance’s refinery (coming online late this year, early next) should help make up the diesel shortfall, and expand the world’s sour crude capacity.
Bob In Pacifica
In Cali it seems that refineries shut down at the most inopportune times. It may be fate, or it may be that at least some of the shutdowns have been to push prices up. And, let’s face it, there doesn’t even seem to be any shortage of gasoline. It just costs too much.
Wilfred
Re; Shortage of oil:
Engdahl has written a lot on the subject and as the above demonstrates a little bit of critical thinking goes a long way.
Joshua Norton
Mr. McCain – You can’t run a beer company from the White House.
Although it would be a step up from the current administration.
jenniebee
You remember how in California seven years ago there was this energy crisis and environmentalists got blamed for not enough plants and too much regulation and whatnot, and then it turned out that there was really enough to go around all along and supply was as high as it ever was and demand wasn’t really going up that much but that energy companies, by which I mean Enron, figured out that there was a pile to be made from just creating a public impression of shortage to justify skyrocketing prices?
Good times.
Got a concept for you: there isn’t a shortage of anything. There are no lines for gas, you’ll notice. Oil companies’ profit margins haven’t been doing any shrinking, in case you hadn’t heard. $4/gallon is simply what the US market will bear.
Just Some Fuckhead
That’s prolly related to the shale oil “boom” going on in the western Dakotas. Shale oil is harder to get out of the ground but prevailing oil prices make it feasible.
grandpajohn
What he said.
As A mattere of fact , if one checks out McSames record of stands and flip flops, salvaging a reputation seems to be his primary motivation in the senate. As for fundamental beliefs the only one he has seems to be that everything should be about John McCain
Joshua Norton
Like Bob Shieffer stating that John McCain “reversed position” on off shore oil drilling while Obama “FLIP FLOPPED” on campaign financing.
El Cid
The notion that silly off the cuff statements about complex topics meant to show I’m a powerful contrarian against the liberal dumbheads means it’s impossible to ever develop an industrialized nation infrastructure not based entirely on fossil fuels. And, as proof, I have the entire history of industrialized civilization, particularly in the modern era.
Exceptions include states which have enacted public financing for various elections, but they are all stupid-heads. And, as proof, I will specifically not list such examples as existing among the universe of elections ever held in the United States.
Duros Hussein 62
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner.
Brachiator
A few years ago, local Southern California talk radio host Mr K (Marc Germain) talked about and web-linked a “Refiner of the Year” video in which oil company executives bragged about restricting refineries. Despite this “smoking gun,” conservative radio hosts in the market kept pushing the lie that environmentalist extremists were preventing new refineries from coming on line, while “progressives” mired themselves in conspiracies of magical alternative sources that were being suppressed.
Germain interviewed Jamie Court from Consumer Watchdog about the reasons for high oil prices back in 2005, and apparently that group is still on the case (The Lie of Coastal Oil Drilling):
On top of this you have the recent news story about Exxon Mobil:
It is an odd business where oil companies see record profits and yet it is unprofitable to refine oil or to sell it to consumers.
And yet, I am always amused that in California elections, big money from Corporations is bad, but big money from unions is good.
KCinDC
NPR is in on the act too. Yesterday I was disgusted to hear Scott Simon and Daniel Schorr lamenting the horrible signal sent by Obama by “breaking his pledge” and being the first candidate to reject public financing. Nothing about empowering small donors, and certainly nothing about McCain’s attempt to circumvent the rules he himself wrote. That was followed by an outraged editorial by Simon defending McCain from Obama’s dastardly playing of the race card (no mention was made of the actual existence sock monkeys and “baby mama” captions).
John Cole
That just confused me, so you win.
Bob In Pacifica
Peak oil, schmeak oil.
In 1976, on his way out as Director of the CIA, G. H. W. Bush, left President-elect Carter a report stating that the Soviet Union would begin running out of oil within five years and thus be forced to invade the Middle East to seize their oilfields. This was the rationale to begin selling Saudi Arabia a big military package. Of course, it was all bullshit. Today the West, and the East, are scrambling all over each other to get to those oilfields.
So that story (found in THE SECRET WAR AGAINST THE JEWS) pretty much suggests an earlier iteration of what I consider the “peak oil” scam.
The whole theory of “peak oil” comes from oil industry facts and figures. Why would you believe them?
Another anecdote. My grandfather on my mother’s side sold the mineral rights to a piece of land in the Mississippi back in 1948. They found oil, then capped the well–for over fifty years. In the last few years they’ve been pumping steadily, and there is enough oil there that they are putting down another well on the property. And lots of royalties are flowing to my mom and her siblings.
The moral? We look at the energy crisis from tankful to tankful. The oil industry at it as a marketing ploy. And it looks at its resources over generations.
grandpajohn
I am waiting for one of the proponents of drilling in ANWAR to post a listing of the oil companies that are standing in line for a chance for the right to expend mega millions of dollars to develop and drill in one of the concessions up there.
From what I have read due to the tremendous cost of developing along with the hardships because of location, there is no companies on record as actually wanting to drill there even if the area is opened up for drilling
Wilfred
From the Jeddah Meeting :
Chidambaram is the Indian Finance Minister. Bodman is a Bush appointee. Who to believe?
Micheline
While I don’t think Obama is playing the race card but it was rather dumb to say “Hey, he’s also happens to be black.” He should have left it at saying they are trying portray him as scary. People would understand what he meant by that without explicitly stating “Hey, he’s also happens to be black.” Obama needs to be careful he giving the media an excuse to pounce him.
Incertus
I think that’s almost right–the only problem is that the customer base isn’t the viewer. It’s the advertiser. It’s not so much that the viewer wants to watch 24-7 Anna Nicole coverage–it’s that most viewers don’t realize there are other options. You’ll hear people complain about the bullshit news coverage all the time, but they watch it because, on tv at least, there aren’t many other options. And advertisers don’t give a shit as long as there are eyeballs on the tv. But I guarantee you–corporate media cares a lot more what advertisers think than what their viewers think.
cbear
WTF?
Is this snark, or did you mistake Tunch’s catnip for your cinnamon this morning?
Williams is a winger asshole of the first order and he and Lil Lindsey gave McCain’s balls a nice tongue bath today on MTP. Or perhaps you didn’t hear the framing of the question regarding offshore drilling?
“The enivormentalists are perfectly happy with $4 a gallon gas (cause they don’t care about ordinary Amuricans) but how do feel about this Sen. Graham (R-Buttboy)????
4tehlulz
P34K 01L IZ A 01L KUMP4N33 KIHNSPIRACY
Scott H
Bottleneck in refining capacity? Has anyone, on the planet, actually reported a physical shortage of gasoline? Anybody, anywhere being turned away for a lack of gasoline? Rationing? Any other 1970’s-style crisis solutions like an even/odd license plates scheme (except for the Beijing regime against driving to reduce air pollution for the Summer Olympics)?
Or, are the prices just interestingly high?
jenniebee
Because it doesn’t?
Lovely to hear that your mom’s well is doing well, but do keep in mind that the peak oil scenario describes a system, not individual well performance (in other words: your mileage may vary). Also, the actual predictions, not the CIA Team-B BS, have been very accurate since they were developed in the late fifties, they were golden for predicting US production peak, and they show global peak hitting in about 2012. So it’s hard to see how continued growth in global production at this moment, which is what the models predict, proves that the models are wrong.
Joe Max
How is it that Republicans who fail spectacularly at whatever it is that they are supposed to be such experts at seem to end up as wise talking heads on the “liberal media”? Carly Fiorina presided over the epic failure of Hewlett-Packard, one of the premier US high tech companies, and her decisions lost money for that company during a time when other tech companies were making it hand over fist. It was lucky for them that the Board of Directors of H/P tossed her ass out before she drove the whole thing into the ground and they ended up as another DEC.
Epic failure – just another highlight of a wingnut’s resume’.
snabby
I was a little surprised that Biden didn’t mention McSame’s little illegal trick regarding getting his loan based on public financing that he then refused after being told by the FEC that he could not unilaterally opt out.
But all in all, I thought Biden did well, and Huckleberry looked pitiful. He’s got nothing to work with, so it must be hard. I must say that I find Huckleberry and Holy Joe Lieberman two of the most odious creatures ever to grace the Senate, and it’s because at their cores, they are not who they pretend to be.
I hope McSame picks one of them as his running mate.
Bob In Pacifica
I don’t think the public financing has much legs precisely because all the whiners today have been bashing it since it started.
And while Obama agreed to negotiate with McCain, that was before McCain violated the law. And Bush’s FEC continues to be toothless for a lack of commissioners.
So are the right-wing pundits arguing that that McCain should be punished for violating THE LAW? Are they arguing that the FEC should be staffed? Huh?
LanceThruster
I consider Brian Williams a tool and therefore “perfect” as the MTP replacement. He was the one who chastised Obama for not adding Israel to his list of the 3 most important US trading partners.
Even if he is competent in other areas, that smacks of a “stealth operative” to me. Always willing to inject a little bit of the “official narrative.” This will be useful as the US and/or Israel prepare to attack Iran.
El Cid
Whoever argued that oil was produced primarily from animal bodies? There accumulates quite a massive amount of plant life over hundreds of millions of years.
Although I find the notion of “abiogenic oil” fascinating, I don’t think that it’s just rigid adherence to scientific ideology or some lack of vision which prevents people from accepting the hypothesis — it’s been very, very difficult to prove.
But worse than simply asserting that an interesting hypothesis is true by fiat is trying to get people to give into the fact that it’s difficult for human imagination to grasp the idea that formerly living things could create geological formations on a vast scale.
Limestone is primarily formed by the biological activities of marine organisms. These are tiny, tiny creatures, much smaller than dinosaurs.
Yet many biologically-formed limestone deposits turn out to be very, very large.
If the cumulative actions of wind, rain, winters and summers over millions and millions of years can erode mountains, why is it so difficult to believe that tens or hundreds of millions of years’ worth of plant life could create oil deposits? People seem pretty commonly accepting now of the biological origins of coal deposits, after all.
kwAwk
A couple of things that get missed in the debate are first, when the the oil industry states that their refineries are running at 85% of capacity, that really means they are just about maxed out. 100% of capacity means that the refineries are running without any downtime for scheduled maintenance or mechanical problems.
This is ofcourse an industry strategy, whereby they have reduced production capacity down to a level where there is little waste in the system (excess capacity) and little room for unexpected events such as fires or hurricanes. In economic terms it is a pretty good illustration that says the market isn’t functioning anymore and we need to find a way to get more competitors into the market. Working with other players to ensure a few more refineries get built is the best way to do this.
A second thing that gets missed is that what we call oil companies aren’t oil companies at all, they are energy companies. That is if they are being run well. To some degree they are making a statement that they know they have lost the battle with environmentalists. The trajectory this country is on is one of switching away from gasoline to alternative energy in the next generatation. As such there isn’t much of an incentive to explore and exploit new sources of oil. If they are handed an easy and very profitable strike such as ANWAR or drilling more off the coasts, they will take it happily, but they are more content at this point to accept the supply that they have and wait until it is figured out what is really the long term direction of the industry.
Bob In Pacifica
jenniebee, where do your figures for peak oil come from? How are they not related to the oil industry? Do you have figures? Who generates these figures? Are they based on our national intelligence estimates?
Anecdotes are just anecdotes, but there are huge tracts of oil reserves off our coasts, on our public land, on private property, etc. If we are running out of oil, how come the oil companies aren’t drilling on all the land they have UNDER LEASE? (Hint: Big Oil makes more money when people panic and pay more for less.) Why aren’t they starting to extract that oil if we are running out of it? Is $140 a barrel not a good enough deal? Or are you saying that we are both living through an oil scam now (wherein Big Oil lies to us) and facing peak oil (wherein Big Oil is telling us the God’s honest truth, because they care a lot)?
We have repeated historical evidence that the Big Oil does these squeezes periodically. Here’s another one. In 1980 they held back oil to the U.S. to produce a shortage to help get Carter out of office. They lie about oil reserves. They lie about refinery capacity. They lie about global warming. Who do you believe, and why?
Believe me, I’m not saying here that everything is hunky dory. I’m saying that we’ll run out of oxygen and ice before we run out of oil. I can go without gasoline a lot longer than I can go without breathing.
I wish that we’d followed through with Carter’s energy plans back in the seventies (but we had oil man/CIA man Bush running things by 1981). I’d love to see every new house built in the world have solar panels on its roof. I am still waiting to see information from a non-tainted source for this energy scam. So how come if peak oil is real and imminent that no one in our government is doing anything about it? Is our leadership so tied to the oil industry that they’re willing to destroy our country? (Well, actually, I kind of agree with that.)
Of course, either with or without peak oil, we should be pushing for alternative energy sources to replace oil. But we aren’t.
Me, I think that peak oil is just another oil industry scam to keep the junkies nervous. Panic in Needle Park.
Church Lady
There seem to be so many variables that go into the price of a gallon of gas that it seems almost impossible to point your finger at any one thing.
Supply vs. Demand: Yes, it defininitely has an impact, but not to the degree that some would want everyone to believe. While China and India’s advancing economies have had an effect on world-wide demand, it has not been to the extent that some would want everyone to think. I read somewhere that an oil report said about 12% to 15% over the last ten years or so.
There was an emergency meeting of OPEC this morning to discuss the energy crisis, and the Saudi’s have agreed to increase production by 200K barrels a day. However, according to some Oil Industry guy that was just on ABC’s This Week, that amount won’t make up for the approximate one million barrels daily that is currently off the market from Nigeria due to political unrest. As to the truth of that statement, I don’t know – it could be just another oil guy giving excuses, or it could be accurate.
While increasing areas allowing domestic drilling is a current hot topic, everyone seems to acknowledge that it would be at least ten years before the oil came on line and that the effect on prices would be negligable. What doesn’t get mentioned often is the fact that the oil companies already have lots of domestic leases that aren’t being used NOW. Also, because of its location, any oil realized from drilling in ANWAR would likely be sent to China for refining.
It should also be noted that the United States, the world’s largest consumer of oil, has reduced it’s consumption somewhat in the last few months, due to price, but prices have still continued to rise. That sort of pokes a small twig into the eye of the supply vs. demand arguement.
Refining Capacity: Refineries usually only operate at 80% to 85% of capacity, except during peak season. Two things typically affect capacity – temporary closure for occassional maintainence or closure due to disaster (hurricanes, fires, etc.). These things don’t happen that often and, given that other refineries can pick up the slack, capacity’s relation to price seems to be a straw arguement. No, no new refineries have been built in years, but, then again, no one is chomping at the bit to build a new one either.
Speculation: Since oil is a commodity, and there is speculation on all commodities, speculation is obviously somewhat of a factor. Anytime there is an idea that there isn’t enough supply of anything to meet demand, speculators will bet that prices will continue to rise in the future, thereby driving the price up today. Unless and until the perception changes that supply cannot meet demand, speculation will continue to play a part in the rising price of oil. This is probably one of the best arguements for increased domestic drilling.
Given that world-wide demand has risen only about 10% to 15% over the past ten years or so, but the price of a gallon of gas has increased by about 250% in the last eight years, and the the oil companies are raking in record profits, well, I’d say big oil’s greed is having more of an impact on the price at the pump than any of the factors listed above. But then again, that’s just my humble opionion.
L. Ron Obama
When have you known government, or the human race in general, to be proactive? We are continually fighting the last battle.
empty
Win!
Joshua Norton
And he has a personal relationship the White House/Wingnut propagandists so he can easily maintain the M$M “2 Republicans for every Democrat” rule quite easily.
Tzal
In a perfect world Fareed Zakaria would host MTP. But then no one would come on out of the well-founded fear of the righteous asskicking they would receive.
And yes, I know he works for CNN, has a funny accent and name, and is brown. But still.
Downpuppy
OK, so you don’t believe me that refining capacity (other than for really heavy sour crud) is no longer an issue.
How about the EIA?
& note the stocks graph on the side – despite the slow refining we’ve gone from record high to quite low stocks.
Zuzu's Petals
An interesting side note:
Dearth of Ships Delays Drilling of Offshore Oil
Punchy
If Hillary were the nommy, would we be calling this “Campaign Fine-Ass” instead? Sounds about the same.
Face
Yeah, but why would Bush want higher prices? OK, to make his cronies wealthy, but high gas prices are going to help crush the RepubliCANTS this year. Is he that disinterested in his party’s fate to artifically (however that is done) raise the price to make coin but fuck his party?
I fully suspect $2 gallons of gas from about October 2 to November 5. Then expect $10 on November 6. By then it’ll be all Obama’s fault, natch.
mrmobi
FWIW, I thought Williams did an ok job, too. It’s pretty much the same show without Russert, same formula, at least. There were only a couple of moments when I wanted to throw something at the expensive Sony LCD display today, and they both involved the execrable Lindsey Graham, he of the blowjobs = treason equation.
Interesting, isn’t it, that the issue which has consumed much of liberal blogistan for the past couple days got nary a mention on the talking heads shows today?
I don’t get it, don’t the talking heads know we aren’t going to be a democracy anymore if the FISA bill passes?
Apparently Goopers think it will be much easier to characterize Obama as a flip-flopper on campaign finance than it would be to defend their slow, steady degradation of the constitution re: FISA. Smart of them, I think.
I still think we should hold Obama’s feet to the fire on filibustering the bill if retroactive immunity isn’t taken out, but I think he’s made the right call on this, so far. You have to win the election before you can govern.
One last thing, anyone see Carly Fiorina and Bill Richardson on Face the Nation? He was unprepared, and she kicked his ass, and I think his name should be removed from the short and the long lists for VP. If he can’t think on his feet better than that, he won’t be of any help to Obama. Biden on Press the Meat, by contrast, was on his game.
My vote for VP pick is still Hillary Clinton.
smiley
I’ll take $3.20 and $5.00.
mrmobi
One more thing.
If there was ever any person born to be Secretary of State for the United States of America, that person is Joe Biden, IMHO.
smiley
See comment #1.
grandpajohn
Yes, another SATSQ
I would think that looking at bushs actions for the last 8 years show that it is obvious that the bush ego is the only thing he is interested in advancing and that everything is about him
Kelly
I downloaded the Excel file from yesterdays link.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_unc_dcu_nus_m.htm
The data is Jan 1985 to March 2008. I applied a few basic stat functions.
For column “U.S. Percent Utilization of Refinery Operable Capacity (Percent)” average=90, median=89. March 2008 utilization=83.2. Seems current utilization isn’t particularly high.
Also interesting is the column “U. S. Operable Crude Oil Distillation Capacity (Thousand Barrels per Day)”. The max is 17,594. March 2008 is 17,594. Perhap the number of refineries is not particularly related to capacity. Growing capacity at existing facilities rather than building new ones is common across many industries.
slippy hussein toad
I think it’s more “making hay while the Sun shines.”
They know their number is up. Probably the real price point of gas is somewhere below the $4.00 average it’s at now. And it will be neatly deposited at that real price right before the elections.
It’s also part and parcel of the dismantling of the energy industry regulations that prevented outrageous speculation prior to the Enron debacle, IMHO.
Svensker
According to the wingnuts I know, it’s all the fault of environmentalists — both rising oil prices and the fact that there are no new refineries being built. Just like we’d all have plenty of $.99/gal gas if only we could drill in ANWR.
No one talks about the turmoil in the ME as being a) part of the reason oil is high and b) part of the reason the market is so reactive — people are nervous. When Israel’s foreign minister(or someone in the Israeli government) threatened Iran a few weeks ago, oil went up $11/barrel. On Friday, when news went out that Israel had done some test bombing runs, oil shot up again.
The low dollar also is partly to blame.
I would blame our brilliant foreign policy and even more brilliant economic policy for a great deal of the price rise, much more than blaming oil company execs. And I wish the Dems would hammer that, as well. No, Bush didn’t raise your taxes to pay for Iraq — he let the dollar fall, is letting inflation rise, and is perfectly happy to let gas prices skyrocket, after all, he’s not up for election. And neocons have said that they figure a strike against Iran might wreck the economy, but it’s “worth it.” Why aren’t the Dems talking that up? Oh wait, they’re too busy expanding executive power and undermining the 4th Amendment.
dbrown
Some how I think importing refined product from low wage areas w/o EPA laws is far more cost effective than building extra capacity here in the US and importing heavy crude that once refined then has too many useless side products – only a guess but would explain the issue fairly well.
joel hanes
Bob In Pacifica Says:
Peak oil, schmeak oil.
You will perhaps forgive me for finding Ken Deffeyes more credible on this issue than Bob in Pacifica, or than Engdahl (clue: oil is not conventionally theorized to come from dinosaur poop, or from the bodies of dead dinosaurs. clue two: consider the volume of coal known to exist — it’s considerably more than a cube nineteen miles on a side, and yet no one is citing that fact as a reason to dispute the organic origins of coal.)
west coast
“Bush didn’t raise your taxes to pay for Iraq—he let the dollar fall, is letting inflation rise, and is perfectly happy to let gas prices skyrocket, after all, he’s not up for election.”
Yup. What’s more, his party will be out of power when it comes time to clean up the mess…how convenient.
Wilfred
How about Kenney, who Engdahl quotes? The question is the evolution of naturally occurring petroleum. Be careful before you trash Kenney, btw.
radish
Does Tijuana qualify? ;-)
Yes. That’ll be 50¢ please.
grumpy realist
Clue three: all the people who want to believe that we’re not running out of oil have damn good reasons to come up with any explanation that might indicate that we are, in fact, not running out of oil.
Note that said population, in general: a) hates environmentalism, b) believes fervently in the Free Market, c) doesn’t admit the existence of Global Warming, and d) thinks cheap oil is a God-given right and if we don’t have Cheap Oil then By God It’s The Fault Of Those Dammed Pinko Liberals.
These are the same sort of people who bitch and whine about not being able to dump chemical wastes in everyone’s backyard.
montysano
First, define huge. Second, realize that oil produced in the USA goes into the global market. It’s not just OUR OIL. The oil under lease may not have been profitable to recover at $50.00/bbl. It may become profitable at $140.00/bbl.
The Energy Information Agency (EIA) shows proven reserves of about 20B barrels in the USA. I don’t think that includes ANWR (5B-15B barrels). The Outer Continental Shelves are estimated at 50B-100B barrels, but it will be difficult oil to recover, and the recoverable amount is controversial. In any event, the world that currently uses about 30B barrels a year, with the USA consuming 25% of that, so there’s some perspective.
Peak Oil theory doesn’t say that we’re running out of oil; it says that we’ve found the easy 1/2, and the second 1/2 will be more difficult to recover, more expensive, and of a lower quality. My reading indicates that we’ve been on the Peak plateau for the last couple of years.
Why doesn’t the govt tell us the truth? Why do Hannity and Limbaugh insist that we can drill our way out of this? Because if the hard truth were laid out, there might be panic.
Just Some Fuckhead
Has Russert been put in the ground yet? Because I’m imagining they could prop his corpse at the table and have Republicans come on and spout talking points for an hour each Sunday. Ya know, if they’re interested in keeping MTP the same.
joel hanes
Kenney is a fine scholar. So was Thomas Gold, the iconoclast who was an early champion of abiotic petroleum. If I remember correctly, Gold’s project to find evidence for his theories by deep-drilling in the Siljian Ring was unfortunately inconclusive.
But to my knowledge, theories about the abiotic origin of petroleum have not yet led to the discovery of any major new deposits of petroleum, and none of the scientists advocating such theories have proposed that the abiotic oil-creation processes they theorize will recharge existing oil deposits in humanly-useful time.
When the rate of extraction is very high, changing the recharge rate from zero (conventional theory) to a positive value that is small compared to the extraction rate (abiotic origins) doesn’t change the scenario very much: we still run out of inexpensive oil right about now.
Both theories require geologic intervals of time for petroleum generation.
slippy hussein toad
Thomas Gold’s other claim to fame is the now-discredited “steady state” theory of cosmology. Where matter was supposed to arise from nothingness to counteract observed dispersion of cosmological mass.
So, right there I’m not sure that listening to him (posthumously) is of much value. And his thinking on oil formation seems to be as magical as his ideas about cosmology.
“Fine scholar” he wasn’t.
montysano
Abiotic oil is one of the many examples of pony-wishing going on right now.
We are not without solutions or strategies. But the hope that we can keep running things the way that we’ve been running them is a non-starter. That’s the concept that no politician will touch.
JL
How much does speculation raise the price of crude? Does anyone know. During the crisis in California, Enron and other oil/gas companies were gaming the system. I read that refineries are running about 93 per cent which seems pretty high to me.
joel hanes
“Fine scholar” he wasn’t.
Oh, I think he was.
It’s just that some of his theories were wrong.
That doesn’t necessarily and completely discredit a scholar, or a scientist : Newton pursued alchemy, Kepler thought that something about the ratios of the sizes of the Platonic solids would necessarily correspond to the configuration of the Solar system. Darwin thought that the effects of use and disuse of a bodily feature might produce hereditable differences. Wrong.
Of co
Corner Stone
Although I like Biden just fine on foreign policy issues, I would have to say he should be disqualified from VP contention based on one simple part of MTP today:
Williams reads two quotes from Brooks and Liz Sedoti. To paraphrase both basically call BHO a slimey two-faced bastard, and a thuggish proto CHI pol.
Williams then turns to Biden and he gives an adequate politicians reply in defense of BHO. Not once did he say anything close to, “David Brooks for goodness sake? You’re going to read that pathetic right wing hack to me on national TV?” or “If you’ll recall, Sedoti presented McCain with his favorite treat – donuts with sprinkles and coffee just as he takes it.”
IOW – immediately ridicule the source and discredit them as having any place in discourse. Anybody can play nice, we saw that with Edwards in 2004. A real VP candidate should be displaying his/her fangs from now til Nov. IMO.
Mrs. Peel
That would solve so many problems for NBC. That way the “you meanies don’t show him enough respect” sob sisters could have a good cry every Sunday because he was still dead, and the Repubs could continue to get their usual lies out without being challenged on them. Win-win.
TenguPhule
John, it’s worse then that.
Big Oil has the leases.
It just isn’t drilling them.
And they want to open up more to buy and not drill.
Welcome to Mono-America.
TenguPhule
Because it would be partisan…or something.
And the death of the Republic continues in slow motion.
AnneLaurie
This is a lot closer to Da Truff than merely complaining that “viewers are stoopid”, with the concommitant warm glow of self-regard that only we and our closest blog-friends are smart enough not to be taken in. Now bump your attention up another level to the remaining player in this closed environment — the OWNERS of the various media outlets. Remember all those Letterman jokes about GE / Jack Welch owning “his” show? Or the inside-baseball fooferaw over whether Rupert Murdoch “deserved” the right to buy the Wall Street Journal, i.e., would the WSJ’s “objectivity” be “questioned” if it were viewed as the mouthpiece for one greedy rich pig rather than some concensus mouthpiece for *all* the
greedy rich pigsBidniz Interusts?Megacorporations and their tycoons buy up all available media outlets because they quite sensibly prefer to decide what will be considered “news” (celebrity drug addicts, Democratic “flip-flopping”) and more importantly what will be Outside the Realm of Polite Discourse (global politics, Republican corruption). The people nominally responsible for reporting the news have come to regard themselves as mere Dilberts, hapless wage-slaves at the mercy of Vast Forces which prevent them from doing anything more taxing than stenography and PR for their corporate overlords. And “we”, the viewing public, mostly acquiese with this program because, after all, it’s more fun to watch the Gotcha Olympics and treat politics as just another sporting event than to do the hard, tedious work required to understand how so much of America’s patrimony has been flushed down the crapper.
The rise of the Pundit Class, aka the Media Village Idiots, is the current Republocrats’ final refinement of this vicious cycle. Rather than having to buy off a hundred thousand smaller outlets in every two-bit media market, a few dozen Important Thinkers have been anointed as official courtiers to our Oval Office Sun King. All the Truly Significant Newspeople can now attend the same round of cocktail parties, speak at the same conferences, and get paid by the same organizations, which greatly improves the speed & efficiency by which this week’s talking points (Drill ANWR! McCain maverick, Obama flip-flopper!) can be disseminated. Of course this level of fine-tuned “perfection” usually indicates an evolutionary dead end, but where is the sociopolitical asteroid that will end the current Reign of the Dinosaurs?
tarrah begone
Lindsey Graham hates America. Where’s his American lapel pin? He’s a traitor. I know he’s wearing jihadi underwear under that suit. I bet there’s pictures of him on the internets wearing a kaffiyeh.
Christopher Wallace
Obama is not going to play by the rules in a system that has been rigged against minorities since the founding of this nation. As an African-American, I am proud to have Obama go toe to toe with racism. There’s no doubt that the first black president will lift our people up and finally give us our due: Reparations for Slavery. But he can’t just say that he’ll compensate African-Americans for centuries of slavery and inhuman treatment because the forces of racism are still running the show. When Obama talks about giving back to the people, of giving us hope, and of creating change, he is speaking to his people and we must read between the lines. We will no longer be swept aside when Obama becomes the face of America.
Xenos
Nice metaphor – although it does not need to an exogenous factor to wipe out the evolutionary dead end. At some point the internal poisons built up in the system will overwhelm it.
What pisses me off is that this is such a petty damn thing to have become an insuperable problem. It was not racism, or civil war, or invasion – just a moral, rhetorical, and political version of Gresham’s law. A few small structural changes to the regulation of the media (restoring the ownership rules for radio and TV stations, breaking up a couple media empires) could make all the difference, but the PTB ate so entrenched I doubt we can ever get it done.
Bob In Pacifica
joel hanes, you mean the Kenneth S. Deffeyes of Shell Oil you linked to? The guy who said that we reached peak oil in December 2005?
Again, I ask for some numbers that are not based on what the oil industry feeds us.
I will again repeat: I am not saying that we shouldn’t be looking for alternative energy sources. We should it’s better for the environment, better for our economy. My point is merely that the oil industry has for years lied about how much or how little oil there is. They have witheld oil from the public in order to manipulate politics.
Why should anyone believe the oil industry about their supplies. And where is there a source of information about oil reserves that isn’t connected to the oil industry? And why is the oil industry not acting like it’s running out of oil?
And what does the peak oil even mean to you? That you’ll pay anything for gasoline? That we should forgive oil companies? What?
ThymeZone
Hmm. I heard his interview of Condi Rice today. Short of going down on her right there on camera, I don’t know how he could have been more deferential and fawning. Softball questions and genteel conversation, no tough questions or tough follow up that I could hear.
They sounded like two old friends who had discovered each other at a high school reunion. Congenial doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Rice has been an unmitigated disaster as Secretary of State, has she not? But Zakaria gave her a sweet valedictory today. WTF?
Chuck Butcher
Oil?
Follow the money. When the stock market was golden for every greedhead in existance did the price of stocks have anything to do with the VALUE of the companies? It had to do with the prospect of never ending profits piling buy price on buy price.
You have a war/terror tax on every barrel from questionable areas, you have profit takers piling on in commodity markets (how many actual oil companies are playing both ends there?), you have restricted pumping, you have refineries dicking with production, and finally you have increased demand. Yes, easy oil has pretty much been drilled so there is or will be a penalty assessed for difficulty. Most of the price you see is artificial or outside the reality of available oil. (why not add in the fuel costs of a couple wars?) Ask John about the fuel usage of land war machines and then consider aircraft that measure usage in tons per hour. Naval craft that still use bunker fuel go through that stuff like it’s going out of style.
I just watched Brian on MTP announce that Tom Brokaw will get it through the election.
Darkness
Except that energy is a MAJOR input into oil production. See Law of Diminishing Horizons as to why much of the second 1/2 will never be profitable to remove. Expending a barrel and a half of energy-equivalent (in the form of natural gas, usually) to extract a barrel of oil will never be rational. (And on top of that will make heating our homes wicked expensive, by sucking up all the natural gas out of the market.)
tofubo
another glaring example of the liberal meadea inaction
Joshua
The pundit class and the right wing has also managed to successfully conflate the opinions of the reporters and anchors – for example, you always see big headlines on Instapundit and National Review or whatever about recent surveys of news offices that say 70% are Democrats or whatever. Thus, liberal bias!
Except, of course, that has nothing to do with what their bosses tell them to put on the air and what stories to report on, and it has nothing to do with how these shows are scheduled. Ever notice how BillO loves to get the craziest/most embarrassing/incoherent lefties on the show just to tear them apart? That’s an extreme example, but nowadays its like all the news channels follow that playbook in one form or another. Put 2 professional right wing attack dogs next to a milquetoast liberal (prototypical example is Colmes) or a laid back journalist and watch the slaughter.
That is why the blogs are so important. Sites like TPM fill the vacuum that the big media has left available. And I do think they are filling it and has been filling it for several years now.
chopper
einstein also believed in the steady state theory.