With gas prices going up, Fox’s new, suggestive replacement for “Drill Baby, Drill” is “Just Poke a Hole”. As a bonus, at about 2:10, Fox’s Eric Bolling holds up a graph of oil prices and claims that oil prices fell in mid-2008 because Bush lifted the moratorium on offshore drilling. Never mind that we had a massive recession around then, and demand fell off a cliff, as this graph points out (click to embiggen):
The sneering about Steven Chu riding a bike to work is just a cherry on top of this whole bullshit sundae.
(h/t pissed off reader Josh)
BGinCHI
What’s clear from ALL of the douchebag commentator’s comments is that it’s all about market reaction, market speculation, and market inefficiencies.
Even his grand (and wrong) example about Bush’s withdrawing of the drilling moratorium was NOT based on “more oil makes things better,” but on market perception.
This says everything you need to know about how the media and corporations work in this country: no relationship to material fact, all eyes on a market constructed out of fear, speculation, and gambling.
David Kock
Those Fox News spokesmodels are a piece of ass.
Sad_Dem
I ride a bike to work. I hate America.
dmsilev
@Sad_Dem: I walk to work. I hate America more than you do…
dms
David Koch
The Fox News spokesmodels are a piece of ass.
geg6
@BGinCHI:
GAWD BLESS MERIKA!
jrg
So, a slight increase in U.S. oil production (the sum of which makes up what, 10% of the global supply), caused a price drop of almost 50%?
Right. Or maybe Fox News is full of shit. Gosh, it’s so hard to say…
geg6
@David Koch:
Goddam it, this will be the second time today I’m cleaning Pepsi off my monitor.
RSR
The Big Picture blog just had a post on the component prices of gasoline.
Of relevance to this post is at the bottom of the recession-induced dip in crude prices, refiners were actually losing $0.08 per gallon due to the futures prices they had paid over the summer.
Worth a look to see just where the money goes when you buy gas:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/03/chart-of-the-day-components-of-the-gasoline-price/
Culture of Truth
“Just Poke a Hole”
Also we should “remove” Ghadaffi. Like a chess piece or an azelea.
Dennis SGMM
How wonderful that FOX, among others, is offering solutions to a problem that every administration since that of Carter did nothing to solve.
The Sergeant said, “Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?”
“Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
‘Bout a mile above this place.
It’ll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We’ll soon be on dry ground.”
We were — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
RSR
meh, maybe they weren’t ‘futures prices’ so much as it just took a few month to work through the supply chain
geg6
@David Koch:
By the way, how about that Scott Brown? He’s a real piece of ass, too!
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/07/scott-brown-david-koch-money/
beltane
“Just poke a hole’? Will Palin, in her mini-skirt and hooker boots, be chanting this at next year’s idiot convention?
The low-info people I know are firmly placing the blame for gas prices on Wall Street bankers. All the holes poked in the world are not going to change that.
The Ancient Randonneur (formerly known as The Grand Panjandrum)
Yeah. Off-shore drilling in the Gulf did wonders for the economy! What could possibly go wrong with more off-shore drilling? And, did I hear a Fox News bobble head say something to the effect of “Bill Clinton paid down the debt”? I love it. The material is writing itself these days.
Poopyman
@geg6: Above the neck? yeah.
beltane
@David Koch: And they’re practiced in the ways of hole poking.
Brachiator
@dmsilev:
I take a commuter train to work. With bicyclists on board. No one could hate America more than I do.
cathyx
Plenty of oil reserves he says. We just need to tap it. 1000’s of years of oil is in the ground. He needs to tell that to the experts. They don’t know that.
Bulworth
Hope I’m around when all the oil dries up.*
*Well, not really, but I would like to see how our Media Villagers respond.
toujoursdan
Even if Bush lifted the moratorium on offshore drilling in 2008, it would still take years of geologic testing for oil companies to determine where to drill, and months and years more to actually put the equipment in to exploit the area.
cathyx
@Bulworth: The fox financial guy says there’s 1000’s of years of oil in the ground and he should know.
BGinCHI
@toujoursdan: This inconvenient truth is fat.
toujoursdan
Also, the ugly truth is that even with advancing technology, the amount of new oil discoveries has been falling since the 1960s. We’ve been using more than we’ve been finding since the late 1980s.
http://wapedia.mobi/thumb/9ac5499/en/fixed/470/288/GrowingGap.jpg?format=jpg
This is only going to get worse as old fields deplete.
FlipYrWhig
@cathyx: That’ll be the next slogan. “I’d tap that!”
Gravenstone
@geg6: Might I suggest you invest in a monitor/keyboard condom if you’re prone to spit takes.
celticdragonchick
@toujoursdan:
Yeah, but the economists keep saying that peak oil is a lie, didnthaknow?
Of course, none of those assholes have taken a structural geology class, but that is enough for the Faux News blonde bimbo crowd.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
i am surprised they didn’t blame the evil developing countries full of darker skinned people who want cars and stuff,never mind the fact that speculators were the ones geeking the price until the bubble burst, unfettered by bush era oversight.
drkrick
@Bulworth:
Easy “we should never have let the common people and the foreigners buy automobiles. Didn’t they understand the sacrifices needed to make sure the important people had the transportation they needed indefinitely.”
chopper
@Brachiator:
i work at home, down the hall from my bedroom. i hate america the most.
El Cid
You see, if you just let oil companies drill anywhere and everywhere, they will ramp up production as much as we want them to, so that they can undermine the price and profitability of their product because we want the supply to go up.
Who has ever doubted that the oil industry would be happy to meet our desires for less expensive gasoline during a time period in which fuel use nationally has been dropping by increasing production so that those companies can spend more money to make a lower and lower priced product?
El Cid
@cathyx: If there are thousands of years worth of oil in the ground, surely it will all soon be easy to get to; it’s possible that we will soon develop the ability to communicate with those oil deposits and convince them to willingly find their way to the surface and enter our supertankers on their own.
D.N. nation
@toujoursdan:
The wingnutz I know said the price of gas went down anyway because the foreign countries were scared that we’d start getting more gas so they made their gas cheaper, or something.
BGinCHI
NY Post Headline:
Black Man Steals Gas
Svensker
@chopper:
I work at home IN my bedroom. I hate America the mostest.
Ash Can
Whatever would we do if we didn’t have the brilliant people at Fox to explain life, the universe, and everything to us?
Citizen_X
@Svensker: I’m unemployed. I win!
b-psycho
So how long until the phrase becomes “hard pumping! good gushy!”?
Tax Analyst
@geg6:
I, too, found it oddly hilarious.
It reminded me of when I woke up very, very early this morning (like around 3am) and flicked on the TV. The ABC early news show topic was “everybody’s wearing PJ’s, even to WORK!”, and the female host had on a bright red PJ number over her business clothes and was kind of giving a side profile, doing a little shoulder hustle with a knowing smile and I was momentarily assessing her plunderability when I really should have been taking that leak I woke up for.
Anyway, I took my leak and by the time I got back the segment was over and she was no longer in those fetching PJ’s and I totally lost interest in that Libya-Kadafi-people-dying stuff and went back to bed since I don’t have to be to work until 11am these days.
Is it still considered “shallow” if you actually operating underneath the ground?
Brachiator
@chopper:
Hah. Yep. You win. Especially if you wear sweaters instead of puching up the thermostat.
@El Cid:
And of course the big lie that is pushed is that there is magically even more oil right here in the USA than in all of the Middle East, and it’s even cheaper to get to than oil anywhere else in the whole entire world, and it is only the evil environmentalist wackos that is preventing us from achieving maximum prosperity from our over abundance of fossil fuels.
Citizen_X
@Brachiator: US oil production peaked in 1970 and has declined ever since. Nothing has stopped the decline. High prices in the early 80’s–which led to new discoveries in the US and worldwide, leading to an oil glut and price collapse (that’s the boom-and-bust cycle)–couldn’t stop the decline. Production of Alaskan North Slope oil–estimated at a total of 13 billion barrels–couldn’t stop it. How on earth will drilling ANWR, with a maximum projected 9 billion barrels, stop it?
Notice that the world did not get a string of huge new oil discoveries as a result of high prices in the last ten years, despite increasing demand. That’s a pretty good sign we’re hitting peak oil.
These idiots aren’t helping. Sure, the Bakken shale (not “Ridge”) has “thousands of years worth of oil.” Too bad it requires tens of thousands of years worth of natural gas to produce it!
“Just poke a hole.” C’mere, moron, I’ll poke a hole right now. I’m gonna go on down to the banks in Houston and tell them that’s my business plan. “I’ll just poke a hole!” Cole will hear ’em laughing all the way up in WV.
SpotWeld
Imagine a room filled with idiots. They wander about each following thier own pattern. Some are random, some are hidously complex. All are making bets on the number of idiots in a given corner of the room.
The idiots are clever enough to make some mostly-informed guesses so they generally come out ahead, espesially when they remember they can bet own thier own position in the room.
Sometimes a idiot drops dead and the rest of the room, in a panic run as far away as they can manage. Bets on the side of the room away from the corpse usually pay off.
Eventually the dead body is resolved and the idiots go back to thier brainless random wandering and betting.
When there is a dead body in the room, locking some loud people in a room doesn’t really have any affect on the idiots; alive or dead.
That, in a nutshell is the speculation market and why GOP gasbagging on “Drill Baby Drill” really has nothing to do with market prices.
Tax Analyst
@SpotWeld:
That seems a pretty good,if somewhat stinky analysis.
chopper
@Citizen_X:
lol. yeah, at least bakken is thermally mature stuff, even though it’s distributed throughout source rock. great, tons of fracking for a dribble of oil. but there’s tons of it! it’ll keep america going for 300 years! (if we only use 2 million barrels a day at the most)
and don’t forget all the talk about the green river formation. yeah, kerogen, that’s some great stuff. just like light sweet crude.
Brachiator
@Citizen_X:
I also remember the 70s, when the Alaska pipeline was sold as helping to magically end US dependence on foreign oil. Even back then, I tried to point out to some friends that this was nonsense, and also there was no such thing as a guarantee that the oil would be produced by US companies for the benefit of America only.
And now variations of the same old stupid lies are being circulated again. It’s nuts.
gocart mozart
Stop ramming sex metaphors down our throats!
Petorado
A great tool to use in conversations like this is the Baker Hughes rig count. Their latest edition of their trend charts show very accurately how offshore drilling has been in steady decline since 2001. Must be a Bush trend!
Chopper gets the oil shale end of the business. Imagine a less efficient form of synthesizing a transportation fuel than coal to liquids and what you would get is oil shale (the kerogen stuff.)
One thing to understand about the “drill baby drill” phenomenon is most countries with significant amounts of oil have nationalized their oil industries so either the country, or the oligarchy, can reap the profits rather than the oil companies. The US, and our ‘give it away for nothing to oil companies” mentality, are a major holdout to this trend. We are the last best place for exploitation of public assets and they aren’t giving this us up without a fight.
Mart
@cathyx: These FOX lies drive me nuts. I help my neighbor out at his work this afternoon and we spend 20 minutes arguing. Me – peak oil, we need to stop paying $$trillions to tyrants, massive troop presence in middle east (I don’t even mention global warming/health). He says all we need to do is drill more, there is plenty of oil within our borders. And he is certain I am the uninformed idiot.
They have molded the brains of millions into complete dolts.
Greg
I don’t drive. I hate cars. Cars make the world more horrible.
liberal
@Petorado:
A word on nomenclature: in economic (not accounting) terms, there’s nothing wrong with oil companies keeping all the profit, where profit is defined as a return to their capital. The problem is with them keeping all (or a large fraction of) the scarcity rent.
karen marie
David Brooks is an idiot.
But there’s an audience for that.