Anybody interested in the United States' oil/gas issues needs to watch this interview/debate with Fareed Zakaria and Stephen Moore, the senior economics writer on the Wall Street Journal. A lot of good points discussed.
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn...licans-are-pandering-on-oil-prices/?hpt=hp_t3
Stephen Moore is an ideological zealot idiot. This statement is pretty stupid:
Anderson Cooper: Stephen, do you believe that Newt Gingrich can bring it to $2.50 a gallon?
Stephen Moore: Yes, I do. I have seen presidents do this when one of the reason this is such a hot button issue, Anderson, is because of the fact that one of the reasons that Jimmy Carter lost the election 1980 was because of very high gasoline prices a result of very high inflation.
Really? We had 2 oilmen running the whitehouse and total GOP control of the House and Senate from 2000 to 2006 yet they couldn't stop the price of oil shooting up from 2000 to 2005 very sharply. And 2007 saw $4/gasoline. You think Newt could fix that? Really? Never mind that we have reports from EIA that say even if we drilled ANWR and off the Atlantic coast, it would not make a significant difference.
I don't know if he is dumb enough to believe that . . . he might be. Or he might just be a big fat liar that says he believes it because that will help his favored candidates win office.
And it is well known that he is a big fat liar when he says things like:
I mean, we have more oil right now in states like North Dakota, Oklahoma, Colorado, California, than Saudi Arabia has oil.
The ONLY way anyone could assign any truth to that statement is to include oil shale which IS NOT OIL. It is Kerogen, a waxy pre-oil substance. There is currently no process for economically extracting it. No one really knows how much it will cost to extract it. People have tried to extract since the 1973 oil crisis and there have been some projects that do extract it but it is so expensive, requires so much water, requires so much energy, and creates so much waste material that it just makes no economic sense.
Fareed knows his foreign policy stuff but he really made a MAJOR boner in that discussion:
Fareed said:
The United States for the first time is actually exporting oil rather than importing oil, and it has made no difference to our prices. In fact, as we can see, oil prices have gone up. Why?
No, we still import around half our crude oil. We merely export refined product these days because we have excess refining capacity and south/central America has demand. (We have excess refining capacity since demand has dropped due to a slowed economy and high oil prices.)
C'mon Fareed . . . you should do better than that. Look at the demand growth from China and the nearly flat worldwide oil production from around 2005. It is no mystery why gas is expensive. It is mostly supply & demand but with a little speculation froth from Iran crisis. Fareed did mostly get it right . . . he just missed the flat oil production.