Thread: Drill here, drill now, pay less!

Originally Posted by Nord Jim

Yes. I wanted to know what the purpose of your question was. It's unusual to ask other people in a discussion to do research instead of making a point directly.

j

I didn't mean for you to have to do research, I just hoped you might know as I am too young to remember. And I thought you might already have known since you know something about Reagan's oil policies. I've heard stories about gasoline shortages and high prices just before the Reagan years though. I wonder how Reagan's oil policies might have related to lowering the price of gasoline and relieving demand or if they had anything to do with it at all. If you don't know don't bother, I'm not going to research it and don't expect you to either

(Oh, forgot to add that the purpose of my question was to confirm an answerr - that's about the extent of the sort of researching I do.)

Oil prices dropped because Reagan announced that America would begin the process to start drilling for our own oil again!

Originally Posted by JMS

Oil prices dropped because Reagan announced that America would begin the process to start drilling for our own oil again!

Not true, actually. Oil in 1981 was in a glut of supply, yet prices were at an all-time high. The glut, created by production induced by high prices and exacerbated by a significant decrease in demand brought by high prices and conservation measures, would remain in place for the better part of two decades. Yet, prices didn't begin to come down signficantly for over six years.

Reagan gets no credit here.

j

I guess it's just coincidence that when Reagan was sworn into office that the Iranians let the hostages go also, as it was actually Carters doing, just as he was responsible for oil prices dropping.

Originally Posted by JMS

I guess it's just coincidence that when Reagan was sworn into office that the Iranians let the hostages go also, as it was actually Carters doing, just as he was responsible for oil prices dropping.

It's quite a bit less simple than than, but in general, you guess correctly.

Originally Posted by Nord Jim

It's quite a bit less simple than than, but in general, you guess correctly.

Enlighten me would you?

Originally Posted by hoglahoo

I didn't mean for you to have to do research, I just hoped you might know as I am too young to remember. And I thought you might already have known since you know something about Reagan's oil policies. I've heard stories about gasoline shortages and high prices just before the Reagan years though. I wonder how Reagan's oil policies might have related to lowering the price of gasoline and relieving demand or if they had anything to do with it at all. If you don't know don't bother, I'm not going to research it and don't expect you to either

(Oh, forgot to add that the purpose of my question was to confirm an answerr - that's about the extent of the sort of researching I do.)

C'mon people, use your Google!

Originally Posted by JMS

Enlighten me would you?

I believe I just did. The hostage issue, though, is off-topic so I'll leave that to you. Just don't miss the part where Reagan's team contacted the Iranians back-channels to prevent the hostages from being released until the inauguration. That's my favorite part, and presages Iran-Contra.

j

I came upon an analogy to this issue that I think is quite apropos. It reminds one of a coke and hooker party paid for with a credit card. Toward the end of the night, the credit and the coke are nearly tapped. The more sober(?) party-goers realize that eventually, the party's gonna have to end, and the credit's gonna have to be paid, so they propose that we sell off the furniture now, while the party's still rockin' along. Don't make no sense to me. The simple fact is that the way we use fossil fuels is unsustainable, whether it be coal or oil, because they are a finite resource, and because we waste much more of the potential in these fossil resources than we need or ought to. We are experiencing pain right now because of the way we use the resources, and while opening up more supply might reduce some of the pain, it does nothing to solve the underlying problem. It just gives us license to not look for real solutions.

Here's another way to look at it. You own an asset which is quite valuable, and who's value is only expected to rise, and rise substantially, in the future. Do you sell off that asset now, or do you wait until the price has peaked? It seems that all other things being equal, the economically sensible thing to do is leave that oil where it is, it'll be worth a lot more in the future. Indeed, historically, the USA's policies when it comes to natural resources like copper and aluminum and the like is to let other nations sell those resources to us, even if we had more than enough to meet our own needs within our own borders. Let others exhaust themselves of resources first, when they've run out, then we can start thinking about opening up our resources if we haven't developed a better alternative to them in the meantime.

There's been a long discussion about the relative virtues of a more primitive sort of lifestyle over the modern one, and while I might have sympathies with our resident anarchist, I think he tends to overly romanticize this lifestyle. It was neither easy nor individually fulfilling to the degree that modern civilization allows. Death, disease and horrific suffering were common. You think AIDS or the Ebola virus are scary? You've never seen someone dying of the Black Death. Those zombie movies they make from time to time are less fictitious than you might think. Nor were these more primitive societies as ecologically aware as you paint them. The hunter/gatherer tribes of North and South America, as well as those that used agriculture, were known for living in an area until is was nearly completely depleted of the resources they required to live, including soil quality. When those resources ran out, they up and moved on. The reason they didn't leave the sort of widespread ecological damage that modern industrial lifestyles do is because there weren't a whole heck of a lot of Native Americans to begin with. They had this habit of killing and torturing one another to show how brave they were. The other reason is because North and South America are among the most resource dense habitats on the face of the planet, especially compared to Europe. This also explains why European culture and technology progressed far more rapidly than Native American cultures, which never even invented the wheel.

The simple fact is that progress occurs only in the face of pain. Living in Europe sucks for the most part. It's hard and you have to fight for every resource you get. People have been living there for tens of millenia, and what easily accessible natural resources that could have been used, have been. Drinking wine and beer with your meals is custom, even for children, not because of their wacky, European ways, but because the water was so polluted due to all the other people and their livestock that lived near it that wine and beer were the only safe things to drink. The old saying that "Necessity is the Mother of Invention" is quite right. Human beings, like all other forms of life on the planet, are inherently lazy. We don't expend energy unless we have to. We don't make progress or change for the better unless we're experiencing pain. This is the final reason to not drill for more oil. Even if all those pro-drillers are right, and opening up the Gulf and ANWR will eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, drop gas prices back to under $2.50 a gallon, and sustain those effects until my children are dead, it's still no good, because it puts off the pain that we need to feel in order to progress. That pain's coming, now or later, to be felt by us or by our grandchildren. When you have a bitter pill to swallow, it's usually best to swallow it now and get it done with, rather than putting it off.

It reminds one of a coke and hooker party paid for with a credit card. Toward the end of the night, the credit and the coke are nearly tapped. The more sober(?) party-goers realize that eventually, the party's gonna have to end, and the credit's gonna have to be paid, so they propose that we sell off the furniture now, while the party's still rockin' along.

In this analogy, we the consumers are the hookers, because we're getting screwed and we're not even gonna get paid.