Oil Prices--why not conservation?

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TPJCatholic

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I am a President Bush supporter, but for the life of me I cannot understand why he does not push the United States to start getting off oil. Sure it will take decades to get there, yet if we don’t start now, how will we ever be independent of foreign oil?

It seems to me to be a national priority of epic proportions.

Thoughts?
 
There are tons of government grants to look into alternate fuels. The cold hard fact is Americans won’t go into another type of fuel until the price of fossil fuel is too high to manage.
 
gilliam,

I would sayh with prices approaching $3 per gallon, with no end in sight, we should be looking at all alternatives to foreign oil.

One has to wonder if we would be battling terror if it was not for our national interest in oil (no I do not believe Bush went to war for oil).
 
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TPJCatholic:
gilliam,

I would sayh with prices approaching $3 per gallon, with no end in sight, we should be looking at all alternatives to foreign oil.

One has to wonder if we would be battling terror if it was not for our national interest in oil (no I do not believe Bush went to war for oil).
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We have looked into them. They just cost more than $3 per gallon (or are being held up because of Sierra Club or Greenpeace suits)

Want a nuke plan in your city? How about a wind farm? Then there is this solar farm which costs more than a nuke plant to build and maintain.
 
gilliam,

Okay, but do we want perpetual war because we have to constantly stick out nation into countries that hold vast reserves of oil? Take away oil and we would not be in those countries. Take us out of those countries and we likely would not see terrorism or war as we are now.

If we are going to pay a lot, I’d rather pay to become free again. The constant tightening of our lives due to security concerns cannot continue forever…we will implode as a nation.
 
We get most of our oil from this hemisphere, not the middle east. Additionally, if the price is too high you can conserve to protect your pocketbook, but you can’t conserve to independence unless you are willing to return to the 19th century.

While we all like to complain about the price, it is not high enough to make people change their lifestyle–in fact motor vacations will be at an all-time high this summer. The sales of RV’s are up as are the sales of full size trucks.
 
snorterluster,

Yet, very soon we are going to see a trickle down from the high oil prices. All retail goods, airline tickets, etc., will see an increase in prices because of the high price of oil. The fed is concerned about inflation due to high oil prices…if that happens, consumers will most definitely feel it.

The point is, we can and should seek independence.
 
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TPJCatholic:
snorterluster,

Yet, very soon we are going to see a trickle down from the high oil prices. All retail goods, airline tickets, etc., will see an increase in prices because of the high price of oil. The fed is concerned about inflation due to high oil prices…if that happens, consumers will most definitely feel it.

The point is, we can and should seek independence.
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We are already seeing it! The small company I work for is being charged a “gas surcharge” on its invoices.

Our garbage hauler has put a “fuel surcharge” on our bill until the cost of gas goes down.

Some airlines have added a $20 per ticket charge to cover costs.

The price of food has gone up in the last month too.

There was an article in our local newspaper on a young woman who has designed a house that uses solar power and the temperature of the earth to heat and run electricity in the house! Why we aren’t building these houses stumps me! The cost to build is not more than a normal house. A nice side effect of this kind of heating is that people that suffer from allergies experience relief. It make so much sense, but I haven’t seen anything else about it in the papers.
 
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TPJCatholic:
I am a President Bush supporter, but for the life of me I cannot understand why he does not push the United States to start getting off oil. Sure it will take decades to get there, yet if we don’t start now, how will we ever be independent of foreign oil?

It seems to me to be a national priority of epic proportions.

Thoughts?
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I agree. All I’ve heard from that side of the water is-

Global warming is a myth!!

…Errrr…Oh not it’s not, whoops!

temple-news.com/news/2005/04/05/Opinion/Global.Warming.myth.Proving.To.Be.A.Grave.Reality-912894.shtml

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1375089.stm
 
Wisdom,

I agree, and there are many things we can and should be doing…yet the Bush admin does little to nothing about oil. It does not help his oil buddy helping image (though I don’t think he gives a whit about his personal image).
 
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TPJCatholic:
Wisdom,

I agree, and there are many things we can and should be doing…yet the Bush admin does little to nothing about oil. It does not help his oil buddy helping image (though I don’t think he gives a whit about his personal image).
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Why do you think he aspired to be and remains President TPJ?
 
fightingfat,

I honestly don’t know why he wanted to be President…perhaps it was a family thing.
 
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TPJCatholic:
fightingfat,

I honestly don’t know why he wanted to be President…perhaps it was a family thing.
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Would you want to be?

Why or why not?
 
I think it is a sad thing that Bush is more worried about social secuirty, then he is about becoming more independent of the mideast.
 
fightingfat,

No, because I could never handle the politics of the office. I would not be very diplomatic in my approach.

How about you?
 
One of our problems is that we pay farmers to grow crops like rice. We produce so much rice that it’s a drug on the market, and the fair market price is below the cost of production. So we pay literally hundreds of millions to rice farmers because they can’t make a profit – so they grow more rice.

Typically, two rice co-ops in Arkansas County, Arkansas get about a hundred million a year between them.

Now, we could put a stop to this nonsense, and maybe give a bit of tax incentives to switch people over to bio-diesel (diesel from peanuts, corn, soy beans, etc.), put some money into research into more oil-efficient strains of those crops, and start phasing out geo-diesel. But the farm lobby won’t stand for it.
 
wisdom 3:5:
There was an article in our local newspaper on a young woman who has designed a house that uses solar power and the temperature of the earth to heat and run electricity in the house! Why we aren’t building these houses stumps me! The cost to build is not more than a normal house. A nice side effect of this kind of heating is that people that suffer from allergies experience relief. It make so much sense, but I haven’t seen anything else about it in the papers.
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It’s because people are generally shortsighted… you can build an energy efficient home (or nearly energy-independent) home with low-energy appliances, energy-efficient windows, solar generators, etc, and it may cost you an additional $10-20k upfront. It might take 10 years of lower electricity and heating bills to pay off. But a lot of people who are building a house would rather not add $60/month to their mortgage.

It also works best in places like California that have a lot of sunny days.
 
Bobby Jim:
It’s because people are generally shortsighted… you can build an energy efficient home (or nearly energy-independent) home with low-energy appliances, energy-efficient windows, solar generators, etc, and it may cost you an additional $10-20k upfront. It might take 10 years of lower electricity and heating bills to pay off. But a lot of people who are building a house would rather not add $60/month to their mortgage.

It also works best in places like California that have a lot of sunny days.
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Unfortunately, the numbers don’t work out for hybrid cars. The cars cost an extra $10k over a standard version of the same car. It takes a lot of miles to make up for the improvement in mileage, and the service costs are unproven at this point. So far, my understanding is the COO is higher on a hybrid.
 
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TPJCatholic:
The constant tightening of our lives due to security concerns cannot continue forever…we will implode as a nation.
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How have our lives been tightened?

Mine hasn’t. How has yours?

You mention Bush is doing nothing about oil. What would you have him do?

Do you believe opening open the Roan plateau, the Sterling project in CA (among others), trying to get drilling in ANWR, asking that refineries be built on military bases and the recently passed energy bill is doing nothing?

Why? Do you believe those measures will have no effect? If so, again, what would you do?

You ask "do we want perpetual war because we have to constantly stick out nation into countries that hold vast reserves of oil?

Not sure what you mean. Oil is the cause of all war? A “perpetual war” is a given?

You state: " I honestly don’t know why he wanted to be President…perhaps it was a family thing."

Yet before that you said “I am a President Bush supporter”

Why do you support him if you don’t know why he wanted to be President?

You also state: " I think it is a sad thing that Bush is more worried about social secuirty, then he is about becoming more independent of the mideast."

Why do you think that? What evidence do you have of that? And why, if you believe that, do you “support President Bush”?
 
Yes, we should look into alternative sources aggressively.

We should also drill in places we know there’s oil but liberals take a winter scene and PhotoShop a carabou on it and say the alaskan reserves would disrupt nature.

A good part of the problem today is also production capacity, so unless we get going and build more refineries, the supply curve is going to get very steep after a certain amount of usage. We might be seeing that now.

This is partly because the petroleum market (at least in US) is very “inelastic” in that price changes do not result in the same proportion of lost sales. By the time the “real” increases kick in from the corners we’ve painted outselves into by a) not developing alternatives, b) not drilling where we know there’s oil because of political idealism, and c) constant refinery outputs at any price approaching 100% now, and it will take decades to fix that even if we acted decisively now.

Alan
 
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