Offshore Drilling Poll

[Lugnuts]

Offshore drilling anyone?

 

[21]

I totally apologize to my friend Lugnuts, but my first thought was to post a great picture of people having boat sex.

 

[Lugnuts]

Well what's stoppin' ya?

 

[21]

If you saw the pictures I found, you would be grateful I took the high road.

 

[Lugnuts]

Hot! Hot! Hot!

 

[BTExpress]

One of our columnists had an interesting idea the other day.

Let's make a deal.

We (Florida) give you offshore drilling on our coasts.

You (USA) give us a national catastrophe insurance fund so that our premiums are not 5-10 times higher than other people's.

 

[spinning27]

The fact that 65% of Americans in a recent poll believe that drilling will bring oil prices down quickly is disturbing on many levels.

 

[HejiraHenry]

Drill now. Drill here.

You blue staters don't seem to mind when somebody named Clinton or Kennedy goes around, ahem, drilling. So crank it up.

 

[Mystery_Meat]

What a surprise that the option with the word "tit" in it is leading.

(I voted drill, because even if it takes 10 years for it to bear fruit, any other solutions probably won't be ready by then, either, so anything to help would be good)

 

[spinning27]

What a surprise that the option with the word "tit" in it is leading.

(I voted drill, because even if it takes 10 years for it to bear fruit, any other solutions probably won't be ready by then, either, so anything to help would be good)

Oil companies absolutely should drill.

They should drill the land they already have.

According to a report by the House Natural Resources Committee earlier this month:

Even if increased domestic drilling activity could affect the price of
gasoline, there is yet no justification to open additional federal lands because
oil and gas companies have shown that they cannot keep pace with the rate of
drilling permits that the federal government is handing out.

In the last four years, the Bureau of Land Management has issued
28,776 permits to drill on public land; yet, in that same time, 18,954 wells were
actually drilled. That means that companies have stockpiled nearly 10,000
extra permits to drill that they are not using to increase domestic production.
Further, despite the federal government's willingness to make public
lands and waters available to energy developers, of the 47.5 million acres of
on-shore federal lands that are currently being leased by oil and gas
companies, only about 13 million acres are actually in production, or
producing oil and gas (Figure 2). Similar trends are evident offshore as well
(Figure 3), where only 10.5 million of the 44 million leased acres are currently
producing oil or gas.
Combined, oil and gas companies hold leases to nearly 68 million acres
of federal land and waters that they are not producing oil and gas (Figure 4).
Oil and gas companies would not buy leases to this land without believing oil
and gas can be produced there, yet these same companies are not producing
oil or gas from these areas already under their control.
If we extrapolate from today's production rates on federal land and
waters, we can estimate that the 68 million acres of leased but currently
inactive federal land and waters could produce an additional 4.8 million
barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day.
That would nearly double total U.S. oil production, and increase natural
gas production by 75%. It would also cut U.S. oil imports by more than a third,
and be more than six times the estimated peak production from the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).1

http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/images/stories/Documents/truth_about_americas_energy.pdf

http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/images/Documents/drilling_facts.pdf

Seems to me like this hue and cry from the oil companies about opening up more areas for drilling is a scam to get some more corporate welfare out of the government.

Maybe if these oil companies spent more on exploration and increasing refining capacity than on buying back their own stock -- http://www.truthout.org/article/nomi-prins-its-profits-stupid -- they wouldn't be looking for more government handouts.

 

[Starman]

Drill, drill, drill. Burn the oil, strip-mine the coal, cut down the rain forests. Nuke the whales, club the baby seals!! Pump up my SUV with Ethyl! Screw you, tree huggers!!! America, **** yeah!!

 

[CollegeJournalist]

NO. NO. NO.

The best way to fix the gas dependence in this country is to keep buying OPEC's oil. Let it go to $10 a gallon and watch the whole country freak out. When it gets high enough to affect even the people with large disposable incomes and completely destroys the economy because the middle class now has zero spending power, maybe people will figure out that the answer is something other than oil, not cheaper domestic oil.

Maybe if that happens, people in this country will open their damn eyes. We're putting all our eggs in a non-renewable basket and one day, it's going to bite us in the ass. And we'll quickly figure out -- like we did at $2 and $3 per -- that four bucks a gallon is just the tip-top of the ice berg.

We dug the hole for sixty years or so. Now it's time to climb out. Depending on oil isn't doing anything but digging it deeper.

 

[Batman]

NO. NO. NO.

The best way to fix the gas dependence in this country is to keep buying OPEC's oil. Let it go to $10 a gallon and watch the whole country freak out. When it gets high enough to affect even the people with large disposable incomes and completely destroys the economy because the middle class now has zero spending power, maybe people will figure out that the answer is something other than oil, not cheaper domestic oil.

Maybe if that happens, people in this country will open their damn eyes. We're putting all our eggs in a non-renewable basket and one day, it's going to bite us in the ass. And we'll quickly figure out -- like we did at $2 and $3 per -- that four bucks a gallon is just the tip-top of the ice berg.

We dug the hole for sixty years or so. Now it's time to climb out. Depending on oil isn't doing anything but digging it deeper.

So your solution is to kill the patient to cure it. Cripple the economy, possibly drive the country into a depression -- which, by the way, would take away a lot of R&D funds to develop these new technologies -- on the off chance there will be a miracle breakthrough in physics and engineering in the next decade. Yeah, that makes sense.

I saw an interview a couple weeks ago with a GM executive in charge of developing the new hydrogen fuel cell cars. She said they're making great progress, and hope to have the first wave of cars on the road by 2013. Even the Japanese automakers are a couple more years away from mass production.
That's not bad, but think about the math here. Five years to get those cars on the road, and the better part of the next decade to phase out gasoline-powered cars and build up the infrastructure for hydrogen fuel. If I'm buying a new car in 2012 that runs on gas, I want to know I can drive the damn thing for 10 years. So you're looking at, say, 2020 before fuel cell cars are the norm. Even then, you'll still have older cars and cars in other countries that run on gas because they'll still be cheaper.
Twelve years is a long damn time to watch the price of fuel go up and up and up. I'd be for limitations on new drilling. Say, a minimum of 60 percent of the oil pumped from new offshore areas or ANWR has to be sold within the U.S. But to do nothing under the assumption these new technologies will be available any sooner than we'd get oil from new drilling areas is absurd.

 

[spinning27]

NO. NO. NO.

The best way to fix the gas dependence in this country is to keep buying OPEC's oil. Let it go to $10 a gallon and watch the whole country freak out. When it gets high enough to affect even the people with large disposable incomes and completely destroys the economy because the middle class now has zero spending power, maybe people will figure out that the answer is something other than oil, not cheaper domestic oil.

Maybe if that happens, people in this country will open their damn eyes. We're putting all our eggs in a non-renewable basket and one day, it's going to bite us in the ass. And we'll quickly figure out -- like we did at $2 and $3 per -- that four bucks a gallon is just the tip-top of the ice berg.

We dug the hole for sixty years or so. Now it's time to climb out. Depending on oil isn't doing anything but digging it deeper.

So your solution is to kill the patient to cure it. Cripple the economy, possibly drive the country into a depression -- which, by the way, would take away a lot of R&D funds to develop these new technologies -- on the off chance there will be a miracle breakthrough in physics and engineering in the next decade. Yeah, that makes sense.

I saw an interview a couple weeks ago with a GM executive in charge of developing the new hydrogen fuel cell cars. She said they're making great progress, and hope to have the first wave of cars on the road by 2013. Even the Japanese automakers are a couple more years away from mass production.
That's not bad, but think about the math here. Five years to get those cars on the road, and the better part of the next decade to phase out gasoline-powered cars and build up the infrastructure for hydrogen fuel. If I'm buying a new car in 2012 that runs on gas, I want to know I can drive the damn thing for 10 years. So you're looking at, say, 2020 before fuel cell cars are the norm. Even then, you'll still have older cars and cars in other countries that run on gas because they'll still be cheaper.
Twelve years is a long damn time to watch the price of fuel go up and up and up. I'd be for limitations on new drilling. Say, a minimum of 60 percent of the oil pumped from new offshore areas or ANWR has to be sold within the U.S. But to do nothing under the assumption these new technologies will be available any sooner than we'd get oil from new drilling areas is absurd.

You're right, that's not the solution. But the oil companies are full of **** and can't be trusted. Isn't it obvious they're trying to get their hands on whatever they can while Bush/Cheney still have power right before their influence gets significantly diminished under an Obama presidency and Democratic congress? Nice how they slipped in the no-bid contracts to service the Iraqi oil fields right before the sands ran out on Bush.

My personal opinion is that the oil companies have no interest in increasing production or lower prices. Why would they? They have us bent over a barrel as it is.

 

[CollegeJournalist]

NO. NO. NO.

The best way to fix the gas dependence in this country is to keep buying OPEC's oil. Let it go to $10 a gallon and watch the whole country freak out. When it gets high enough to affect even the people with large disposable incomes and completely destroys the economy because the middle class now has zero spending power, maybe people will figure out that the answer is something other than oil, not cheaper domestic oil.

Maybe if that happens, people in this country will open their damn eyes. We're putting all our eggs in a non-renewable basket and one day, it's going to bite us in the ass. And we'll quickly figure out -- like we did at $2 and $3 per -- that four bucks a gallon is just the tip-top of the ice berg.

We dug the hole for sixty years or so. Now it's time to climb out. Depending on oil isn't doing anything but digging it deeper.

So your solution is to kill the patient to cure it. Cripple the economy, possibly drive the country into a depression -- which, by the way, would take away a lot of R&D funds to develop these new technologies -- on the off chance there will be a miracle breakthrough in physics and engineering in the next decade. Yeah, that makes sense.

I saw an interview a couple weeks ago with a GM executive in charge of developing the new hydrogen fuel cell cars. She said they're making great progress, and hope to have the first wave of cars on the road by 2013. Even the Japanese automakers are a couple more years away from mass production.
That's not bad, but think about the math here. Five years to get those cars on the road, and the better part of the next decade to phase out gasoline-powered cars and build up the infrastructure for hydrogen fuel. If I'm buying a new car in 2012 that runs on gas, I want to know I can drive the damn thing for 10 years. So you're looking at, say, 2020 before fuel cell cars are the norm. Even then, you'll still have older cars and cars in other countries that run on gas because they'll still be cheaper.
Twelve years is a long damn time to watch the price of fuel go up and up and up. I'd be for limitations on new drilling. Say, a minimum of 60 percent of the oil pumped from new offshore areas or ANWR has to be sold within the U.S. But to do nothing under the assumption these new technologies will be available any sooner than we'd get oil from new drilling areas is absurd.

Sorry. I thought the fact that I was exaggerating some points of the argument was rather obvious. I wasn't completely serious.

But the point stands: the only way to seriously fix this problem is to put serious work into finding an alternative solution to oil. Not just foreign oil, but oil in general. As long as the majority of our country continues to spread outward from city centers and increases its dependence on oil -- domestic or foreign -- we are at the mercy of capitalist oil companies that have every right to turn maximum profit.

Obviously crippling the economy would have a damaging effect, but oil is crippling our economy right now. Sooner or later, it may take drastic measures to fix that problem. And sorry for all of those who think domestic oil is going to fix our problems. It's not. Even if we had the resources necessary to sustain the entire country for an extended period of time on domestic oil, we don't have the manpower or the capacities (read: up-to-date refineries) necessary to do so.

We are, at least right now, at the mercy of foreign oil. And even if we do start limited off-shore drilling programs, we're going to be at least partially at the mercy of foreign oil.

It's a problem we dove headlong into years ago without thinking fully about the consequences. And now when the price of oil rises the proliferation of urban sprawl and SUV buying and needless driving is finally catching up to us. And no one knows what the hell to do.

We created this problem and now we have to fix it. And I think offshore drilling is like putting a band-aid on a gun shot wound.

 

[Lugnuts]

College Journo, I like the way you think.

Hopefully you and your peeps will turnout in November??

 

[Bubbler]

NO. NO. NO.

The best way to fix the gas dependence in this country is to keep buying OPEC's oil. Let it go to $10 a gallon and watch the whole country freak out. When it gets high enough to affect even the people with large disposable incomes and completely destroys the economy because the middle class now has zero spending power, maybe people will figure out that the answer is something other than oil, not cheaper domestic oil.

Maybe if that happens, people in this country will open their damn eyes. We're putting all our eggs in a non-renewable basket and one day, it's going to bite us in the ass. And we'll quickly figure out -- like we did at $2 and $3 per -- that four bucks a gallon is just the tip-top of the ice berg.

We dug the hole for sixty years or so. Now it's time to climb out. Depending on oil isn't doing anything but digging it deeper.

I agree that people need to open your eyes, but I don't want to eat bark until they do.

 

[PeterGibbons]

I think they need to drill but put it into the legislation that oil companies MUST build new refineries and the oil drilled MUST only be sold in the USA. Also, in the legislation kill all subsidies for corn-based ethanol!! It is doing nothing but making skyrocketing food prices go higher.

I know this will never happen b/c no one in Congress has any balls and will never do this.

 

[CollegeJournalist]

College Journo, I like the way you think.

Hopefully you and your peeps will turnout in November??

Not going to matter where I vote. He's black. Though I should say, he carried the county I'm from and the county I went to school in and where I'm still a non-resident voter. But he has no shot at winning the state, so my vote doesn't exactly matter more than me feeling good about doing my civic duty.

 

[Ben_Hecht]

The fact that 65% of Americans in a recent poll believe that drilling will bring oil prices down quickly is disturbing on many levels.

Alas, there's no fair way to legislate against untoward stupidity.