Quote Originally Posted by Gawain of Orkeny
I want to use what works now and plan for the future.
No, you want to look at the past and continue to do what worked then. You are a mirror of corporate America at the present. Planning for the future is exactly what you try to discount. You dismiss it as a bunch of lefties and environmentalists. (Tempting to start an ozone/CFC discussion here.) That's why we haven't had a working energy policy. The energy bill that finally made it through was a mere drop in the bucket.

Somday yhou will wake up and realise this is a balancing act. The reason they dont drill more is because they couldnt refine it anyway. We need to both drill and build new refineries,
I'm wide awake. We haven't been doing a balancing act. The alternative energy investment fell to a trickle after the supply based crises of the 70's ended. Energy conservation has been nearly absent in industry since then--didn't seem to matter how good the rate of return was on my energy savings based projects, the managers were not interested. We have tech now that can start shifting our consumption, but it takes time, and we aren't making use of it. Our President openly ignores at least 2/3rds of the tools at his disposal.

Refineries? We've been over that popular piece of nonsense ad nauseum. It fails to explain today's market. In fact, there are efforts in the industry to shut down older refineries still--and I can think of one closure that is being opposed by the very "greenie" populations you complain about. Refinery capacity is added as needed...I should know, I've worked on several recent projects.

Your circular logic does not match the data.

First off we have to live now. Secondly once more there is plenty of oil left. We havent even gotten half of it yet at best.
Stick your head in the sand, poke your fingers in your ears. You want to go on PRETENDING that there is no problem. You have no solution other than to keep doing what we've been doing, despite real changes to the nature of the market and supply. We can live just fine now, but we can also invest in the future, rather than working on the wrong end of the beast.

Do you think we suddenly started running out of oil around a year ago? Oil is a commodity and its pricwe is whatever they think they can get away wiith. Their predicting shortages in supply and thats why the prices are going up just like they did in the 70s when we were "running out of oil"
You still can't get it...how many times do I have to explain the difference? That was an artificial supply reduction, this one is about demand outstripping supply, and not in an artificial way. It would not have mattered so much...but the U.S. no longer had excess supply, it hit its limit in 1970...as Hubbert predicted. But hey, you don't believe that approach. If you did, then you might understand what is wrong with your theories.

We've been running out of the lighter varieties of oil for decades (despite efforts to bolster production and "drill our way out") and now we're starting to fill the crunch. However, yes, we did start running out of production capacity about two years ago. If you go back and look at the "excess" supply capacity numbers I posted in the other thread the change is obvious (unless you are Helen Keller.) With excess supply capacity at less than 1% of total usage, there is no swing buffer, and growing production is critical just to prevent a major shortage. The Saudi's admit they are trying to keep up by putting in new production capacity. Everyone else is already tapped out.