Oil prices fall on further rise in US drilling, signs of slowing demand
- Thread starter WVU82_rivals
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They tried that a couple years ago. Produce oil like crazy and drive the frackers out of business and then after the frackers go out of business jack up the price of oil. It didn't work.
I believe what OPEC countries are doing at this moment is crapping their pants at the realization that they no longer control the price of oil and likely never will again. And that oil will never be super expensive again like it was back in the day. And that the new reality for OPEC countries is living with much less oil income than they've become accustomed to. Hurray for all that.
Currently trading a $45per barrel, gasoline should be under $2.00. There is a tropical depression forming in the Gulf, so the price/gal may go up with the immanent destruction of our southern refineries.
Okay, I'll buy that. They're not succeeding so far though because the price of oil is still low and the frackers are hanging in there. More power to them. And every day that passes is one day closer to renewables, which will make oil even less relevant.
Saudi Arabia has started this big program to try to diversify their economy because they see the writing on the wall. The gravy train is slowing down.
Only when the price of oil, natural gas, natural resources goes way up, will there be a profit in renewables. That's the way it should be. Look at your cell phone, there's more computing power in the old flip phone than in the computers that took man to the moon. Trying to make a market, renewables etc, where one doesn't exist is a waste of money. Where there's profit, there's innovators. When govt gets involved, there's waste and graft. Soyndra, A1 batteries etc.
What you're ignoring is the fact that renewables are maturing technologies that get cheaper every day while fossil fuels, with the exception of the occasional technological breakthrough like that which lead to cheap fracking, is a mature technology that is not getting cheaper. Even if the price of fossil fuels stays the same as they are now renewables will win eventually. The fact that you have to dig miles below the surface of the earth to get fossil fuels puts them at a systematic disadvantage.
I think a better analogy using computers would be to compare an early computer that could do math but would break down a lot to a slide rule and never break down. People might say "These crappy computers are useless, just stick with the slide rule." Yeah, but the slide rule isn't going to get any better while computers are getting better every day.
The Sun pours a tremendous amount of energy onto the Earth 24 hours a day every single day. Figuring out how to capture that is the long term winning idea.
Why would you respond like that? Really, that illustrates the problem, namely that so many (on both sides) of the political spectrum find the conclusion they want to defend and then they defend it without regard to any other input.
What I wrote is just common sense. The time when renewables get cheap enough on a large scale to push out fossil fuels is uncertain. Maybe it will be a long time, maybe not. But simple damn common sense says it will happen eventually.
If you don't think it will happen then tell me this. What do you think will happen when fossil fuels run out hundreds of years from now? Will society just collapse because we have no energy source?
I have no problem with what you are saying. You have a problem with what I said because you think that the sun offers free energy. It's not free when our govt gives people like solyndra money because they were a big backer of Obama. The Bush admin said they were crap as far as a business goes. Batteries have to be made and where there's no profit, you take away hard earned money to support a business that needs to stand on it's own two feet. Solar will become a great source of power in the FUTURE when it becomes cost effective. Now, you have to rip the public off to get people to install solar panels by giving them ridiculous tax advantages for doing so. Is there a tax advantage for cell phones purchases? No, there's profit and that's why they are better.
Politics has nothing to do with what I'm saying but since you brought politics into it note that the fossil fuel industry, just like every industry that's been around forever, gets tons of subsidies in one form or another.
You're assuming the only way for other fuels to be cheaper than fossil fuels is if the price of fossil fuels increases. You're discounting the other way, which is for the price of other fuels to decrease. And they are. Every day. Do some googling on the cost solar energy per GW produced over the last few decades. It's going down and down.
Pretend for a minute that you don't know anything about energy. And pretend someone asked you which method would be better to get energy, one that involves drilling a mile below the ground to get some substance or one that involves capturing from the air the giant volume of energy that constantly pours onto the planet. What would your answer be? Again, this is just common sense.
"The problem?" What's the problem, BROp2? If we don't get in our own way, I believe the future can be wonderful. I think you're just a little too anxious. Micro-electronics is awesome, but a computer has never gone to outer space or lifted something or basted a tunnel through a mountain all by itself. That still takes energy. Also, do you know where plastic comes from? Hint: not plastic trees.
I wouldn't have to be like a broken record if people wouldn't ignore the simple damn common sense things I say.
What does this have to do with anything? Am I advocating for the complete stoppage of oil? No, I'm just acknowledging the common sense reality that things change and an energy system that's been around for a long time is gradually being replaced by something better, just like everything is gradually replaced by something better. The future is going to be better than wonderful, of that I am confident.
Don't forget to pour that used antifreeze and motor oil into the nearby creek. And just toss that Coke can out the window of the car when you're done with it.
But seriously, re. recycling I've read enough about it that I'm not sure it even does any good in the grand scheme of things But everybody does it now so it's not going to go away.
I basically want to know what is "the problem" to which you are referring. Our glorious high-tech future, and I mean that, will be easier to transition into, and better, if it occurs naturally without government mandates. A free market system provides better goods to more people. We should know this by now, IMO.
I agree in general that things are better without government interference but I also acknowledge that the government interferes a lot and for a long they've done so in favor of fossil fuels and they continue to do so know.
But I don't know how that gets to the point I was addressing anyway, which didn't have anything to do with specific policies but rather was the more general point that given enough technology renewables is simply a far superior paradigm than digging stuff from a mile below the surface of the earth and that as a result it's just common sense that renewables will win out eventually. It mystifies me that anyone would disagree with this but a lot seem to do so.
Since I run a business, a real business, I would say let the market place dictate what we use. The market place is a better at getting the best product at the cheapest cost. Liberals want to tell you what you should be using no matter what the cost. Again, I think solar will become a force in the futre, not while you and I are alive. We have 200 years of fossil energy to use up that is still the cheapest form of energy you can purchase.
If you think we'll still be using fossil fuels in large amounts in 200 or 150 or 100 years then you're drunk. If you're interested here's a World Bank webpage that shows the percentage of energy created from fossil fuels over time or for each individual country.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.COMM.FO.ZS
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.COMM.FO.ZS
If you run a business I bet if you thought real hard you could think of some ways that the government subsidizes you. There are probably things that you don't think of as subsidies that effectively are subsidies.
I can tell you I'm an S corp and my overal tax rate is 40%. I'm getting screwed royally. I've laid off people, cut back hours and the only subsidy I get is a depreciation schedule that takes too long. I'm a dentist so there isn't much the govt does for me, wiseguy. By the way, liberals are so fast to tell us what to use and how to use it, how about you let us use what is best and cheapest?
I don't know anything about dentistry but I bet a million dollars that there's at least one dentist lobbying groups doing what they can to talk the politicians into making rules favorable to dentists. If dentists don't have a lobbyist group then they're the only profession that doesn't.
Well, now that you mention it, what is inherently more efficient, growing an animal, heating it's body 24/7, feeding it, growing its bones, running its brain, running its GI system to create the waste (which you then have to deal with), etc, or simply growing the meat?
You think I came up with that idea? No. It's been around a long time. Winston Churchill wrote an essay on it in 1932.
http://rolandanderson.se/Winston_Churchill/Fifty_Years_Hence.php
As I recall there was verbiage in Catch-22 about something like that. I read it long ago and it was a good book and the author was very clever with language. I can't remember the passage now but it was funny.
Farmers have very powerful lobby all over the world. It's not just in the US that they get ridiculous subsidies of all kinds. France, Japan, all over. There is something about farming that makes people romanticize it and it gives farmers lots of power.
It went something like this: You'd have to be crazy to want to be in the military, so you couldn't get out for being crazy, I think. For some reason I think Popeer would know. Not about the crazy, but a about the Catch.
I was thinking of something else in the book. I looked up. It's described in the first paragraph of this article.
http://www.economist.com/news/unite...mers-grow-subsidies-instead-milking-taxpayers
http://www.economist.com/news/unite...mers-grow-subsidies-instead-milking-taxpayers
Here is part of it.
“The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.” Each day, Mr Major “sprang out of bed at the crack of noon... just to make certain that the chores would not be done.”