You realize that your scenario is completely unrealistic, right, and is not the way oil is produced and sold on the world market? One, every nation in the world uses oil, so you need to account for this, too. Two, it’s not as if demand for oil remains constant. The U.S. doesn’t “need” any amount of oil. The U.S. uses a certain amount of oil, and if the price gets too high, that consumption decreases. If a severe shortage of oil occurred then the price for consumers would rise dramatically. That means that consumption would go down, and all of a sudden the U.S. wouldn’t “need” as much oil as it did previously. Three, production can increase, too. If the price of oil were that high there would be a large rush to produce more oil. In the end, everything would come to an equilibrium.
Your scenario would simply never come to pass. You are assuming that this is a simple equation where everything remains equal if you change one part of it. Sorry, but when one thing changes everything else changes in response to that.
And finally we get to something we can agree on, but this just makes my “make” believe world more realistic.
This government cannot in anyway allow oil to get to that severe shortage stage without trying everything to secure more.
Price rises out of reach of the consumer, economy crashes, hello bread lines. So in my scenario we invade Iraq to try to keep affordable oil for the consumer for as long as possible.
Now does your view on this war change at all?
I hear what you’re saying. So as a commodity, oil is traded/bought on the open market. If I work for Microsoft, I might get preferencial prices on stock purchases that are better than open market stock prices.
Might that not be the case if Exxon sets up a processing plant in Iraq, purchases extraction rights from Iraq and then sells it to its distributors at a preferential price. Now imaging Mobile, Texaco and whatever other U.S. oil company sets up shop in Iraq to do the same. All competing oil companies on the open market but all U.S. based and now saturating the oil extraction and processing (with good market profits for Iraq for their resources). Is there much room left for anybody else wanting to do the same? Are there not oil “contracts” negotiated with the providers? It’s not like any random tanker just pulls up and fills up at the tap and pays the cashier on the way out. I understand that in Saudi there is Aramco (a Saudi company) that is responsible largely for extraction, and distribution. I imagine any Iraqi equivalent has been descimated long ago.
Says who? Oil will eventually run out and as we proceed down the road to this eventuality, the price of oil will keep rising. As this happens, people will find profitable to find other ways to fuel our economy. It’s not as if we are going to wake up tomorrow and say, “oh, shit, we ran out of oil!” We will experience an oil shortage, but it will not take place as you have envisioned. It will be gradual over hundreds of years.
I don’t think your contention is implausible, Quicksilver, but I’m unsure what you’re getting at.
No matter who takes it out of the ground, whether a U.S. corporation or a state-controlled monopoly which exists in many Persian Gulf nations, oil is still a world-wide commodity. Once it hits a tanker it’s not “Iraqi oil” or “Saudi oil,” depending on where it’s produced; nor is it “U.S. oil” or “Chinese oil,” depending on where it will eventually end up. It’s just oil.
The thing that boggles my mind is you are arguing against a pretty solid history of resource wars, if everything was as cut and dry as you state a lot the wars in history would of never happened. And if your saying we have economists now everything changed, then thats even more mind boggling.
Money becomes worthless when a supply cannot be replaced and demand is steady.
I don’t imagine this as happening like this, its all done to base the question on. If that was the case would your views on the war change?
This is not a oil depletion related thread, I have seen those and there is no one side that can factually answer the other sides views.
Some think the end of oil is right around the corner, others think in 20 years and you think in 100’s of years.
(Which OT I would love to see how you come to that conclusion I have seen nothing anywhere stating enough oil for another 50 years let along 100’s of years).
I thought we came to an agreement on the fact that if the price raises to much the economy would collapse and the government would not allow that to happen while sitting idly by, but I guess you think otherwise.
Your links prove absolutely nothing since they have no relevance on the situation you described. There was no shortage of oil that caused the first Persian Gulf War. Hussein simply wanted to control Kuwait’s oil. Similarly, there was no shortage of oil that caused Japan to attack Pearl Harbor.
The diamond and other resource wars of Africa are likewise a poor fit for this exercise. There is no shortage of diamonds and other minerals – these folks are simply fighting over who gets to control them.
And the colonial era is over; pretty much everyone today acknowledges that this is not a sustainable way of running a nation. Plus, what does this have to do with your original post?
In your scenario, a shortage of oil in the world prompts the U.S. to attack Iraq in order to secure supplies of oil for ourselves. Sorry, but this is not even close to similar to any of the examples you mentioned above. I’ve also demonstrated how unrealistic it is. Your theory holds absolutely no water.
I re-read the posts, twice, to find where you proved anything other thats how the worlds oil is supplied now.
When water was abundant in the western US there was minor complaints from those who shared water, now they have huge complaints and larger case loads for “water judges”
Because times change and things change with a finite resource. Its all good and peaceful until someone needs something someone else has.
Actually, the history of the West is full of conflicts over water rights. As soon as you had person #2 move into an area of the West, you had a conflict over water rights. As the saying goes, “whisky is for drinking; water is for fighting.”
The world’s oil supply will continue the way I described until it runs out centuries from now. As oil gets harder and harder to extract, and therefore we have less and less oil, the price will continue to rise. As it does so there will be an incentive for people to develop alternative energy. Look at any fuel throughout history. Oil used to be a nuisance liquid, until the price of other energy sources gave an incentive for someone to develop an alternative source of energy. Voila! We now have a petroleum-based economy. The same model will hold true for whatever form of energy our economy is reliant upon in 2505.
Renob can you please explain to me again how the oil producing nations cannot impact the U.S.? It seems to me that since the U.S. was ready to invade Saudi Arabia over the 1973 embargo, they effectively DID just that. It’s not necessary that they do it in a surgically precise way. By the way it’s not true that OPEC only restricted worldwide oil. They specifically boycotted countries that supported Israel.
Also your theoretical models are outlandishly perfect. If there’s a shortage of oil then other countries will increase production to pick up the slack? Maybe, but not before possibly driving the country into a recession, etc. Or the U.S. can just at will lower consumption to adjust to achieve equilibrium? Hardly. In fact consumption in the short term can only be altered a relatively small percent without seriously damaging a country economically and militarily.
Yeah, the OPEC embargo essentially stopped oil to the U.S., parts of Western Europe, and Japan. Of course, we had a different world back then with the USSR and a variety of communist countries that no longer exist. The world is a much more market-driven world now, so I don’t think the OPEC embargo could happen today.
I’m not saying that production will increase in other nations right away. I’m saying that consumption will adjust in response to rising prices. It’s not a matter of "the U.S. just lowering its consumption “at will.” It’s not as if the government controls U.S. consumption. Consumption is controlled by consumers that respond to prices. As prices rise, consumption goes down.
Bolding mine
So thirty years ago things could change, but today nothing can change? Because thats the way it is now it has to be stay that way. Interesting concept.
Previous quote
So you where wrong here, which means that my “world” could be realistic. If it wasn’t for some of the brighter bulbs in here I would of thought you handed me my ass and my world would be impossible. Guess you only had me fooled.
No, I wasn’t wrong. For one, as I said above, the worldwide economic and political system is much different now than it was in the 1970’s. Two, the OPEC embargo of the 1970’s isn’t even close to your scenario, which has the world running out of oil. The OPEC embargo came suddenly and ended rather quickly. The world will run out of oil, but only gradually over the next hundreds of years.
See I knew it your arguing against oil depletion which was not the intent of this thread, I have seen at least 10 threads along those lines, go jump on them. I was asking hypothetically, not to argue for or against how much oil was left.
*bolding added by me
Now if you can tell me how you where not wrong I would love to see this as well. Because to me this looks like you might of been wrong.
You said this
Perhaps you would like to actually provide some support to your proposition in your opening post, rather than engage in a Socratic dissection of other’s arguments?
Can you tell us how is it that Iraqi oil will only end up in American hands?
And perhaps you can explain why the US consumption of Iraqi oil has been more or less steady since 1999, excepting the periods of war, the Iraqi embargo on the US, and the decreased production due to recent attacks on Iraqi oil facilities? Cite.
These numbers, by the way, show that the average amount of Iraqi oil imported per month by the US in 1999 and 2001 exceeds the amount imported in any month since the war began, save two.
Interestingly, US consumption of Iraq oil peaked in the month BEFORE the war began.