What a useless pile of surgically tightened skin. She’s making the pro-drill crowd into martyrs and the Dems will be blamed for high gas prices. I say call their bluff and leave drilling up to the states. If Florida wants to risk their multi-billion dollar tourist industry let them do it. Just add an ammendment that requires the Congressional Budget Office to issue a report saying how much oil is involved and when it will hit the market. That will make the Pubs look like the dickheads they are.
Nah. I wouldn’t screw Pelosi with a stolen dick. :pukey smiley:
Its tricky, but I think Obama has the right idea: compromise, and look flexible, and insist on the sort of environmental controls that should already have been in place. Capital being what it is, and capitalists being what they are, likely very little will come of it. Probably and regretably, alternative energies will not come on line soon enough to render such enterprises unprofitable, but if they do, that’s a huge amount of money thrown into the crapper. Big Oil is going to want certain guarantees for their risks, there are all kinds of ways to permit offshore drilling while assuring that very little of it ever actually happens.
For a fake issue, a bullshit response is perfectly in order.
IMHO, the whole problem could be solved if oil leases were treated like coal leases. i.e. If the oil companies don’t use them within a specified period of time, they revert back to the government.
The oil companies already hold thousands and thousands of acres in land the could develop - but have chosen not to. Right now, they are attempting a huge land grab while the getting’s good. If they had to actually use the acres as they claim they want to or risk losing them, all this clamor for more drilling would stop in a day.
I doubt it, because at the end of the day, while we’re transitioning away from oil, we actually need more domestic supply, and that oil has to come from somewhere.
A lot of the land oil companies hold leases on don’t have any oil, or at least, not enough to warrant a huge investment in development.
There IS however a lot of oil in offshore areas and in ANWR that we’re not currently allowed to touch. I suppose the question really is how much oil is there in these forbidden places?
Well, if there isn’t oil in the places the companies hold, why don’t they divest themselves of those leases? What’s the point of having them if they’re useless?
WAG: Maybe because some of the relatively worthless parcels of land were acquired with other parcels that did have appreciable amounts of oil, and it doesn’t do them any good to divest themselves of them now because the land will be worth more later?
I honestly don’t know, it’s a good question.
Because exploration leases are dirt cheap, so why not keep them?
So, up to $10/acre per year, and probably less. Literally dirt cheap, and cheap dirt.
So in the 10-20 years it will take to get any of this new oil, there will be no progress on alternatives? How about we just take some of those record profits and begin the transition now, instead of dumping the money into exec’s pockets or investing in the old sources?
There’s also no guarantee that they’ll actually sell whatever oil they get, to us. If they can get a better price from other countries, they’ll just export it. This whole thing is retarded.
We got the 800 mile Alaskan pipeline online in only three years. It won’t take 10-20 years to get things rolling, maybe to reach peak production for that long. We can tap ANWR into the existing pipeline we built in the 1970’s, too.
Well let’s hope that the oil companies are patriotic! Or the govt intervenes in such a way to comel them to keep it at home, otherwise you’re right, it would be pretty pointless, other than to provide a lot of new jobs in the oil industry.
Oh right, I can totally see the Republicans going for that level of government interference in private industry!
And more money in the pockets of Cheney et al. Woo Hoo – Support your Vice President – now that’s patriotism!
Well, the government would get quite a bit of cash from taxes and royalty payments even if all the oil is exported, but it probably wouldn’t be anyway, as it wouldn’t make much sense to tank it to Europe or Asia when there are willing buyers at home; not that it makes any difference where a specific barrel is used anyway.
That’s exactly how oil leases work, for the most part. You don’t get to sit on it forever. A company I used to work for had a surprising number of meetings along the lines of ‘Oh shit, we’ve got 3 weeks to sink a hole or we lose the lease’ on federal land in the west.