'Just In Time For Collapse'

There are a couple of the Montana Dextra brethren who are jumping on the bandwagon that we can save the planet by offering already wealthy corporations the ability to pillage drill more oil in the US.  (Okay, Hammond ain't my brethren and he'll get no link from me.)    I actually like Geeguy's thinking ... to a point.  Yes, opening up American reserves of oil would be a quick fix, and people  (certainly NOT BITTER) will support such a move to get a respite from high gas prices.  Only. One. Problem.  Geeguy, and I can only assume Samuelson, are promoting a quick panacea that has no assurance of working.

By relying on the idea that Americans will weakly choose to do whatever feels good (kind of insulting to some of us) the theory is that if we open up American reserves to drilling, the public will be assuaged by lower prices at the pump.  That may be the case, for a short while.  However, it also may not be.  The oil industry hasn't blamed the high price on lack of supply, but on limited processing.  'We don't have enough refining', so they wail.  Simply put, we don't lack for reserves of oil, but for those of gasoline.  That's why the Clinton/McCain (I wonder who wears the pantsuit in that union) plan to give us a break in gas tax may seem spiffy, but won't work.  It's really a  matter of reserves, and we don't have any that we need, not money, not political capital and not gasoline.  Thank Chimpy mcWorthless for most of the aforementioned.

I know more than just a little about complexity dynamics, complex systems and chaos theory.    So I bear a high degree of confidence in writing that anyone who proposes that the only solution to global warming, mass famine and high gas prices is to burn more oil is being, at best, disingenuous.  They are promoting the idea of the excluded middle.  We can burn ethanol and starve folks, or we can burn oil and be smack-happy.  Uhhhh, no.  Complex systems don't work quite that simply.  I'd been mulling over an explanation of the point for weeks, and never got around to writing.  But as usually happens (Serendipity!) someone else wrote my thoughts for me.    I give you ... Devilstower:

What happened that evening illustrates how systems that are enormously costly and massive, can still be incredibly fragile and subject to the failure of a single part.  There's a famous antecedent that John Glenn, moments before he was about to become the first American in orbit, realized that he was sitting on a billion dollars worth of low bids. It's good for a smile, until you realize that what was true for Glenn then is even more true for all of us today.
...

Want to know why corporations are able to sit on huge sums of money, but the average worker's pay hasn't increased?  It's because they can get by with fewer of us and still get what they need.  Not more than they need, of course.  Just enough.  Corporations have been proudly "cutting the fat."  Flexibility and robustness are not the goals for a corporate society that rarely glances beyond the end of the current quarter.

I strongly urge reading the whole thing.  But if'n you won't, here's the summery:  Corporate society is focused on paper.  It makes numbers look good, regardless of the wider result.  Because of that, the numbers become more real than the long term results of actions by government or corporate leaders.  Those results are often unexpected and not too pleasant for the bulk of us.  But yet we, as good Amurkins, continue to trust that those numbers lead to solutions, instead of increasingly fragile complexity.  We're kinda foolish that way.

So yeah, we can react, and drill more oil.  And it won't stop profit taking from corporate food growers who avail themselves of opportunity.  It won't stop rising food prices; that horse has fled the barn.  It sure as frack won't do anything for climate (record droughts in those food growing regions we don't care about).  But yeah, it will make our oil executives even richer.  That's a goal I'm sure we can all get behind ... on Grasshopper Planet.

Comments

[Jay Stevens]

Hm. I've always understood the untapped oil in the US amounts to nearly nothing. A few day's burn. Also, that, yes, refinery is bottlenecked (thanks to Katrina taking out some processing plants and enviro standards making it difficult to build more), but that demand, esp. in China and India, is accelerating.

So, the oil producers will make gazillions from the drilling, we'll have huge holes in our ground, but the prices probably only increase.

Conservatives talk a good game about independence, self-reliance, and innovation, etc & co, but they always go crawling on hands and needs back to established authority. Give more to Big Daddy, and Big Daddy might give you a lollipop.

[Big Swede]

Are oil companies really drowning in a endless sea of profits, not according to facts and figures your post seems to lack.

Profited “greatly” depends on which measure one uses for that determination. The industry did make $150 billion in profit, but that came from more than $1.7 trillion in sales. Their profit margin came to a whopping 8.3%, which underperformed the entire manufacturing sector as a whole. For investors in the oil industry, and 8.3% return on investment doesn’t exactly equate to screamingly fabulous growth, especially when looking at pharmaceuticals (18.4%) and beverage makers (19.1%).

Sure profits are up, but so are the taxes they pay, 90B in 06, up 334% in 4 years. And of course if we allowed drilling offshore, and in ANWR, one of the biggest benefactor is the US govt thru lease and production payments.

[GeeGuy]

I don't think I implied, and I apologize if I did, that the "only solution to global warming, mass famine and high gas prices is to burn more oil." I will also posit that the solutions to our long-term energy needs require more realistic analysis than simple resort to tired old anti-corporate cliches about "big daddy" and his "lollipops."

The last thing I want to do is debate the merits of capitalism or lack thereof.

I think it is fair statement, though, to suggest that long-term solutions are at least as likely to come from the unrestrained greed of evil corporations (regardless of how many underpaid people are harmed in the process) as to come from government subsidized research or regulatory programs (regardless of how many overtaxed people are harmed in the process).

My point, however poorly I may have tried to make it, is that there is an awful lot of economic pain being suffered by the very people that pro-government collectivists purport to care about, pain that might otherwise be mitigated by our nation's willingness to start utilizing our own resources for our own benefit to try to give us a little more control over our own destiny.

[Wulfgar]

Wow, Swede, I'm impressed. That was a terrific way to defend Big Oil's profits. Who would have thought that record profits really aren't if you compare margins to soda pop. Disregarding the fact that no-one needs a Coke to get to work, I have to admire your deft pretense that leads us to believe that "profit" really gets measured by margin; and $150 Billion is really not that much if you compare with Billy's lemonade stand (50% margin; go Billy!)

You are right, though. My post did lack all of your Limbaugh-supplied-bullshit, mostly because it wasn't germane to the idea I was conveying. Thank you once again for spectacularly missing the point.

GeeGuy, I actually agree with much of your point (as I indicated). But saving US resources to ease pain in the US is still relying on the 'low bid'. The point I was getting at isn't that corporations are evil. Short sighted corporate thinking, on the other hand, might well be.

[DMerriman]

Drilling for more oil is certainly one way of addressing the current (and projected) shortages. Pretty damn short-sighted, though.

Ever since the Oil Embargo of the 70s, I've maintained that the country should have been putting more time, effort, and money into developing alternative resources (solar, wind, methane, and the like), improving efficiency of energy-consuming products (higher R-ratings for homes to reduce heating/cooling costs, for example), and letting the free market set energy prices. I was in Australia in 1976 (while in the Navy), and even then, they were paying Aussie $1.25/liter (that worked out to about $6.50/gal at the exchange rate then). If gas was $10/gal, I'll wager there wouldn't be a whole lot of people using Hummers, Yukons, Navigators, Expeditions, and the like to haul their solitary asses to work or around town.

When I hear people object to solar, wind, methane, hydrogen, and all the other alternative energy sources by saying that they won't replace oil, it makes me crazy(er): no, none of them -- alone -- will do that. But all of them will damn sure put a dent in how much oil we DO need and use. Aaaargh!

I still remember Jimmy Carter coming on TV and suggesting to everyone that they leave their thermostat set low in winter, and put on a sweater if they got cold -- and the furor and ridicule that followed. It seems that most Americans are perfectly willing to bitch and moan about any damn thing that inconveniences them or hits them in the pocket book -- but aren't the slightest bit inclined to actually change their own behavior.

[Big Swede]

I admit to being overly sensative when it comes bashing oil companies. But the more I think about what Devilstower and you are trying to convey about Aesop's fable goes right back to the demonization of that industry.

Sometimes I think if W. or his family had owned some fast food Texas BBQ franchise instead of being envolved in oil we would have increased our production and decreased the spike in prices we see today. But its your buddies who continue to delay, derate, and derail any efforts to increase domestic supply.

To me the grasshopper is the one who says, "we got all these grains right here at our feet, easy pickins, lets use them for our oil". While the ant says, "oil is the best resource for the combustion engine, lets find more".

Our Gov. is the perfect example of this philosophy. He knows that oil hatred sells votes, so he says, "lets make oil out of coal...or corn...or anything but the black stuff which comes out the ground, knowing full well that oil production makes his state healthy economically.

You you tell me, if grasshoppers relied only on crops for heating, transportation and food and the ant used crops for food and oil for the others, which one would spend a cold long winter with?

[Wulfgar]

That's kind of the point, Swede. Oil is not evil. Those who profit from oil are not evil. Those who are blind to maximizing the good in favor of profiting from oil ... probably not what we would call "good". There are alternatives, none any more certain than the rest. One thing we can be certain of is that short-sighted reliance to manipulate voter good will is the wrong path to take. Fuel can come from the sun, it can come from corn, and wind and it can come from hemp and it can be drawn from algae (probably the best option.) But claiming that we must exploit more oil for a brief feel-good solution (that won't have the effect desired because corporate profit won't invest in the long-term) is not the best idea around.