I saw an amazing interview with Texas oilman, T. Boone Pickens on Glen Beck’s show on CNN Headline News last night. Even if you think that Beck is some nut bag conservative, you should try to find the rebroadcast of this interview either online or when they re-air the shows over the weekend. (Click the title to link to the transcript of the interview.)
If your fed up with the ever-increasing prices at the pump, Pickens, who’s made billions in the oil game, lays out the very cold, very hard facts about why we are paying so much. No it’s not because George W. Bush is evil, or we are being raked over the coals by greedy oil companies or even the speculative commodities market.
The real reason we are paying so much more is the good old-fashioned economics of supply and demand. Pickens laid out the numbers as follows: “85 million barrels of oil produced every day, and the demand in this quarter is 86.4 (per day.)” That means demand outstrips supply by 1.4 million barrels every day. That’s a shortfall of over 500 million barrels of oil per year worldwide.
Pickens also laid out a damning case against our dependency on foreign oil. At $125 per barrel we export roughly $750 BILLION per year out of the U.S. economy. Currently we import 16 million barrels of oil every single day. We use 21 million barrels per day, which equates to domestic production of just 5 million barrels per day. 72% of all of the oil we use comes from foreign sources.
Our consumption equates to using 25% of all of the world’s oil production when we comprise only 4% of the world’s population.
Pickens also points out that every single President since Richard Nixon has run on becoming energy independent, yet we have continued to get worse and worse in our energy policy. As Pickens put it in the interview, “a fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan. I promise you that’s the case. We have no plan. We have no plan.”
No I’m not going soft or turning liberal, my core principles remain rock solid. It doesn’t matter if you’re conservative or liberal or spineless independent, it’s long passed time that we start to demand that our politicians stop playing games with our energy policy.
Stop blaming oil companies for high prices and playing games with threats to seize “windfall profits.” Stop claiming you have a plan for energy independence. Put in place practical environmental restrictions and stop worrying about the albino cockatoo or snub-nosed butterfly. We can safely drill in ANWR and off shore and tap into our domestic supply.
It’s well passed time that we consolidate the ridiculous number of custom gasoline blends that slow the refining process. Why could we possibly need more than a half dozen varieties? We need to make the building of new refineries easier and less expensive than
the current 15 year, multi-billion dollar process!
We need to get over the non-meltdown of Three Mile Island and start to put more nuclear power plant on line. The same goes for coal gasification, refining from shale oil deposits, the building of wind farms and solar power. It seems like we’ve gone decades and decades with hearing the old B.S. from our elected officials and we haven’t taken any concrete steps towards a real energy policy!
I really don’t care who you support in the race for the White House, because this transcends politics. This is at the core of our success and our future. We are a national built largely on the back of transporting goods and for us to be able to continue to do that and be hugely successful, then we need to take firm action now! We can stand by and do nothing and change nothing about our policies and we will be regulated back to the Stone Age.
I for one do not want to go back to being a cave dweller!
If your fed up with the ever-increasing prices at the pump, Pickens, who’s made billions in the oil game, lays out the very cold, very hard facts about why we are paying so much. No it’s not because George W. Bush is evil, or we are being raked over the coals by greedy oil companies or even the speculative commodities market.
The real reason we are paying so much more is the good old-fashioned economics of supply and demand. Pickens laid out the numbers as follows: “85 million barrels of oil produced every day, and the demand in this quarter is 86.4 (per day.)” That means demand outstrips supply by 1.4 million barrels every day. That’s a shortfall of over 500 million barrels of oil per year worldwide.
Pickens also laid out a damning case against our dependency on foreign oil. At $125 per barrel we export roughly $750 BILLION per year out of the U.S. economy. Currently we import 16 million barrels of oil every single day. We use 21 million barrels per day, which equates to domestic production of just 5 million barrels per day. 72% of all of the oil we use comes from foreign sources.
Our consumption equates to using 25% of all of the world’s oil production when we comprise only 4% of the world’s population.
Pickens also points out that every single President since Richard Nixon has run on becoming energy independent, yet we have continued to get worse and worse in our energy policy. As Pickens put it in the interview, “a fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan. I promise you that’s the case. We have no plan. We have no plan.”
No I’m not going soft or turning liberal, my core principles remain rock solid. It doesn’t matter if you’re conservative or liberal or spineless independent, it’s long passed time that we start to demand that our politicians stop playing games with our energy policy.
Stop blaming oil companies for high prices and playing games with threats to seize “windfall profits.” Stop claiming you have a plan for energy independence. Put in place practical environmental restrictions and stop worrying about the albino cockatoo or snub-nosed butterfly. We can safely drill in ANWR and off shore and tap into our domestic supply.
It’s well passed time that we consolidate the ridiculous number of custom gasoline blends that slow the refining process. Why could we possibly need more than a half dozen varieties? We need to make the building of new refineries easier and less expensive than
the current 15 year, multi-billion dollar process!
We need to get over the non-meltdown of Three Mile Island and start to put more nuclear power plant on line. The same goes for coal gasification, refining from shale oil deposits, the building of wind farms and solar power. It seems like we’ve gone decades and decades with hearing the old B.S. from our elected officials and we haven’t taken any concrete steps towards a real energy policy!
I really don’t care who you support in the race for the White House, because this transcends politics. This is at the core of our success and our future. We are a national built largely on the back of transporting goods and for us to be able to continue to do that and be hugely successful, then we need to take firm action now! We can stand by and do nothing and change nothing about our policies and we will be regulated back to the Stone Age.
I for one do not want to go back to being a cave dweller!
1 comments:
I just read an article about Mr. Pickens a couple days ago. It seems that even though he has made millions in oil, he is now looking into developing huge windmill farms, using the new technology from Erie General Electric. I believe the initial order is for something like 450 devices.
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