well he is against drilling...................
your turn
Obama is not proposing we get entirely off oil in ten years.
He is proposing a plan to eliminate PART of our oil consumption equivalent to what comes from the Middle East and Venezuala.
I'm really trying not to be snotty here, but you just don't seem to be comprehending that distinction.
Your own quote from Obama says "Mideast Oil"
Not "Oil"
Not all oil, but rather oil from one particular source.
I don't think the distortion was intentional, but is was still a distortion, nonetheless.
He only recently added the "in the middle east" part to his USA oil independent. Probably realized how stupid he sounded without going into much detail.
No prob though, he's been doing that a lot lately.
Hannity has been saying for 6 months now that we could send a big FU to the middle east if we tapped all of our resources over here. Oh snapz
ok. he's against drilling, so where is this oil coming from?
We haven't tapped all of our resources because middle east oil is simply cheaper.
Why should we pay more for deep sea oil that requires billion dollar platforms subject to hurricanes to extact?
Does he want us to have higher gas prices?
Obama has not "recently" added the "in the middle east" bit.
It has been on the energy section of his website from the get-go.
To be fair:
Obama can't pick and choose where the oil actually comes from any more than Hannity can, the market does that.
Both Hannity and Obama (and McCain for that matter) seem to imply that if we did X, we wouldn't have to buy from these places or be vulnerable to disruptions from them, and that simply isn't the way the market works.
is he really?
In this post I pointed out two very specific bits where he talks about encouraging more drilling.
He isn't for a total "free for all" though, and neither am I. I would rather not get the temporary boost from oil, only to lose whole fishing or tourism industries forever to an oil spill because someone got careless.
I doubt the people who own $5,000,000 costal homes would particularly like a few tons of crude oil washing ashore. That is one of hte reasons that Florida doesn't like near-coastal drilling. One big spill and the loss of capital from coastal property values plummeting is enough to give state and local governments who depend on property taxes nightmares.
that must be the latest flip flop. it's kinda hard to keep up actually. i think the bush tax cuts are the latest, but i'll stay on task.
well the valdez happened because it was being shipped here. the dude being drunk didn't help. if we drilled that would almost totally wipe out oil spills. do some research on natural oil seepage also.
if they agreed these refineries would be more than 10 miles offshore. you couldn't even see them with the naked eye. i think in the unfortunate and/or unlikely chance we did have a spill we would be able to clean it up before it reached the shore or be visible from the shore.
well, RG, i just finished watching the oreilly obama interview. oreilly gave a teaser..........well i'll just let you hear him. i dont want x y to confuse z to the 3rd power.
advance to 9:43
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJiBDu5gWtc
1) Seepage is one of those misleading bits that oil companies and their supporters like to trot out that sounds "gee whiz" but is really misleading.
The figures for seepage they use are for VAST areas and represent very small amounts being slowly released. It is released at a rate that the biological and physical environment has contended with for billions of years.
This is vastly different than concentrating vast amounts of oil in a tanker or oil platform storage and then having that spill at a concentrated spot all at once.
"seepage" will not cover hundreds of thousands of birds and mammals in fatal goo, or form a oxygen-proof barrier over vast amounts of sea, or cover hundreds of square miles of coastline in goo that won't go away for decades.
"If we just drove more, that would end car crashes altogether." ???
I know you are trying to say "if we just extracted all of that oil, it would end the seepage", but that statement really looked odd.
Oil spills are a certainty with oil production. It is not if, but when and how much. Insurance companies, the government experts that study this stuff, and the oil companies themselves know this.
What you miss is that there would still be seepage from all the oil deposits that we will never find, or are too hard to get the oil out of, and that woud still be vast amounts of oil.
Again, seepage isn't a problem. The environment can take this kind of release.
BUT
If you increase drilling and extraction, you will have more spills. This is a statistical certainty.
I personally am willing to live with a bit of environmental damage, as long as steps are taken to mitagate it, and put the costs of that damage where it belongs, on the producers where the true costs of the good can be readily seen.
I am not the one you have to convince. I do not own hundreds of billions of dollars of coastal real estate, nor do I depend on fishing or tourism for a living. People who do will invest hundreds of millions of dollars in fighting this stuff, and these business people and and property holders will be joined by the "envirowackos" that the right loves to bash, as well as the state governments involved, if you try to force too much drilling.
Like it or not, the lawsuits that WILL come out of unrestricted drilling will drive up costs for extracting that oil, just as surely as the sun rises.
As for:
"in the unfortunate and/or unlikely chance we did have a spill we would be able to clean it up before it reached the shore or be visible from the shore"
With all due respect, I call "bull ". You don't know and can't prove that. It is a bit like saying "in the unlikely event that I have a car crash, I will only be going 30 miles per hour or less."
Damn, I wish Presidential debates would be in that format. McCain and Obama, facing EACH OTHER - talking it out; We would learn MUCH more about their respective intellectual dexterity - Obama more than held his own with O'Reilly in that segment.
I agree.
Makes one long for a "Lincoln/Douglas" style debate.
In today's TV world, it would never happen. It would take too long. The candidates would spend all their time trying to hit each of their "talking points" and never get into actually TALKING to each other.
, we should as a nation just draw lots. Pick eleven people, rent a bar for an evening, sit the two guys down with the 10 people and a few pitchers of beer.
At the end of the night, let those eleven people cast their vote for who should be president.
Don't know if it's about talking points; what would happen would be a decisive victory, IMO. Which would effectively end the campaign. The big, expensive, all kinds of people from all over the place making money, campaign.
That would be cool (they should also be able to pick one of the eleven, if he/she was superior to one of the other schmoes.)
and i quote obamessiah from last night's presidential forum or whatever it was called.
"we're going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 20 or 30% over a course of a decade..........................or two."
hmmmmmmm. i wonder what percentage of that "20% or 30%" middle east squeezes into.
The US actually doens't get much as oil from the middle east as one might think. The cost of shipping it tends to mean that we rely on closer sources, as the shipping cost adds to the overall costs faced by refiners. Europe and Asia buy more Middle Eastern oil than we do if memory serves.
For reference:
Click here for a quick, easy to read table that shows where we import our oil from.
Now for a moment of intellectual honesty:
If we reduced our oil consumption overall by 25%, we would still be buying oil from the Middle East.
Neither candidate really emphasizes that point, because it doesn't make for good rhetoric.
They will always couch their proposals with words like "we will reduce our dependence on imported oil" (but not eliminate it) or in this case "eliminate an amount equivalent to the current amount we import".
If we reduced our consumption by 25%, the overall proportions of WHERE we get our oil will be virtually unchanged.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't move away from this source of energy in favor of renewables like solar and wind, and this DOE NOT mean it is really feasible to completely change our economy to not use any oil at all.
Anybody who tries to sell you that is deluding themselves.
Over time, simply due to the physical realities of oil production supply, the price point of oil will go up to where our economy will HAVE to move away from oil, as its cost, relative to other sources of energy, will go up.
Here is one attempt to forecast where the price point (the intersection of the supply and demand curves) of a barrel of oil will be in 4 years.
I don't know how well this will come up on your browser, but the price point in Sep of 2012 is about $225 per barrel. Over 2 times what it is now.
I don't think it will get quite that bad, as higher prices tend to permanently "destroy demand" as people start changing long term habits like buying smaller cars or moving closer to work.
Any such projection must conclude that the demand curve will adjust downwards over time.
BUT
This is not a fully unreasonable scenario. There is a fair consensus that we are getting close to, if not past, the ultimate physical limit peak production of oil.
This will have some pretty long-reaching consequences.
Conspiracy theorists will tell you this is literally the end of the world, and the collapse of global civilization.
It won't be. We have the technology to change our energy mix, and as energy gets more expensive, more and more capital will be focused on research on just how to do that most efficiently. The free-market at work.
There WILL be a lot of upheaval. The sooner we get started the better.
"Drill baby drill" may cut it to give us some time to work on replacing oil, but if you think that all the offshore drilling in the world will do more than buy us a few years, you are mistaken.
i agree we should start now. get government and environMENTALS out of the way. drill drill drill will not get us out. i've always said that. not sure if i made that clear here. i don't think mccain has said that either. frankly, i'd rather drill drill drill then be taxed taxed taxed. we've got to be energy independent or at least be 85 to 90%. , let's use brasil as an example. they're kicking ass in that department. they're using the logical form of ethanol. they're not burning up a food group. at least not an important one.
Ethanol is a ed way of getting fuel, no matter WHAT source the ultimate feedstock is from.
Brazil uses a lot of ethanol, but it requires VAST amounts of land, and, more importantly WATER to feed the sugar cane stock that produces the ethanol.
The US, by comparison, has more vehicles, less farmland, and less water.
Here is some basic math:
http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/show...t=40718&page=3
This discussion with a corn farmer about it brings up some interesting bits.
Ultimately ethanol will probably be some part of it, because there is enough wasted plant biomass out there to economically make some ethanol, but do not look to ethanol to provide anymore than a very small fraction of our overall needs.
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