Its a ing stupid simplistic analogy that ignores that the picker is picking the apples that sell for more at the market regardless of their location on the tree.
No, the main point of the article was to push talking points even when its obvious they make no sense.
you would think a self-proclaimed engineer should know SOMETHING about why they drill there.
well, there are different types of engineers....
structural.....electrical.....mechanical......nucl ear....ocean......petroleum.....choo choo train.....
Because there's a load of oil there ?
It isn't a stupid simplistic analogy, it is fairly apt.
One must remember that time/effort carry with it a cost to any business.
In terms of picking apples here, picking apples at ground level without having to climb up and down ladders gives you a faster rate of picking apples.
To put it a bit more concretely:
Let's say you hire someone to pick apples from your orchard.
Their labor costs you, just to keep the math simple, a total of $10/hr.
Just picking the stuff that can be easily had, they pick 100 apples an hour on average.
Your labor cost per apple is calculated at 10 cents each.
Now, assume that you have picked through the easy stuff and the same person has to climb up and down a ladder to get the higher up fruit.
Their productivity now drops to 50 apples per hour. The labor cost per apple is now 20 cents.
If your profit margin in the first case is 18 cents per apple your net is then 8 cents, but now is -2 cents on the higher up apples.
You will not pick those apples until the price per apple rises.
Oil is little different. Yes you have to take the market price as you noted, and that is completely (mostly) independent of your costs. What does change is the amount of apples you can profitably pick or oil you can profitably drill.
This spill is bringing the true costs of deep water drilling a bit more to the fore, and will be factored into to future drill/no drill decisions, just like the farmer has to decide how much that next higher apple will cost him relative to his prices.
It starts off as yet another anti-environmentalist diatribe that does little other than demonstrate the authors ignorance of how the global oil market works.
The sad thing is that it sounds reasonable to people like you, who get suckered into it. In that case it is little different than the pseudo-scientific herbal remedies, and the jackasses who claim that flouride in water is a government mind-control conspricy.
Please stop claiming that environmentalists are somehow to blame for oil depletion. Its ed and has been debunked.
The rest of it is fairly reasonable, though.
cute map.
you said they don't want to drill there anyway.
A lot of that is very deep.
Do you have a YouTube or an interest group pic saying how much of a difference opening all of this to drilling will make in the price of gas?
there is so much oil that if it gets sucked out......the world will cave in.
and it would flood the market and drop prices to a nickel a gallon.
The spill isn't bringing the true costs into anything because BP will STILL make a lot of money from this well. They are never going to have to foot the true bill of the cleanup. Never. You think BP (or any other oilco for that matter) is going to factor in how much this spill hurt other industries when they have the ridiculously low cap on their damages? The worst effect they receive from this is PR and you can see how much bad PR hurt Exxon after the Valdez oil spill.
I'm very surprised you think otherwise.
Let me be a bit more clear.
"This spill is bringing the true costs of oil drilling to the fore" means that the public gets to see what those costs really are, when before it was just an abstract "what if we get a massive spill" scenario.
I don't think that BP will really pay out the true cost. They could easily spend an extra billion dollars a year on legal fees and still make money. (200+bn in annual revenues, with 2009 being a bad profit year and only 16bn in profit)
That should ing scare anyone that a private corporation with no public accountability should have that much bank.
I do think that oilcos will start factoring in the costs, because that is what their accountants will tell them, and that this will be far different than the Valdez spill though. The Valdez spill didn't last 6+ months and affect widely populated areas in multiple states.
That BP's stock is likely oversold at the moment due to hysteria is probably a good bet. Time will tell.
Lastly:
That cap goes by the wayside with a determination of negligence. I think that is looking more and more likely, don't you?
I hope this stuff spurs us into doign what I know is in our long term best interest:
Solid investment in renewables, and scientific exploration of the seafloor.
I think it is high time for us to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on energy independence over the next 20 years. The sooner we get cracking, the sooner we can provide the Next Big Thing for our economy.
"in our long term best interest"
won't happen. the hypocritical/bad-fath conservative/Repug deficit hawks will kill such research, and oil/gas/coal companies will do their best to keep the US economy totally dependent on unrenewable carbon.
America is ed, thanks to Repugs, conservatives, and corrupt Exec and Congress.
Painfully cynical, although it can certainly seem that way occasionally.
I *know* there is some solid investment seed capital betting on renewables, as Darrin has pointed out. Boosting that with a good shot of government grant money for incubator technologies and feasibility/cost/benefit studies seems to be an easy sell.
Even some conservatives have taken up the energy independence cause, although many seem to be deluded into thinking that can be acheived if only the big bad enviromentalists would just let us drill everywhere.
Have a little faith man.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 06-04-2010 at 05:37 PM.
If we swung the doors up to that shale production unreservedly, how economical would it be to extract?
I'm not sure.
Actually, it's very natural. The original biofuel.
Not exactly.
..shale oil requires a lot of water...thanks to global-climate change there is less and less snow on the mountains and less and less water for consumption...
I thought global warming increased the intensity of both thunderstorms and snow storms. Can't you guys make up your minds?
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