One rich oil man knows the party is over

By Ron Beasley

It should come as no surprise that the energy bill is is dead on arrival. The politicians are doing about the only thing they can do - politics.

Last month oil billioniare T. Boone Pickens told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that World crude production has peaked. While watching FOX news today I was surprised to see this commercial.  He also has a website where you can view this:

From Pickens website:

America is in a hole and it's getting deeper every day. We import 70% of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year - four times the annual cost of the Iraq war. I've been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil. On January 20, 2009, a new President gets sworn in. If we're organized, we can convince Congress to make major changes towards cleaner, cheaper and domestic energy resources.

I don't agree with his proposal entirely but it's better than anything we are like to get out of the lawmakers in Washington and at least represents a starting point.

Update T. Boone Pickens has a commentary in the Wall Street Journal where he goes into more detail.

Comments

[Hootsbuddy]

The idea strikes me as positive. I don't see government doing anything like it (yet). Pickens is not anyone those of us on the left will love (Swiftboat, hedge funds, oil deals, etc.) but that is not an indictment of the idea itself. Until someone shows me otherwise I think his proposal has merit. Besides, it's his money. And he's putting it where his mouth is.

This "post-partisan" stuff cuts both ways. Time to look forward, not backward.

[Earl]

I've got to agree with Hootsbuddy here. Regardless of my personal disdain for Pickens, he actually admits that this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of.

I don't really give a damn if he's trying to get in on the ground floor of the next wave of energy, just as long as he actually does it.

[Earl]

Bad Earl. Must close HTML coding...

[Mark]

I can't listen to the video right now, but I wanted to comment on the various energy proposals being floated by Congresslizards of both sides. They are all - without fail - beyond idiotic and beyond short-sighted, and demonstrate the utter vacuity of vote-seeking politicians.

For example:
1. I hardly need to reiterate all the reasons why additional offshore oil drilling or drilling in ANWR will have at most a negligible long-term or short-term effect on prices.
2. I also hardly need to reiterate all the reasons why a "gas tax holiday" is idiotic beyond words.
3. "Use it or lose it" - the primary effect of this would just be to assure that future oil supplies are unable to meet demand (resulting in ever higher energy prices in the future), and additionally suffers from many of the same flaws as the argument for additional offshore drilling, i.e., it just won't have much of an effect on gas prices.
4. Good luck finding a reputable economist (left or right) who views oil speculation as being a major factor in rising oil prices that needs to be regulated for somehow being corrupt.
5. I saw at Econospeak that Harry Reid is floating the idea of requiring that any production resulting from increased offshore drilling be reserved for domestic use. The complete lack of any understanding of economics behind this idea is staggering.
6. Continued, even expanded, subsidization of corn ethanol (combined with ethanol blending requirements) is one of the most vile policies and proposals that our Congresslizards have ever dreamed up - even with the subsidies, the blending requirements at least marginally increase (not, as they want to think, decrease) gas prices. And that says nothing about the unbelievable inefficiency of corn ethanol production, the tremendous effects it has on food prices both domestically and - especially - abroad, etc.
7. I don't even want to get into the idiocy of the proposals I've seen for a "windfall profits tax" or, worse yet, an "Excessive Profits Board."

Moreover, just about every single one of the proposals I've seen from politicians focuses almost entirely on the supply side of the equation, and -worse yet - carries with it a clear and strong (and false) assumption that high oil prices are entirely a supply-side issue. To be sure, the parties attempt to attack the perceived supply-side problem from different angles (the Dems saying that the problem is that the oil companies are price gouging or are intentionally short-changing supply; the Repubs that the problem is that the oil companies aren't allowed to produce enough supply). But both approaches are equally vacuous and are nothing more than attempts to avoid blaming the voters (ie, the demand side) for high prices. Not only that, but they both apparently fail to recognize that gas/oil prices are not just increasing in the US - the fact is that high gas and oil prices are a global issue caused primarily by rapidly increasing world demand. Our prices just seem to be rising faster because we are faced with an extremely weak dollar right now.

BTW- I'm in no way, shape or form an economist (though I minored in Econ in college), but this stuff is, for the most part, really, really basic Econ 101 material.

[The HTML fixer]

Okay, let's see if that fixed the HTML.

[jonerik]

Pickens makes sense but he assumes that all of the oil this country is using is being burned by automobiles or vehicles. That's not the case, Our entire petrochemical industry is based on oil too and we use oil for many other purposes think of Saran wrap or toys, and even into chemicals for pesticides and fertilizer which we consume. How much of that can be displaced by natural gas?