Like many of you, I have often wondered why oil prices shot up last year. Was it a shortage? Was there a sudden increase in demand? What happened? The truth is quite sinister.
“The staggering 2008 run up in price, which beggared hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, was caused by the sinister machinations of a few dozen oil traders and speculators in the commodity pits and lush offices of hedge funds and investment banks. (Think Goldman, Sachs at its worst.) The shortage, which terrified innocent people and literally killed the U.S. automotive industry, made a few dozen or maybe a few hundred people very rich,” according to Ben Stein in a post at the American Spectator.
This finding was from President Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission! But Obama benefited from the panic that oil was running out. He is now pushing a green agenda via the infamous cap and trade and energy control bill.
The fact is, we have a lot of oil here in the U.S. that the Democrats won’t let us tap into. Indeed Gov. Schwarzenegger just approved an oil drilling deal that will allow us to finally tap into the huge oil reserves off the coast of Santa Barbara. Here are a few excerpts about this deal from the L.A. Times:
After months of partisan bickering, the governor and legislative leaders hammered out a budget deal Monday night that would revive an offshore drilling plan with a long and tangled history. New oil extraction ventures would be allowed in state waters for the first time since a disastrous spill here in 1969 gave birth to the modern environmental movement.
Fifteen months ago, Plains Exploration & Production Co. reached a deal with local officials and environmentalists to stop offshore oil production off Santa Barbara County decades early in exchange for the right to drill into untapped undersea reserves from an existing platform.
It also promised to donate 200 acres of ocean-view property along the Gaviota coast and 3,700 acres in the region’s wine country for public parkland. The state would rake in $100 million in oil revenues this fiscal year and an estimated $1.8 billion over the life of the project.
There is so much oil off the California coast that for years it has been seeping into the ocean! Don’t take my word for it, here is an excerpt from an article about this in EV World, a website about electric vehicles.
“A sixty mile long stretch of coastline that reaches roughly from Ventura Country west north west to San Luis Obispo Country, well south of the Big Sur coast, has some 2,000 active sea floor oil seeps. According to former JPL physicist Bruce Allen, the tectonically active zone is estimated to have leaked some 800 million barrels of oil over the last 10,000 years.”
Of course California’s legislative Democrats are opposed to collecting this oil, even it it can help the state get out of fiscal problems. Who cares what they think? The latest polls indicate that our state legislators have a 17% approval rating! We should drill for that oil and sell it.
Gaviota is just north of UCSB, where I went to school. I used to sail my outrigger canoe through areas where where the ocean looked like soda water, bubbles methane coming up, with little globs of oil here and there. It’s been doing this for millions of years. First headland north of the campus is known as “Coal Oil Point”. Interestingly, this used to be the case also for LA county beaches prior to the 60’s, but the offshore drilling has reduced the gas pressure underground and the seepage has largely stopped in that area. Nevertheless, as you extract oil from a field, it gets increasingly more difficult to produce, thus more costly. Depending on a lot of factors (increased world demand, conservation policies, … ) about mid-century oil will become too pricey to burn for fuel. (This from a course in petroleum engineering I took at USC a few years ago.)
choke, gasp, gag!!!
Pedroza and I agree on something!!!!
art just so you know i DONT HATE YOU THAT MUCH HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA i agree with you on this one , the world is coming to a end
I agree, last years price spike was caused by speculators running the price up, not a severe supply shortage.
I do support the move to a green enery policy that gets us off the oil and the large trade deficit it helps create. That said there is no reason we should not be producing as much oil as we can in the meantime.