Why High Oil Prices? : Senate Enviro-Democrat Ignorance

This should be old news by now as most of talk radio and a few newspapers have carried this line for the last two to three years.

The demand for oil, and all energy resources, are growing four times faster than supply.

The market mechanism does work but it seems that the congress has to show how stupid and uninformed they are by demanding solutions from thin air. The facts be damned!! I find it amazing that the Democrats in congress think that the public is as stupid as they are. They believe the average citizens don't know how the liberals are in the bag with the environmental fascists demanding all expansion of fossil fuel research and development cease. That is coal, oil and they include nuclear. How do you like living in a tent and eating bark?

What are we to think now at $135 a barrel for oil? Who are these people? They aren't Americans, are they? Am I wrong here? Would Americans deliberately try and destroy their own country?

I do not want to turn my thermostat lower that the 65, that I have it set now, just because congressional socialist progressives want to remake out society to reflect that agenda. Are we slowly turning our personal freedom over to a tyrant? The federal government?

I don't have an answer as to why the socialists have as much power as they do given the vast majority of the population doesn't buy into the global warming fraud to start with, which when the dust clears, is at the root of the problem. Maybe it because too many of us have been too silent for too long.

So get on the phone and the computer now and let these simpletons know we mean business - open up the government lands to development and refire our nuclear program. It will take years to do this but as they say 'even the longest journey begins with a single step'. Do it now!

Keep the faith while dialing the numbers because now you know the battle is joined!


Blame Washington, Not Oil Companies
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Thursday, May 22, 2008

Senate Democrats, dragging executives from five major U.S. oil companies before them for a second day, say they're alarmed by our "failed" oil markets.

What? Congress' Democrats are the problem here, their the ones that should be is ashamed. After all, it's mostly the fault of the Congress that we're in this mess. True, the Big 5 announced profits of $36 billion in the first quarter, as oil breached $100 a barrel and just kept going.

This prompted nothing but contempt from Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin this week: "Where is your corporate conscience?" he asked the oil executives, forced to sit and listen. Others concluded that this must be a market problem. "We need to get prices under control," said Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin. "We can only conclude that the oil markets have failed.

"Well, markets have failed. But the failure is due to Congress' refusal to let oil companies drill on federal lands, thereby cutting sharply into our supply of crude as world demand grows and prices soar both here and abroad. Congressional ignorance of basic laws of supply and demand is at once bizarre, breathtaking and frightening.

For example, the American Thinker Web site this week took note of a speech delivered by New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer on May 13. In it, he urged the U.S. to force Saudi Arabia to pump a million barrels a day more of oil — which Schumer claimed would slash the price of crude by $25 a barrel.

What Schumer didn't say was that 1 million barrels is exactly the amount of extra oil the U.S. would today be pumping if President Clinton hadn't vetoed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1995. Despite this, Schumer still opposes drilling in ANWR.

As for those massive oil profits, Democrats want to slap Big Oil with a "windfall profits tax." In fact, since 2002 the U.S. oil and natural gas industry has earned about 8.1 cents per dollar of sales — exactly the same as all U.S. manufacturing, excluding autos. Not much of a windfall. To listen to Congress, you'd think oil companies don't pay taxes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In 2006 alone, according to the American Petroleum Institute, U.S. oil companies paid some $138 billion in taxes to the IRS — and that doesn't include special oil severance, sales and use taxes companies also had to pay. The total effective tax rate on oil is about 40%. This compares with a top income tax rate of 35% for all corporations. If anything, Big Oil is overtaxed.

A recent study by Ernst & Young notes that the same Big 5 oil companies that Congress harshly criticized this week earned $662 billion from 1992 to 2006. A lot of money, to be sure. But keep in mind that they invested $765 billion over the same stretch to bring us more oil from ever smaller pieces of the Earth's surface.

We are in the midst of a major global oil-supply crunch — one that can only be broken by Congress and other governmental bodies around the world taking concrete action. A report released Thursday by the Department of the Interior notes that most of the oil and 40% of the natural gas under public lands in the U.S. is off-limits to drilling. That's about 19 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.

A separate report, this one from the International Energy Agency, warned of a looming global supply crunch resulting from the failure of governments — not private oil companies — to invest more or open up their lands for exploration and development.

One of the oil business's dirty secrets is that only 6% of all reserves are controlled by investor-owned oil companies such as those demonized by Congress. The rest are controlled by governments, one way or another. And 11 of the 15 largest oil companies are government-owned.

Government is the problem, not "Big Oil."That's why this ridiculous blaming of oil companies must stop, and why the companies must be allowed to get back into the business of pumping oil. Once this happens, we'll find that the markets that ignorant and demagogic politicians called "failed" will once again turn out plentiful energy at prices people can afford.