Right Minded Online

Upward tick in gas prices may be coming to an end – Yahoo! News.

We were doing so good there for a while, but the price of oil and gasoline have been creeping back up the last few months. Demand is low, supply is high, so that should mean lower prices. But the plentiful supply simply isn’t being shipped to market.

The economic recovery Naimi so optimistically predicts would certainly be vital to oil-producing countries, whose own economies would be imperiled by a drawn-out recession. Oil demand in rich countries has crashed since the onset of the economic crisis last year, and is now at its lowest level since about 1981, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. U.S. oil inventories – the stored surplus – this month reached their highest level since the 1980s. And about 2.6 billion barrels are currently stored in commercial tankers around the world. “There is some risk we will run out of storage space in the next four to six weeks,” says Simon Wardell, director of global oil at IHS Global Insight, an energy-forecasting company in London. To oil-rich countries that possibility evokes grim memories of 1998, when the Asian economic crisis sent demand plummeting, driving world oil prices down to $10 a barrel. “If we run out of storage it could prompt a collapse in the price,” says Wardell. Oil producers might then choose to dramatically cut output in order to run down the surplus.

Oil Is Plentiful, Demand Weak. Why Are Gas Prices Going Up? – Yahoo! News.

The price of gasoline is now lower than when George W. Bush came to office eight years ago.

Washington Times – Price dip adjusts Bush’s gas legacy.

What is it government and global warming alarmists have been telling us? To drive less and buy more fuel efficient cars, which I refuse to do, but enough Americans have done as they were told that we are buying noticeably less gasoline, which has cut the stream of tax revenue to government, and since government can NEVER do with less, there is a movement underway to increase the federal gasoline tax.

Charles Whittington, chairman of the American Trucking Associations, which supports a fuel tax increase as long as the money goes to highway projects, said Congress may decide to disguise a fuel tax hike as a surcharge to combat climate change.

Transportation is responsible for about a third of all U.S. carbon emissions created by burning fossil fuels. Traffic congestion wastes an estimated 2.9 billion gallons of fuel a year. Less congestion would reduce greenhouse gases and dependence on foreign oil.

“Instead of calling it a gas tax, call it a carbon tax,” Whittington said.

What is I’ve been telling you? That global warming is nothing more than a hoax designed to grow government and raise taxes. Indeed, motorists have done exactly what we’ve been told to do as far as conserving energy, and government is lamenting that we have obeyed. And they are going to “reward” our obedience by raising taxes.

It wasn’t that long ago that the “experts” were predicting $200-per-barrel oil and $6 or $7-per-gallon gasoline. Well, today, the price of crude fell to around $43 per barrel, a 4-year-low, prompting the “experts” to predict $25-per-barrel oil and $1-per-gallon gasoline.

First, Barack Obama said he would back off on his pledge to raise taxes on the rich, and now he has backed off on his windfall profits tax for big oil, since the price of crude has dropped below $80 a barrel. (Actually, it’s trading for around $46 a barrel right now.) This is both good news and bad news. The good news is apparent. The bad news is that Obama was planning on punishing oil companies for windfall profits when the price was $80+ a barrel, even though oil companies don’t control the price of crude in the first place.

Now that the price of oil has dropped to around $50 a barrel, Saudi Arabia’s king says it should be $75. The Iraqi oil minister says it should be $80. Funny, but I don’t recall them making these assertions when we were paying $146 a barrel.

The federal government has auctioned off some land out west for oil drilling, to which I say “Bravo!”

Late on Election Day, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a Dec. 19 auction of more than 50,000 acres of oil and gas parcels alongside or within view of Arches National Park and two other redrock national parks in Utah: Dinosaur and Canyonlands.

The National Park Service’s top official in the state calls it “shocking and disturbing” and says his agency wasn’t properly notified. Environmentalists call it a “fire sale” for the oil and gas industry by a departing administration.

Officials of the BLM, which oversees millions of acres of public land in the West, say the sale is nothing unusual, and one is “puzzled” that the Park Service is upset.

It’s amazing the places environmentalists won’t let us drill: the frozen tundra of Alaska, the arid regions of the western U.S., out in the ocean. Liberals are decidedly anti-growth, anti-oil, anti-capitalist, anti-anything that would make life economically better for U.S. citizens.

That’s what I paid per gallon of gasoline today. I cannot remember the last time I filled up for less than $2 per gallon. I guess I could look it up, but it seems like years.

Barack Obama has expressed his desire to bankrupt the coal industry in America. What a way to win over the coal vote. I wonder what other industries he would want to bankrupt if elected president.

Senator Joe Biden continues to be a gaffe machine, as pointed out most recently by Ben Smith on his blog over at Politico.com.

Biden’s apparent answer: He supports clean coal for China, but not for the United States.

“No coal plants here in America,” he said. “Build them, if they’re going to build them, over there. Make them clean.”

“We’re not supporting clean coal,” he said of himself and Obama. They do, on paper, support clean coal.

The answer seems to play into John McCain’s case that Obama has been saying “no” to new sources of energy.

In the primary, Biden opposed Obama’s push for clean coal, which is seen as a way of maintaining or expanding America’s coal-burning power plants — many of which are in rust belt swing states.

“I don’t think there’s much of a role for clean coal in energy independence, but I do think there’s a significant role for clean coal in the bigger picture of climate change,” he told Grist last year. “Clean-coal technology is not the route to go in the United States, because we have other, cleaner alternatives,” he said, but added that America should push for a “fundamental change in technology” to clean up China’s plants.

Biden also was not shy on his own clean energy credentials.

“The first guy to introduce a global warming bill was me 22 years ago. The first guy to support solar energy was me 20 years ago,” he said, apparently referring to the 1986 Global Climate Protection.

Think Progress has some more context, and Jake Tapper reports that Obama this morning rebuked Biden on a separate issue, his quick opposition to a federal bailout.

Today, Senator John McCain pounced on Biden’s remarks.

“I am going to put in place the priorities and policies that will create jobs in Ohio. One important way that we are going to create jobs here is with the development of additional nuclear plants and through investments in clean coal technology,” he said. “[Obama's] running mate here in Ohio recently said that they weren’t supporting clean coal.”

Biden spokesman David Wade responded by calling McCain’s statement “yet another false attack from a dishonorable campaign.”

He continued: “Senator McCain knows that Senator Obama and Senator Biden support clean coal technology. Senator Biden’s point is that China is building coal plants with outdated technology every day, and the United States needs to lead by developing clean coal technologies.”

But the error here does seem to be Biden’s, and his remarks, and his apparent return to his primary position Tuesday, were striking because just three days ago, he praised the possibilities of coal to a crowd at the United Mine Workers of America annual fish fry in Castlewood, Va.

“You know we have enough coal in the United States of America to meet out needs domestically for the better part of the next hundred to 200 years,” Biden said before launching into a critique of McCain’s energy priorities, slamming his support for billions in tax breaks for oil companies as the industry rakes in record profits.

“Imagine … what Barack and I can do taking that $4 billion … and investing it in coal gasification, finding out what we can do with carbon sequestration, finding out how we can burn the coal that you dig that can free us from being dependent on foreign oil countries and at the same time not ruin the environment. That’s within our capacity to do it, if you give me $4 billion I promise you, I promise you we will find the answer,” Biden said.

He linked the ticket’s support for coal with their call to have U.S. automakers produce plug-in electric cars. “Where’s that [electricity] come from? That comes from a utility. What do utilities burn? They burn coal mostly.”

So is Joe Biden for coal or not? I guess it depends on the audience.

I don’t think anyone has blogged as much on the Gang of 10 as Terry Frank, whose latest post points to a study predicting the results if they actually get their way on energy policy.

We estimate the proposal will increase corporate tax burdens by approximately $13.57 billion over ten years, 44 percent of which will fall on households in the petroleum manufacturing states of Texas, California and Louisiana. Using RIMS II multipliers we estimate the proposal will reduce U.S. employment by roughly 637,000 jobs over ten years, reduce household earnings by $34.97 billion, and reduce total U.S. economic output by $185.95 billion.

terryfrank.net » More Economic Costs of Corker’s Gang of 10.

Hurricane Gustav has delivered the Big Easy only a glancing blow and weakened considerably since coming ashore earlier today. This is terrible news for the Democrats, good news for everybody else. The price of oil also dropped $4 a barrel in the wake of the averted disaster, falling all the way to $110.95, its lowest price in quite some time.

My brother shipped along the link to George Will’s latest masterpiece, this on Obama’s economic/energy plan and how he would try to change the way Americans live either by government force or by government incentive. This guy is a social engineer who wants to have his hand in everyone’s personal choices.

Obama has also promised that “we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.” What a tranquilizing verb “get” is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both — billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers and billions more to bribe customers to buy cars they otherwise would spurn.

George F. Will – Little Rhetoric Riding Hood – washingtonpost.com.

On July 15, President Bush lifted the executive-branch moratorium on offshore drilling. At a news conference the following day, the President repeated his position while slamming the Democrat Congress for not lifting the congressional moratorium on drilling offshore and elsewhere. Crude-oil futures for August plunged $9.26, or 6.3%, almost immediately as President Bush was speaking, bringing the barrel price down to $136.

Oil prices have not stopped dropping since. As of this writing, the price of oil was $116 per barrel, down more than 20% since President Bush’s July 16 news conference. Some of the additional decline may be attributable to a slight decrease in demand, but the fact remains that President Bush sent the pendulum swinging the other way.

Wrote Larry Kudlow at National Review Online, “Democrats keep saying that it will take 10 years or longer to produce oil from the offshore areas. And they say that oil prices won’t decline for at least that long. And they, along with Obama and McCain, bash so-called oil speculators. And today we had a real-world example as to why they are wrong. All of them. Reid, Pelosi, Obama, McCain – all of them.”

Indeed, President Bush proved in one day what Democrats said would require ten years: that increasing the supply of oil will lower prices. Even the prospect of drilling for more oil caused the price to drop.

Given repeated opportunities to allow more drilling, especially along the outer continental shelf, Democrats have refused. The Democrats say we need to end our dependence on foreign oil. Their solution? Completely transition from oil to renewable energy. Al Gore has set the bar at ten years to make that transition. So ten years is too far off for drilling, but not for renewable energy.

The American economy is by far the largest in the world. Oil is fuel that drives this economy. Yet Democrats display more vitriol toward oil than Osama bin Laden. Oil has become the enemy of the Democrat Party.

When Democrats became the majority party in Congress in January, 2007, the average gas price was $2.32 a gallon. Last month, the price peaked at $4.10 a gallon — a whopping 77% increase in just 18 months.

Imagine a typical family that uses, say, 100 gallons of gas every month. Now imagine that we did open more areas for drilling and the price were to come back down to $2.32 a gallon, which is not an unreasonable expectation. That would translate to a savings of $178 per month, or $2,136 per year. That’s the equivalent of a robust tax cut similar to the Bush tax cuts. Of course, we know how the Democrats feel about tax cuts. Except the Democrats couldn’t spin this one as a tax cut for the rich. As far as percentages go, rising gas prices hurt the poor the most, and so a reduction in gas prices would similarly help the poor the most. And Democrats are all about helping the poor — except when they stand to lose politically, then the poor become irrelevant.

You see, Democrats don’t want the price of gas to come down as long as President Bush is in office. They need to be able to pin the blame for high gas prices on President Bush and the GOP, because on the left, politics trumps the good of the country and the good of the consumer. So Democrats must make the American people suffer just a little while longer while they go pandering for votes. Despite their witless “we can’t drill our way out of this” rhetoric, they know that increasing supply, which is the GOP’s solution, would be the most effective means for lowering gas prices. We know they know because Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have both called on President Bush to release a portion of the strategic oil reserve in order to lower gas prices in the near-term. In other words, they want to increase supply in order to lower gas prices. But they don’t want to drill, which illustrates why liberalism is so bereft of logic and common sense.

To quote a Tennessee GOP bumper sticker, your wallet is the only place Democrats want to drill.

The Maha Rushie played a clip of oil executive Rex Tillerson giving mainstream press reporter Charlie Gibson a lesson on just what his company does with its money, like it’s any business of the media, or the government.

TILLERSON: Everything we do, the numbers are very large. I saw someone [Barack Obama] characterize our profits the other day in terms of “$1,400 in profit per second.” Well, they also need to understand we paid $4,000 a second in taxes, and we spent $15,000 a second in cost. We spend $1 billion a day just running our business. So this is a business where large numbers are just characteristic of it.

GIBSON: When profits are so high, why is spending on exploration so low?

TILLERSON: Well, we’re spending at record levels. Through the first half of this year, we have spent $12.5 billion. That’s a record level of capital and exploration expenditures for us.

Big Oil and Staggering Ignorance.

A mainstream media survey finds that gasoline is actually more affordable now than it was in the early 1960’s.

After studying the average yearly price of gasoline from 1949 to 2007, and assigning the number “1″ to the ratio in 1960, we found today’s prices comparable to what they were in 1960 (1.35 today to 1.00 in 1960, with a high of 3.32 in 1998). The higher the gasoline affordability index figure, the lower the price of gasoline relative to disposable income.

Consumer anger about rising fuel prices has taken a while to build because, until the last year or so, the increases could be shrugged off as natural year-to-year price variation. Moreover, pump prices still seemed relatively cheap given increases in personal wealth. Personal disposable income since 2000, for instance, has increased by an average of about $4,800 a person. Those very real increases in economic well-being reduced the pain of higher prices at the pump. People didn’t notice that real gas prices were higher because the percentage of their income going to the gas station was at an all-time low until recently.

A big surprise on gas – Los Angeles Times.

Congress has gone on its summer hiatus, which is usually a good thing, except the Democrats neglected to do anything about oil prices by refusing to allow a vote on opening up more oil drilling along the OCS. In his weekly radio address yesterday, President Bush nailed the Democrats on their refusal to lift the moratorium.

While Obama is telling us to inflate our tires and get tune-ups, the Speaker of State, Nancy Pelosi, remains steadfast that we will not increase offshore drilling. Indeed, the Speaker of State would rather keep gasoline prices high and Americans suffering in order to benefit at the ballot box in November. It’s the only explanation there is. Even though high gasoline prices hurt the poor the most — and we all know that Democrats care greatly about the plight of the poor — Democrats not only want us paying higher taxes, they also want us paying as much as possible for our gasoline. It’s who they are.

I cannot believe how shallow this guy really is. Barack Obama, the Messiah, the man who is going to bring hope and change to the masses, has solved the energy crisis, and it doesn’t involve drilling, conserving, or alternative fuels. Obama says (Handel’s Hallelujah chorus playing in the background) “We could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and — and — and getting regular tune-ups, you can actually save just as much.”

With each passing day, I become even more amazed that this guy could actually be president of the most powerful nation on the planet. And they talk about Bush being a dunce.