Posted by
rycK on Monday, May 12, 2008 7:54:13 AM
Blowing Bubbles over Oil Nonbubbles by the New York Times: Liberals Love High Gas Prices.
This article so sophomoric and so festooned with distractions and left-liberal whinings that it is difficult to identify it as written by a college graduate. Paul Krugman, the famous non-economist of the economic/ political world and self-anointed Economics Sage of the New York Times preaches about the price of oil without discussing the effects of the supply functions in the US. This propaganda piece bubbles with visions of solutions to the problem that benefit the socialists and nobody else.
In an intellectually insulting and very crude propaganda piece: The Oil Nonbubble[1] , the obvious problems of: [1] leftists preventing new oil drilling in the US, [2] leftists preventing construction of new refineries in the US and [3] leftists preventing the construction of nuclear plants in the US, are not mentioned.
He starts with a gurgle about speculation and speculators and what the National Review thought four years ago.
He plays with nonsense like this:
“All through oil’s five-year price surge, which has taken it from $25 a barrel to last week’s close above $125, there have been many voices declaring that it’s all a bubble, unsupported by the fundamentals of supply and demand.”[all quotes are from The Oil Nonbubble article.]
Who said that? Everybody has been concerned with the supply and increased demand by China and India so what can this mean? Propaganda by misdirection?
The Oil Bubble is not the issue—Supply of US oil is the issue.
“So here are two questions: Are speculators mainly, or even largely, responsible for high oil prices? And if they aren’t, why have so many commentators insisted, year after year, that there’s an oil bubble?”
Here is the limiting quiz: the cognitively disnimble are supposed to now choose from only two possibilities: the nasty old speculators are responsible or they are not responsible for the last $50 per barrel oil price increase. This is as stale as the old cliché that goes: oh, we want to hear both sides of the story. The supply part in the US is left out and the ethereal speculator must be at fault.
He then stumbles into reality on the matters of supply and demand the speculator effect with:
“Even if this were purely a financial play on the part of the speculators, it would have major consequences in the material world. Faced with higher prices, drivers would cut back on their driving; homeowners would turn down their thermostats; owners of marginal oil wells would put them back into production.
As a result, the initial balance between supply and demand would be broken, replaced with a situation in which supply exceeded demand. This excess supply would, in turn, drive prices back down again — unless someone were willing to buy up the excess and take it off the market.” [Emphasis is mine in all quotes.]
Maybe he really did take Econ 101? But, then he drifts off his own argument with:
“After all, a realistic view of what’s happened over the past few years suggests that we’re heading into an era of increasingly scarce, costly oil.”
We have plenty of oil. We just located a huge supply around North Dakota [2]and we have huge reserves in Alaska and the Gulf. There is no reason that oil must be scarce unless the supply is cut for political reasons. The Bakken Formation may increase our reserves and hence our supply by 10X and free us from foreign oil dependence. Did our krugmaniacal socialist mention that salient fact as he bubbles away with his rubber ducky in some leftist pond?
He lies by omission.
“The consequences of that scarcity probably won’t be apocalyptic: France consumes only half as much oil per capita as America, yet the last time I looked, Paris wasn’t a howling wasteland. But the odds are that we’re looking at a future in which energy conservation becomes increasingly important, in which many people may even — gasp — take public transit to work.”
Paris was burning 500 cars a night no so long ago and, as an additional tid bit they use nearly 80% nuclear power for their electricity so they don’t have to burn oil or gas. OH! The liberals in the US don’t want us to build nuclear plants?
The old liberal line: public transportation:
“Again, I wouldn’t be shocked if oil prices dip in the near future — although I also take seriously Goldman’s recent warning that the price could go to $200. But let’s drop all the talk about an oil bubble.”
So, we must conserver or cut back in the US while we hold our oil reserves and let China pump oil off the coast of Cuba? We must not pump more oil because the liberals don’t want us to. Ted Turner, the famous scientist has told us that CO2, produced by burning oil, will boil the oceans and turn us into cannibals. [3]
It is very clear that the world supply is down [Nigeria as one case] and relief is not possible at this level given the world market demand and the refusal of our sordid left to produce more oil. An increase in the supply will bring down prices. The EcoNazis are behind this and they want our economy to collapse so they can ‘fix’ it with more tax hikes. There is no relation between CO2 levels and earth surface temperatures, so that is a political exercise and a farce.
Liberal Democrats are Directly Responsible for the High Oil Costs.
This phony economic propaganda by the Walter Duranty Memorial Papers [4]is just a crude attempt to argue around the fact that the liberals are deliberately hiking the price of oil and gasoline to their political advantage. The liberal Democrats started out 8 years ago hoping the economy would crash and that we would lose in Iraq and this article is an insult to both economics and to real [non liberal] Americas. Perhaps Fidel Castro can appreciate this, it was probably written for him. Castro and his Islamo-Fascist brothers adore our liberal Democrats. Maybe Jeremiah Wright ought to preach on the evils of Demon Oil, a probable KKK invention to maintain slavery or other such nonsense. Or, maybe oil causes AIDS. We might have to pay $200 for Cuban oil. That works for the NYT.
And B. Hussein Obama backs this phony theory.
Vote accordingly and never for a liberal.
rycK
Comments: ryckki@gmail.com
[2] http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news2.13s.html
[4] In honor of that celebrated Communist stooge and liar and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the NYT. The color RED is used in my essays in honor of Walter Duranty, a saint, if there could be one, in the Marxist Archives of Honor.