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June 18, 2008 - 12:21pm.

Global Warming and Off Shore Oil Drilling

Here’s a theory I saw last night on the National Geographic Channel. The problem is that the earth orbits the sun in a circle and then it grows into an oval putting the earth closer to the sun. Ten thousand years later it returned to a round orbit. In the past this heat would simply rise to the atmosphere but today it is staying put. This seems to be why the arctic and an-arctic glaciers are starting to break up and melt.

So how do we survive this heat until it heads into an ice age? Do we panic and blame it on crude oil fueling our industries and transportation? Do we start thinking like Bush 43 and demand oil drilling on the coastlines of America? Where is the logic of his actions? Who is he kidding that drilling without refineries will solve anything? Hell, we have the greatest source of energy called the sun. Let it heat up and let’s figure out how to use the energy to cool us off.

Do we read into Nostradamus’s predictions or wander around with the Evangelical prophets and simply waiting for the end of days? To we sit and do nothing as it seems to be the American way. When the disaster of our laziness hits us we look shocked and ask the White House what we must do. The churches say prayers and all will end as God has planned.

Bush is keeping us and everything American in debt. Even if someone came up with the solution to find a car that ran on water we would have to wait for the government big wheels to quickly invest in water distilleries before they would approve. If we could use sugar or honey you can bet nothing would be done until our government brokers could first figure on how to make the sugar canes and increase the lives of bees and become wealthy before letting the rest of know about the system. At this time we are being diverted into a killer war for oil.

Is the answer allowing the government to drill from oil wells off shore? How much more does this criminal in the White House want from us? Will it save the lives of our soldiers? No! Will it bring down the price of gas? Absolutely not!

I heard this morning that trying to save the coastal areas of both sides of America is strictly for the elite. Losing our tourist trade is not being elitist but simply Americans who have had their small business on the coast for years. What about the fishing industries that suffer if only a small amount of oil spills? What about the sea birds and protected sea otters in California? Would they be only protected by the elitists?

The Republicans in Congress will put a in bill this week to stop the ban on off shore drilling which is their action to support John McCain. There is no action they will overlook to keep the Bush Administration going for 4 more years.

We Americans are working for the benefit of the federal government. The government of the people is no longer in D.C. We must first “do no harm to the powers in office” and never complain about their illegal and corrupt actions. The Patriot’s bill and the no fly zone lists are waiting for a discouraging word.

This is what is facing all of us in November. Our physical future is on the line and unless we stop this nonsense and get out of the Middle East we will lose what is left of our American values. Are we too late?

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I guess the readers of CHB

I guess the readers of CHB want off shore drilling. I received little feed back from trying to get into the Universal healthcare. I'm way out of step here at CHB. I might as well accept it and stop trying for any rational debate. You want the government to take care of you medically and if the shores and fisheries and tourists are destroyed you might get gas kept at $5 per gallon.

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Lexie Homewood I agree,

Lexie Homewood

I agree, Sandy. I already posted on another article on this topic. It is the American way to ignore a problem that can be seen from a long way off, but not do anything about it until our backs are to the wall. And then go for the quick fix.

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It is the American way to

It is the American way to ignore a problem that can be seen from a long way off, but not do anything about it until our backs are to the wall. And then go for the quick fix.

Of course. We have a reactive govt and a reactive society. I believe I used the grasshopper and ant fable as an analogy in another post as well.

The chicken and the egg question comes to play here. Do we have a reactive govt because we have a reactive society? Or is it the other way around and we have a reactive society because we have become complacent about the govt coming to the rescue.

Rational debate? Excuse me but this is an election year. Al Gore showed what happens when you try to have a rational debate in an emotional feeding frenzy. In the end he was right, but not POTUS. Trying to have rational debate during an election year is like trying to win the title of Heavy weight Champion with one hand tied behind your back.

If you want to debate health care then compare and contrast what Obama is advocating vs McCain. That will stimulate debate.

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Y'all have got to be

Y'all have got to be kidding. This is the end of the American dream. Suburbia and the SUV are OVER, get used to it. The beginning of the end began in 1913 when a corrupt midnight congress passed the Federal Reserve Act giving the power to print money to a privately owned central bank.

Most definitely unconstitutional (I could quote the US Constitution but read it yourself!).

Now we are near the end of the end. Soon in Amerika there will be only the rich and the poor. We (the middle class, the productive class) are suckers. We dissed the poor and emulated the rich, & supported the illegal wars (I was born in 1942 and although I think WWI & WWII were unnecesary, I KNOW that every war since then was illegal and waged for the benefit only of the military-industrial complex that a war-monger himself, President Eisenhower, warned us against).

This will end in revolution. Chaos and blood in the streets.

Imagine being a farmer in Amerika when the masses in the metropolitan areas are homeless and starving.

Believe the media, believe the politicians, we are all fools.

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This is what you are up

This is what you are up against!

67% Support Offshore Drilling, 64% Expect it Will Lower Prices

And the Republicans SAY "they don't pay attention to polls"! Yeah, right!

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Remember in 1995 Bill

Remember in 1995 Bill Clinton vetoed a bill passed by the Republican Congress that would have opened up ANWR to oil exploration. This occured during the "prosperous" Clinton Administration, and has been a Republican position long before our current "crisis".

Should that bill have been signed into law, we would be enjoying one million barrels per day (for an estimated 30 years) more from the already declining North Slope facilities. Since the pipeline already exists for transport it would make greater sense to open ANWR before considering increasing offshore exploration. When it comes to environmental impact, ANWR offers a better alternative. Oddly enough, 75% of Alaskans support ANWR exploration.

And this debate also fails to address other issues related to fuel prices, which include suffocating inflationary policy and the subsequent currency devalutaion, and the lack of refining capabilities.

We have been led to believe that it is solely an oil supply problem, but when you can't convert the oil you already have into gasoline, merely increasing the supply of oil is no solution. Even OPEC has cited inflation and refining issues as the underlying cause of the "crisis", and is the basis for their refusal to increase supply.

So while there is a need to increase domestic oil production, doing only that while ignoring other reasons behind high fuel prices only serves to waste valuable time seeking false solutions. But truthfully, isn't that what our government is best at - dreaming up false solutions that only lead us to beg at their feet for more false solutions?

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I just spent the past entire

I just spent the past entire weekend with an OLD oil man. The bottom line is alternative fuels only make a slight dent in the billions of barrels of oil that we use daily.

So if we want to get off foreign oil we must replace it with some of our own.

I don't buy your ASSUMPTION that had that bill passed in 1995 we would be swimming in oil. Unfortunately the price of oil at that time was so low and the cost to drill in that area so high, I don't believe we would have seen any immediate relieft. In fact, if it had passed we might just now be seing something due to the high price of oil.

Many oilmen have been sitting on reserves of oil and gas for years and are only now going back in and developing them. Why? Because in the past, the cost of oil was so low that it was not worth the investment to develop and/or produce the well. Today, what's left of the domestic oil and gas industry is working as fast as they can to keep up.

This is why they are pushing to remove the ban NOW rather than in the past. Because the price of oil is high enough to pay for the tremendous cost of developing such fields.

The bottom line as oilmen see it...the only way you would ever get the price of oil back down is if you rationed it. I don't think the American public is going to buy that idea unless it would mean cheap gas.

You are correct that there is a definite lack of refining. Since Reagan/Bush killed the domestic oil & gas industry in the 80's with their massive tax cuts for the rich, there has been absolutely no new building of oil refineries since then.

The GOP tries to blame it on the Dems and the environmentalists but the truth is that there is no incentive for the rich to build new refineries. No the bigs guys have just gone and bought up all the small refineries and kept them going with string and bandaids prettty much.

And it doesn't help that many of the refineries that were damaged by Katrina and Rita have not had proper repairs STILL.

Someone asked me recently where all that money Exxon etc was making was going. Well, I can only guess where it's going but I can tell you where it's not going. It's not going into helping America by building refineries.

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I didn't say that we would

I didn't say that we would be swimming in oil, but one million bpd is nothing to sneeze at, especially since the overland infrastructure already exists for transport and North Slope production has declined to less than one million bpd. And this is no assumption, it is documented reality.

But doesn't this speak to another one of your posts about being proactive vs reactive? Now that we are forced into being reactive, the "crisis" calls for swift and costly band-aids instead of solid and substantial fixes.

I don't see how you make the connection between tax cuts and refineries. We can debate all day and night on which party is to blame, but that isn't the point I try to make. Both parties are to blame by serving the interests of their elitists cohorts over the interests of the People.

And what you say is true about other wells. We have hundreds of wells ready to pump in the Gulf of Mexico, waiting for the price to be right. I think that with the billions of dollars in profits the oil companies enjoy each quarter, they can afford to purchase a few drill bits.

So the real lesson to be learned here is that when corporations and government are allowed to gain sole control of a resource, manipulation and engineered scarcity are the tools they use to not only profit greatly from this manipulation, but also to force us to accept their narrow and hurried solutions in times of "crisis".

Taking an objective view of this, my opinion, and the opinion of many others, is that the environmentalists on the left and big oil on the right are just part of the two party dog-and-pony show that breaks the People into opposing camps and perpetuates superficial debate while the fox makes off with the hens.

While Democrats will find reasons to blame Republicans and vice versa, I find the fault to lie with both parties and their strict adherence to their defined roles. This is to be expected in an especially heated and emotional election year, but it doesn't mean it is acceptable.

I came across a quote the other day by George Mason in a speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention on June 14, 1778, and it reads...

"Nothing so strongly impels a man to regard the interest of his constituents, as the certainty of returning to the general mass of the people, from whence he was taken, where he must participate in their burdens."

I think this quote speaks to the very essence of what's wrong with our government. They don't participate in our burdens.

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I would love to see you sit

I would love to see you sit down with my father and say that stuff. One old oil man formerly a Republican against your cyncism. He could explain very graphically what Reagan/Bush did to the domestic oil and gas business. Now that would be something to watch.

Too busy today to debate squat. I know about the oil game personally.

I still say that if they had opened that up in 1995 there would be no more oil today than there already is now.

It's called the cost to drill and produce versus the price of a barrel of oil.

In 1995, it was not profitable no matter how many barrels of oil you pumped out of the ground. Today it is!

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Well perhaps your father

Well perhaps your father should log in and give everyone here a lesson. I'm always open to learning. Last I knew we had a government consisting of three branches, not just the President. While it's easy to blame a single entity I choose to blame the whole of government for it is the whole of government that shapes policy. So while you're allowed to be cynical toward just one branch, I am not allowed to be cynical of the whole?

And isn't being in business all about investment and risk? How much did it cost to drill for oil in 1900 compared to the price at that time? OPEC seems to have been making a profit all these years. How much of a factor does inflation and speculation play in influencing oil prices these days?

And you miss the point entirely about ANWR. I never implied that we would increase overall supply but merely replace one million bpd foreign oil with one million bpd domestic, which would seem to be your position as well - to reduce foreign dependency.

My father spent 45 years as a physicist and engineer for the DOD. He held symposiums and gave speeches all over the world for the likes of the UN and NATO. He was hardly ever home. He was one of the most highly regarded in his field and has received some of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon a civilian. Does that mean he is an expert on the inner workings of our federal government or the DOD? Hardly. And it doesn't make me one either.

So please, at your earliest convenience, explain to me how Reagan cutting taxes ruined the domestic oil business. Furthermore, if Reagan's policies were so detrimental to big oil, why haven't we changed those policies in the twenty years since he left office? Perhaps big oil likes it that way. I don't necessarily dispute this, I would just like it explained to me. Because you make a valid point - it is all just a game.

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i'm not in a combative mood

i'm not in a combative mood and its the weekend so I'll be brief.

Before the Reagan/Bush era, the richest Americans paid a lot of taxes...up to 70%...EXCEPT if they invested this money in stuff oh like oil and gas production as well as oil refineries.

And they made a lot more money which they didn't have to pay taxes on for various tax breaks, etc.

After the Reagan/Bush tax fiasco, that all stopped. Where did that money go? In that shell game called the stock market.

Since then we have not had one single new refinery built domestically.

You can argue as much as you want, but it literally killed us domestically speaking when it came to oil and gas....enough so a lifelong republican from Mississippi vowed never to vote GOP again and hasn't.

I wish I could get him to log into this forum Grif. He would fit right in as he has no use for anyone with the name George Bush (either one). The problem is he hates computers. Won't touch one and at 80+ he's pretty set in his ways. Oh, but the stories he could tell you....(very big grin). Have a good weekend....I'm out of here.

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I'm not trying to be

I'm not trying to be combative, I'm simply asking questions that you claim to have some answers to. But I didn't realize that tax money should pay for refineries. Those that stand to profit from oil should foot the bill for its production like any other business venture, not public monies, be it taken from the rich or the poor. And aren't we already subsidizing big oil with millions of tax dollars? Where is our return on investment? Certainly not at the gas pump.

You may as well blame tax cuts for the rich as a basis for all of our ills, seeing as we look to the government to solve them all. There are many reasons why new refineries haven't been built, some having to do with the exhorbitant costs of fighting nuisance lawsuits by environmentalists and the delays that accompany them.

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"And aren't we already

"And aren't we already subsidizing big oil with millions of tax dollars?"

No, its in the billions. Something like 15 to 18 billion dollars over the next few years.

-- Kent Shaw

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The first time I don't mind

The first time I don't mind being corrected. Although I thought it was in the billions, I didn't want to be accused of exaggerations.

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Sandra, we all agree with

Sandra, we all agree with you, or at least most of us do. But we're all individuals and as such there is a very limited amount any of us can do, individually. BIG problems like the ones you're talking about take BIG solutions of many like-minded people working together to solve. This is called a government. But I'm sad to report that the first step is to completely destroy our current government before it destroys us.

The party's over for this country and as soon as we can start over, we might stand a chance of fixing some of the BIG problems you mention. In the mean time, find your favorite problem that an individual or small group can solve, and devote yourself to that. The BIG picture will take care of itself.

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It's all in the Ketchup.

It's all in the Ketchup.

We are all suffering too much mustard at times.

We angst TOO!

Wait till they get a glimpse of the crowbar from HECK.

ZERO tax base. ZERO is visible, my auto, is a shoe full of soulo footoe.

Watch who you call out, Murphy lurks and I heard he was the last to work on the transporter we're counting on to extricate ourselves from lunacy and global chaos. KTFOTP's

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Google abiotic oil and you

Google abiotic oil and you will get 28,900 hits. Don't ask. Just go google it.

Since this is my first post since the comments numbers were brought back, and because I'm sure Doug read's Sandy's blog (grin), thank you, Doug, for bringing back the numbers. Much easier on this old dawg.

-- Kent Shaw

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