Offshore drilling bill passes house - CONTACT YOUR SENATORS!

[jbichsel]

When did I blame the US alone?

You do make the claims that the rest of us shouldn't be blaming you for consuming far more per person than anyone else on the planet.

Well tough. If you don't like people telling you the simple truth and holding you responsible for how you behave then it's easy, cut back on your consumption and act like most other people have to. If you don't want to do that that's fine too....but then don't whine about everyone else pointing it out and getting on your case. You can't have it both ways - using up more than your fair share of resources and expecting no-one else to complain. When the oil is gone it's gone - for ALL of us.

Right now the price of most things is also going up for ME because of the rise in oil prices. Don't you think I have a right to look at the causal reason for that and comment on it? The US uses so much oil that it's affecting every economy in the world.

...and you're trying to shift the blame to China and India!!!!!

No...the US isn't solely responsible. They are MAINLY responsible though by a HUGE margin. Sorry if that fact pisses you off.

While i do commend Japan on their attempts to reduce oil consumption, there seems to be some hypocracy in your statements. Japan imports 80% of its oil and is the second largest importer after the evil U.S. Also there seems to be a major spike in oil imports for 2006.

http://omrpublic.iea.org/trade/Ct_cr_ov.pdf

Look, bottom line is we all, world residents, consume too much oil. We need to find better alternatives. But cold turkey is not the answer. We all, world residents, need to hold our politicians accountable and make them represent us, the people. I believe that America's Founding Fathers created the best model for a Representative Republic, but big money and the hunger for power has perverted our government from what was intended.

But I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bath water. Sometimes we must abide a necessary evil for a time to get to where we need to be.

I've beat this horse enough. Again, I believe we all want the same thing, it's just a matter of which road we take to get there.

 

[Kim]

While i do commend Japan on their attempts to reduce oil consumption, there seems to be some hypocracy in your statements. Japan imports 80% of its oil and is the second largest importer after the evil U.S. Also there seems to be a major spike in oil imports for 2006.

Well...I agree that the horse died on about page two of this thread.

There's no point in attacking Japan though, or calling me a hypocrite......I'm English!

As far as Japan goes though....if you had to pay the same price for fuel as we do here you'd be buying a lot more bicycles and small cars than you do at present.....and your consumption would go WAY down!

 

[ScubaBabe22]

I thought this article was pertinent....

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
Wed Jul 5, 2:08 PM ET



WASHINGTON - Corals and other marine creatures are threatened by chemical changes in the ocean caused by the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, a panel of scientists warned Wednesday.

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Already blamed for a greenhouse effect warming of the climate, much of this added carbon dioxide is dissolving in the oceans, making them more acid.

Such a change can damage coral and other shells and sealife, according to the panel of researchers convened by the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Geological Survey.

"A most fundamental property of ocean chemistry, pH, is changing and will continue to change as long as CO2 emissions are increasing. That is not debatable," Joan Kleypas, the report's lead author and a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said in a briefing.

The pH scale measures how acid or alkaline a substance is, rating from 0 to 14 with 7 being neutral. The lower the number the more acid something is.

"In the oceans pH is a relatively constant property and it has not changed over time scales of hundreds of thousands and probably even millions of years," Kleypas said.

"The pH changes that are occurring in the ocean today are truly extraordinary," she added. The oceans are normally slightly alkaline. Their average surface pH was 8.2 in 1800 and is headed for a predicted 7.9 by the middle of this century, she said.

"But we are only beginning to understand the complex interactions between large-scale chemistry changes and marine ecology. It is vital to develop research strategies to better understand the long-term vulnerabilities of sensitive marine organisms to these changes," Kleypas said.

The researchers estimated that between 1800 and 1994 the world's oceans absorbed 118 billion metric tons of carbon, reducing the natural alkalinity of seawater. A metric ton is 2,205 pounds.

Richard Feely, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said "this is leading to the most dramatic changes in marine chemistry in at least the past 650,000 years."

Chris Langdon at the University of Miami said studies show that coral calcification consistently decreases as the oceans become more acidic. That means these organisms will grow more slowly, or their skeletons will become less dense, a process similar to osteoporosis in humans. That threatens reefs because corals may be unable to build reefs as fast as erosion wears away the reefs.

___

Ocean acidification report: http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/report.shtml

 

[DallasNewbie]

no, this is an example of believing the numbers. the US consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day, more than the NEXT FIVE COUNTRIES COMBINED.

US drives oil demand worldwide. we are an incredibly oil-hungry economy.

sorry if this doesn't fit with your view of the world.

US demand is fairly stable, and supply is fairly stable as well. Stable supply and demand lead to stable prices. US oil consumption increases by about 2% a year, while chin's consumption is increasing by about 10% a year. It isn't the demand that causes higher prices, it's the increase in demand.

 

[H2Andy]

US demand is fairly stable, and supply is fairly stable as well. .

ah... no, sorry ... incorrect

why do you think price spikes come and go? they come and go based on changing
US demand.

supply *is* fairly stable (there's only so many facilities through which oil can come
into the us and be refined -- that's the bottleneck)

however, demand is not stable. to parse terms and say that it's the "increase in demand" that is not stable is to beg the question. also, from year to year,
US demand continues to increase. see oil futures for proof.

hence the price hikes.

if what you say were true, oil prices would be stable over the board, and they
are not. or at least they would average out over the course of a year.
look at a price chart, and you'll see a steady and continuous increase --
driven by demand.

 

[dherbman]

Demand is cyclical. Yearly consumption is relatively stable, as I understand it. The bottlenck comes as refineries switch production priorities.

 

[Kim]

US demand is fairly stable, and supply is fairly stable as well. Stable supply and demand lead to stable prices. US oil consumption increases by about 2% a year, while chin's consumption is increasing by about 10% a year. It isn't the demand that causes higher prices, it's the increase in demand.

That may be. However....2% of the US total is similar to the 10% of the China total when measured in actual barrels of oil/day.

However it's all actually rather missing the point. At the present rate of consumption oil is going to run out really soon. Drilling here or there isn't going to change that. The real question is can we learn how to make a soft landing when it does as we move into an alternative, or will nothing continue to be done until it all comes to a crashing stop?

 

[Wayward Son]

I'm pretty sure I don't buy the "oil is gonna run out real soon" calims any more.

30 years ago, they were busy telling me that in 30 years we were going to be close to the end of oil. Most of it would be gone. Well, it's 30 years later & it's not only not gone, we now have more known reserves than we did then. We're easily looking at 100 years worth of oil, just with what we already know about & we find more every year.

I also don't think the term 'fossil fuel' is correct for oil. As a kid I was taught that oil came from dead dinosaurs. Anyone ever give any thought to jusy how many dinos it would take to simply account for the billions of barrels we've already pumped up, much less the billions still down there?

 

[rigdiver]

Hmmm let's see. The US consumes around 25% of the oil that's consumed annually, China consumes 6%.....China has about 4 times as many people as the US.
http://www.marktaw.com/culture_and_media/politics/GlobalOil.html
(India's not on this list but is actually around 3%....with about 3 times as many people as the US)

Yeah right....let's blame China!

Where would you rather live? People in China for the most part can't get what they want. Cars, and gasoline to fuel them.

 

[H2Andy]

Wayward, that is a valid point .... but i think today we have a better picture
of what reserves are out there ...

we've used about 900 billion gallons of oil since the invention of the internal combustion engine ... there are approximately 1,000 billion (or one trillion) gallons
of oil out there, of which 70% are in the Middle East. By 2020, 88% of all reserves will be in the Middle East (or "why we are in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq").

http://www.iags.org/futureofoil.html

at the same rate of consumption, those 1,000 billlion gallons will last another 100 years. at increased rates of consumption, they will last far less.

i am not convinced, but i am worried. President Bush, on the other hand, is
very worried (not politics, economics):

"It's important for Americans to remember that America imports more than 50 percent of its oil -- more than 10 million barrels a day. And the figure is rising. [..]this dependence on foreign oil is a matter of national security. To put it bluntly, sometimes we rely upon energy sources from countries that don't particularly like us." - George W. Bush, February 25, 2002

translation: why we are in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq