I listened to Bush push for off-shore drilling today. He seems to believe that trashing the entire planet for oil is our only option. Then he lies by saying it will not cause damage, then sneaks in shale oil mining.(strip mining) What a load of crap. I am so disgusted, no mention of improving our transportation infastructure to allow for more public transportation, no mention of lessening demand by coming up with viable alternatives to cars, no mention of what gets spewed into the atmosphere when the stuff is combusted. And of course no questions about that from our valiant news corp. When one reporter asked if the president would ask americans to conserve gas he claims the public is smart enough to balance ther own checkbooks, as if money is the only thing that matters ever! He claims congress needs to get busy.... they sure do, working on impeachment!

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With oil costing over USD 100 in the long term it is essential to use any and all methods to mitigate the problems with lack of oil.

1. Research into new energy forms, fusion, solar cells, new battery cells

2. Vast buildup of Nuclear energy plants as well as research programs in to 3rd and 4th generation reactors capable on running on wast from 2nd generation reactors, 98 % of the waste problem is erased.

3. Full scale drilling offshore and in Alaska

4. Use of US vast coal reserves, building carbon capture test plants

If all these measures is taken on board the price of oil will in long term fall dramatically but they will have little impact in the short run, so energy prices will be brutally high for the next 5 years.

International regulation of so called speculation in oil futures is a pipes dream so forget about it, in fact speculation is keeping prices lower than they otherwise would be.

Over the long term heavy speculation and a large futures market have by research of historical data been shown to have a very calming effect on commodity prices, spikes, despite the propaganda against speculation. It is in fact the opposite scenario that takes place, when speculation was banned, restricted commodity prices spiked, ran rampant.

speculators destroy unfit business models, severely punish governments with poor economic governance and make the world a far more stable and better place. They are not nice people but completely essential.

First but not least we need to become more energy efficient but there is no need to put the hair suit on and cry "The End is Near, Repent"

The only thing that will save the world is Green Capitalism, not more regulations and socialism. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California is setting an shining example together with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

In fact I would love to see Mike Bloomberg as president. However as I understand it he will become the Secretary of the Treasury in any case, be it under McCain or Obama.

A very good choice. A true liberal both when it comes to personal liberty as well as the freedom of the market.

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The position then was even worse than now - with real shortages in terms of retail supply. But OPEC was totally being manipulated by Henry Kissinger.

US/UK oil companies wanted high prices - cos they were in deep shit with massive debts.

The position now - is extremely similar. Sure there will be a be/is a big economic crash,and then there will be a recovery.

Environmentalists don't want oil on principle- in fact they don't want anything to do with conventional or nuclear energy.

But Western civilisation is dependent on the stuff.

If the success of Environmentalists continues they willl totally crash the World economy leading to mass poverty and starvation.

Americans will be hit - just like everyone else.

Check America's own poverty rates - American kids going hungry - and you will be shocked.

This is all directly related to the price of oil - and the current situation will by now be far worse than the official statistics which will be more than a year out of date.

Environmentalists are at least as guilty as the conservatives and the oil companies for this poverty and starvation.

The hypocrisy of environmentalists is astounding. The NOT IN MY BACK YARD has reached a ridiculous state

The environmental destruction of the Third World continues - and environmentalists are guilty.

You have effectively forced the US to rape and pillage for energy across the World because you have been exceedingly successful at preventing any new exploration in the US

And you then have the gall to blame the oil companies.

Sure the oil companies are guilty too - what they have done in Nigeria is appalling - and Iraq - Well...

Environmentalists are guilty too even of that.

So this article is about Pollution...

Show me where all this pollution is in the UK?

North sea oil and gas effectively not only saved the UK economy - but has funded a massive improvement in the ENVIRONMENT of the UK including Air, Land, Sea & Rivers.

I KNOW - because I remember what it was like in the UK in the 50's and 60's

Its about time America sorted out its own Energy Problems and stopped raping the rest of the World

If you want to shutdown all your conventional and nuclear power and completely crash your economy - then carry on

The rest of the World already thinks you are Mad - and carrying on down your current path will just prove it.

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The usual oil spills from drilling off of the north coast of Alaska will cut evaporation from the Arctic waters, keeping all of the summer heat in the water. This heat will turn parts of the melted Arctic Ocean into a methane-releasing boiling sea of bubbles. The pole will get really hot, and then the hurricanes will really blossom.

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You forgot the other recent example of hypocrisy........how the Kennedy's and their satraps and fawning acolytes kill efforts to place wind generator farms in the sea near Cape Cod. But what do they care ....they can always get away in their personal jets. Makes you wonder how 'green' their major real estate holding..........the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, is.

Even if exploiting the oil resources off our coast doesn't bring the price down, look at the secondary effect........high paying jobs for the blue collar worker.............helicopters, supply ships, transport ships, refineries, etc.

The author of this article doesn't say if the oil spills were from rigs offshore or other facilities. And also, FYI, 100,000 gallons is not really that much. My moderate sized swimming pool is 25,000 gallons. Where I live, they spend MILLIONS just adding sand to the beaches.......compliments of the usual fool..the US taxpayer, and our Congressman, who gets his local appropriation payback for 'loyalty'.

We have thousands of miles of coastline in the USA. The rigs would hardly be noticeable. No more so than the 2 Nuclear plants taking up miles of coast here in Florida.............oh, lets not forget the space center..............omigosh............pristine Cape Canaveral destroyed by the Space Shuttle launcher.....terrible, just terrible.

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It is better to employ nonAmericans in the production of energy consumed in this country. It is better nonAmericans have the multitude of good-paying jobs--engineers, geologists, welders, pipefitters,boat mates, divers, truck drivers--involved in extracting and transporting our energy. It is better to send our dollars to other countries rather than keep our dollars here benefitting hundreds of thousands of families. It's true that opening up our coastline won't bring lower prices anytime soon if ever. But it sure will bring a lot of jobs. Are there risks? Of course. But they are manageable risks. The technology has improved greatly since the 1969 Malibu spill.

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Hemp is a far better biofuel that can be put to 25000+ industrial uses and can completely replace fossil fuels. The only way our crumbling infrastructure is gonna be saved is by first ending the phoney "war on drugs" which includes lifting the ban on hemp and allowing it to compete with fossil fuels and nuclear in the supposedly "free" market. Do a google search on hemp and you'll see.

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You all really need to use updated information here is what the MMS reported as of June 20, 2007

As of January 25, 2007, MMS identified 125 spills of petroleum products totaling 16,302 barrels that were lost from platforms, rigs, and pipelines on the Federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) as a result of damages from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Those spills did not occur due to loss of control of the producing wells.

There were no major spills (2,381 barrels per spill or greater) according to USCG official standards.

The USCG defines offshore spills of less than 10,000 gallons (238 barrels) as “MINOR”; offshore spills of 10,000 to 99,999 gallons (238 to 2,380 barrels) as “MEDIUM”; and offshore spills of 100,000 gallons, (2,381 barrels) and greater as “MAJOR”.

According to a report on “Oil in the Sea” from the National Academy of Sciences (1995), far more oil enters the ocean from natural, underwater seeps than from offshore production platforms. In fact, the seeps introduce about 1700 barrels of oil a day into U.S. marine waters, which is about 150 times the amount from oil and gas activities.

Over the past 20 years, less than .001 percent of the oil produced in U.S. state and federal waters have been spilled.

The loss of oil from the Federal OCS wells themselves was minimal due to the successful operation of the safety valves that are required by the Minerals Management Service (MMS) to be installed on every well at least 100 feet below the ocean floor.

All facilities on the Outer Continental Shelf in areas threatened by the hurricanes are “shut in” prior to a storm’s arrival, meaning that pipelines are closed and platforms are secured for heavy weather.

Oil losses were mostly limited to the oil stored on platforms that were damaged or oil contained in individual segments of pipelines that were damaged.

There were no accounts of spills from facilities on the OCS that reached the shoreline, or oiled birds or mammals, or involved any large volumes of oil to be collected or cleaned up.

The five largest spills were estimated to be between 1,000 barrels and 2,000 barrels. Two of the five spills may have only been a couple of hundred barrels. These five spills represent only 4 percent of all the spills but total 8,428 barrels and 52 percent of the total spillage. The table below provides more details

but i’ve never known the left to be worried about the truth
http://tinyurl.com/64zuf9

http://tinyurl.com/6yyan9

as for the alleged 124 spills you're partially correct

"According to the Minerals Management Service, those hurricanes caused 124 offshore spills for a total of 743,700 gallons. "


herewith is the correct information as found on page 27 of the following report
http://tinyurl.com/64zuf9

the number 743,700 appears nowhere in the document

"As a result of both storms, 124 spills were reported with
a total volume of roughly 17,700 barrels of total petroleum products, of which about 13,200 barrels were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 4,500 barrels were refined products from platforms and rigs.

as for the pipelines the following is reported
Pipelines were accountable for 72 spills totaling about 7,300 barrels of crude oil and condensate
spilled into the GOM."

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Didn't your guys president Bush agree to fund and develop Hydrogen Technology at some European Union Conference in 2003? Here is a solution that you all can implement now to increase MPG using Hydrogen Gas as a fuel supplement.

I have implemented a simple device using the Hydrogen for Gas Technology on all of our family cars by making a Hydrogen Electrolyzer Device which makes HHO gas (Brown's) gas. This HHO gas is a supplement to gasoline and helps increase mpg. The device is about the size of a mason jar and can easily be installed in the engine compartment of most cars. I have installed this system on a 2004 Nissan Sentra, 1999 Nissan Frontier and 1999 Ford Taurus. We have seen between a 20-35% increase in mpg on our vehicles. The other day we also installed this device on my buddies 2000 Dodge Durango "8 cylinder" and he said he went from 11mpg to 15.6mpg!!! Yahooooooo!!! Here is video of the device working on my cars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5mZCxH0dFg

Now I sell the device to people with install guide and email tech support. The kit includes everything you need to increase MPG. The Hydrogen burns with the gasoline as a supplement and burns cleaner, protecting our air and environment. Us Northern Californian's need to take advantage of this "surpressed" technology to revolt against the greedy Oil Corporations of the World and improve our environment by burning clean gas.

For the Revolution...

We never give up...

Michael A (from the Great Land of Lake County)

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The above comments/trolls are so disturbing that one feels sickened in face of their GREED and IGNORANCE.
What does America become, if not ever stupider? The solution to our oil problems IS NOT THRU MORE OIL! Not on America's EXQUISITE CALIFORNIA COASTLINES (why dontcha come SEE for yourselves) and MOST CERTAINLY NOT BY CONTINUED SLAUGHTERING OF IRAQIS! All you bigbutts who think your vast appetites have some kind of weight in this argument are pathetically shortsighted. That Amerca's military usage represents a WHOPPING 40% of our nations oil, gee, do ya think that could be CURTAILED alittle? How bout BULLET TRAINS between LA and SF? How bout MASSIVE SOLAR FARMS? ETC! Do we not have some brainpower to use for SOLUTIONS? Get a clue, America! Our coastlines are not your personal trash heaps! We've fought off the OILigarchy too many times to stop now. Bush/Cheney, get ready for a big ol fight over this one, and you ain't a winning!

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The market manipulation by the speculators due to the Enron Loophole and London Loophole and the Goldman Sachs Loophole is one of the biggest swindles of all time and the entire Republican party and our crooked President are all in it up to their necks...

Yet most Democrats will still not tell this to the people repeal these Bills and the deregulation and prices will drop from 25-50% in 30 days...

This is not about supply and demand as the head of OPEC, VP of Exxon and the Former Director of The CFTC Prof. Michael Greenberger among many others all explained already....

Enron wrote the Commodities and Futures Modernization act which started all this and they are doing to America with Oil prices what they did to California...only 1,000 X's bigger...

It's the biggest Swindle in History...

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That is a perfect question to all those desperate petroleum ZOMBIES who keep acting like nothing more than a bunch of desperate crybabies crying "WAH ! WAH ! THE PRICE OF GAS IS TOO HIGH !!! WAH ! WAH ! I WANT MY FUCKING OIL AND I GOTTA HAVE IT !!! SHUT THE FUCK AND DRILL !! WAH !! WAH !!" .

Now let's come clean here. The only reason America is oil strapped is people and businesses don't want to conserve or produce fuel efficient technologies. It's that first lesson some financial courses misteach you about volume sales somehow appealing compared to quality sales. But what if all that volume runs out? That's right. Finance doesn't teach you how to plan when you can't buy anymore of that wholesale. Applying this to oil and nuclear, this is what is going to happen as has been the case decade after decade. First, some huge bloopdy doo supply will be poured in (well, borrowed in most cases such as Saudi Arabia) and all of a sudden "Look everyone ! OIL GLUT ! THERE'S A SURPLUS ! SPEND IT ! SPEND IT !" Like tax cuts for the wealthy, America will be bombarded with sleazy bullshit telling them to "give up your small cars and feel strong with our new super power biggies !" Now, what happens when more people fall for the "The surplus is there. Go ahead, guzzle it all done because that's kool!" Instead of walking, taking a public bus or rail where available, or even buying a vehicle that delivers more miles for the gallon, they'll fall for the waste waste waste ideas of buying more gas guzzles and going out on frivolous trips going bonky bonkers trying to show off. In the meantime, as all this WASTEFUL mainly demand keeps skyrocketing, the supply is sapped up so fast that production is harder to come by. To make matters worse, neither fossil fuels nor nuclear are renewable. And even for nuclear, breeders are more expensive and are cheaper for producing nuclear WMDs than for recovering usable uranium for energy needs. So you see, it's just a temporary supply of doggy biscuits for all you stupid dogs out there. Don't expect much of a price savings to be passed on to you.

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Goebbels, Joseph Paul. German propaganda minister for the nazis.
"Goebbeling"., modern slang.
A person or entity knowingly stating a false truth as fact to influence the general public.
Sen. McConnell did some "goebbeling" didn't he.
Got to go, AL/NL tied at 3 each to the 9th in.

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The Republicans have turned the country over to the Corporations, and will be more than willing to impose Marital Law to keep the rest of us in line.

A freely elected Coup d'etat.

They now have more control than their predecessors in the early 1900's.

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All the oil on our turf is just a drop in the bucket of world supply. However if you can pump it for 20 and sell it back to the American people for 130 that’s just money going to waste. The price of oil for us is going to be what ever Saudi Arabia is selling it for, buy it from them. Oil companies make money pumping oil not selling gasoline. All Obama has to do to end the war in Iraq is stop pushing Iraq for a sweet heart oil pumping deal. When he does that there are going to be a lot of pissed off people.

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A friend of mine five years ago recounted a conversation she had with her brother over the holidays, her brother being an employee of a large oil company. When she earnestly asked him why we weren't working as a country to develop more environmentally-friendly energy technologies, he laughed in her face (did I mention her brother was kind of an ass anway...?) He said to her, "Michelle, do you really think for one minute that we haven't already figured out how to use alternative energy? We already know how we're going to develop, wind, solar, nuclear, etc. But we don't care and we aren't going to do anything about it until we squeeze every last drop of oil out of the Earth and make the biggest profit possible on it and it's naive of you to think otherwise."

She was appalled, as was I when she repeated the story. I wasn't particularly surprised to hear it, but I was surprised at how cavalier and open he was about saying it.

So I guess the only thing to do now is fight like hell to keep these greedy SOBs from carrying out their plan.

Off-shore drilling is not the answer. As the article mentioned, we can do things to affect prices right now and we need to lobby to have them done while we aggressively pursue alternative technology infrastructure development. But drilling is not one of those things and we need to own up to it.

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Good morning? Today I just learned the following - maybe it is not true that Bush & Big Oil know we have billions of barrels untouched in the USA. They are "technically available."

Please google The Bakken Oil Formation and this url:
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911

We may have been lied to way more than we have a clue about.
I'm 95% for Obama.

Keep up the skepticism and ACT!

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Lets not forget the one FACT he doesnt want us to KNOW. that he gets RICH and profits off the drilling of oil. Line his pockets with gold! Way to go sheeple! Yey!

JT
Is your ISP watching?

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this is bullshit. People are trying to tell you that increasing supply does not lower the price. It doesn't even pass the sniff test. Then they use the "global price" garbage to pretend that somehow pumping a ton of oil out of our land won't give us cheaper gas. If this were true than people in Saudi Arabia would be paying what we are for gas. And they're not. Because it's their oil, and they get first crack at it. And when they get their prices low enough they sell the rest and make bank.

What happened was that people were fine with not drilling when gas was 2/gallon and now it's at 4/gallon they are trying to pretend that the positions that seemed reasonable five years ago are somehow still OK. They're not. Circumstances change.

The real problem here is that our political climate makes it impossible for people to admit they're wrong. If you spent the last ten years fighting against oil drilling you can't admit that those years were a waste because that would make YOU a waste. People aren't addicted to their ideas. They are addicted to people treating them like authorities. People can't give that up. It's why Jimmy Carter will travel around the world in a desperate attempt to find people to applaud him.

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The 800 lb. elephant in the room that conservatives refuse to acknowledge is GLOBAL WARMING.

More oil production= more environmental destruction and more CO2 emissions when the amount of time the world has left to drastically reduce its greenhouse gas production is shrinking.

Raise fuel mileage standards and invest in mass transit. Get people out of their cars.

How about employing workers in producing renewable, non-polluting energy like wind and solar?

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Nuclear power plants are incredibly expensive to construct and the number of plants that would need to go into operation to provide significant power to the U.S. is in the thousands.

Oil doesn't power most homes, so by reducing car usage through expanded public transit, demand goes down and people are not affected by high gas prices.

And nucleat power requires large amounts of WATER, you know, the precious resource which is becoming ever more scarce as global warming intensifies droughts throughout the world and America.

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Let's assume that despite the obvious point of view, the articles' figures are fair, balanced, objective, and accurate and that Hurricane Katrina did indeed cause 9 million gallons of spilled oil.

Katrina was a huge and violent storm that virtually wiped out most of New Orleans, killed thousands, and caused billions in property damage. It destroyed over a million acres of forest. If one wanted a lab experiment to test offshore drilling's environmental safety, Katrina would have been ideal.

So if a storm that powerful spilled less than one Valdez (a unit of measure for spilled oil that I just made up), a reasonable observer might be tempted to say, "That was all?"

A couple of questions might put 9 million gallons into perspective. I don't know the answers, so I look forward to a rebuttal.

Question 1: About many days or weeks does it take for 9 million gallons of oil to seep naturally from the sea floor?

Question 2: How many gallons of water are in the Gulf of Mexico?

And just for good measure, "Wouldn't it be a lot less risky to ship oil a short distance (from the offshore rigs to the coast) than a long distance (from the Middle East to the United States)?"

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