Petroleum Industry Christmas Wishlist Conservative pundits are quick to point out that no "
new refineries have been built since 1976", and even quicker to blame "environmentalists". But the facts just don't support that. Refiners have chosen the environment that they do business in, and in some cases have willingly contributed to it. (
Plenty of data here.) Here's why:
- The government has allowed the industry to merge, consolidate, and restrict refining capacity, thus impacting pricing, supply, and demand.
- The quest for profits has caused the need to run extremely lean supplies (ie. no stockpiles of crude - it arrives when you need it, not before) and has resulted in susceptability to wild volatility in prices, but has allowed refiners to operate at very high efficiency but with no margin of excess capacity for temporary shortages, disasters, etc.
- Oil refiners trimmed back capacity after the Oil Crash of the early 1980s and have been unwilling to reinvest in new technologies unless environmental restrictions and local fuel cleanliness mandates are reduced.
As one would expect, Bush's solutions nicely match up with the wishlists of
OPEC and
US refiners, who in the past few decades have largely undone the breakup of Standard Oil (
via) via mergers and joint ventures. Representative
Joe Barton, (R-TX), Chairperson of the
Energy and Commerce Committee, incidentally up for reelection and
well funded, by "
the industry" through various
Political Action Committees, has released a draft of the predictably named (to be
found here when released)
Gasoline for America's Security Act of 2005 (committee discusion and
webcast are scheduled for 9/28 at 8 am.) Given that new refineries are years away, there is still no solution for current prices or the (90%?)
increase in prices since January of 2001.
posted by rzklkng
on Sep 27, 2005 -
22 comments
Loose lips sink ships!!!1 (There be images, some quite big here) I suspect a lot of MeFi shares my obsession with
propaganda (and propaganda-style)
posters,
both domestic and foreign, as well as the
photoshops that the
Something Awful or
Fark crowds generate. CoolGov has a link today to the
Office of the National National Counterintelligence Executive and their Anti-Espionage
poster collection.
Some are great, some are almost
pure propaganda, and some show how
obsessed with secrecy our government has become. That lead me to Google to look for posters on the
*.gov and
*.mil domains. Check out the posters for
"Venemous Snakes of Afghanistan and Pakistan", or what the
well dressed airmen is wearing (*note the "Essentials"), posters from the NOAA telling you that
"lightning kills", the
Code of Ethics for Government Officers and Employees, and this one telling GI's why
smoking could kill them.
posted by rzklkng
on Apr 18, 2005 -
22 comments
