Big Bad Oil

Just to let you know this is my first blog ever also. After agreeing to blog I kind of wondered why would I want to do this? Who would want to read my thoughts? Then I read the Sunday Journal Sentinal and figured if they can pay these people to write what they do, at least I'm not taking money. So here goes.

  In the Crossroads section there is a nice article written by a lady from the Sierra club about Big oil and leases, oil company profits and of course not letting Big Oil steal your childrens dreams. She (Rosemary) talks about how more production won't help. Rose points out that permits for drilling have tripled since 2001 and that hasn't lowered the gas price at all. Of course she doesn't mention demand has probably quadrupled since 01, and my truck does not run on permits.

   Then we talk about efficiency and conservation. Rose wants us all to use less gas. Now Rose if all of us in Wisconsin use say 15% less, that will be 15% less in gas tax. Where would Diamond Jim Doyle rob money from to balance his budgets? If you go and read about the CAFE Standards set in this country you'll see they are mostly make believe. They say a PT Cruiser has a MPG of 26 when real testing is closer to 17.

   We also have the big cry about leases, Russ Fiengold is leading this charge. Big oil should drill on the land we want them to lease. Did you ever think there just might not be a good enough chance that there is actual oil there. Maybe that's why they don't look there. Maybe it's cost prohibitive, when gas gets to $10 a gallon maybe they will look there. Heck I have 20 acres of swamp I can't get the farmers to lease, maybe Russ can force them.

  We also have those nasty profits. Lets use liberal numbers, $40 billion dollars in profits is so obsene, unless of course you find out that it is on over $500 billion in sales. S&P 500 shows Net Profit Margins at around 8.5% for Big Bad Oil. Not bad, not great, Google had a NPM of 25%, lets tax them. Rose talks about oil subsidies and they should be taken away and given to renewables like wind power. If it weren't for government subsidies and government mandates there wouldn't be any windmills. The only reason you see these are because laws were passed telling power companies that 10% of the power must be renewable by what ever date. And you can rest assured once they hit that magic number they will stop putting them up. And what is so renewable about a windmill thats not renewable with a steam turbine.

  I guess my questions to Rose would be, Why can't we drill for more oil while developing other energy sources? Who is doing most of the realistic experiments on alternative energy now? If the world only has so much oil I would imagine Big Oil must be looking for other ways to protect the profits.

   But my biggest question Rose is, How in the hell is Big Oil robbing my children of memories or opportunities?

Comments

[Steve T.]

Buck, because T Boone Pickens new wind farm has the speaker of the houses money! Yes, Nancy Pelosi herself has invested in it. Wait no, her husband did. Wait No she did. You just cannot pin her down. Well factcheck.org has this to say. Anyways it doesn’t make sen$e for Pelosi to open the drilling and devalue her stock in the wind farm. Is that not a conflict of interest?

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/is_nancy_pelosi_heavily_invested_in_t.html

Is Nancy Pelosi heavily invested in T. Boone Pickens' alternative energy company?
A: No, but her husband bought stock in Clean Energy Fuels Corp. last year. It amounted to a tiny fraction of the couple's assets.
"Heavily invested" is a relative term, and so we'll just state the facts and leave it to our readers to decide whether that characterization fits or not.

Pelosi's personal financial disclosure forms show that her husband purchased stock in the company valued at somewhere between $50,001 and $100,000 on May 25, 2007.

The notation "SP" in the left-hand column indicates the purchase was by her spouse, Paul Pelosi, a successful San Francisco businessman and financier. The exact number of shares and their precise value are not known, because members of Congress are only required to disclose their family assets within broad ranges of value.

For the wealthy Pelosis, it was not a major purchase, however. Nancy Pelosi reported that the couple's total assets at the end of 2007 totaled somewhere between $35.5 million and $156.2 million, as tabulated for us by researcher Dan Auble at the Center for Responsive Politics (where Pelosi's entire disclosure form may be viewed online.) So the Clean Energy purchase amounted to, at the very most, only 0.3 percent of their holdings at the time of purchase, and probably much less than that.

It has been a profitable investment, at least on paper. May 25 was the first day the stock was publicly traded. Shares were initially offered at $12 and traded hands that day on the open market at prices ranging from $11.97 to $13.00. The stock price has since gone up. It closed at $15.14 per share on the last day of 2007 – a 26 percent increase over the initial offering price. Pelosi valued her husband's shares at $100,001 or more at the end of 2007. This year the price of the stock has fluctuated. Her husband still owned the stock as of Aug. 20 when we spoke to the speaker's spokesman Brendan Daly. On that day it closed at $14.67 per share.

Clean Energy Fuels Corp. markets compressed natural gas and liquefied natural gas as a fuel for motor vehicles in the U.S. and Canada. The company was founded in 1997 and, as mentioned, became a publicly traded company last year. One of the company's founders is T. Boone Pickens.

Pickens is running a nationwide advertising campaign to promote his plans for wind-powered electricity and the wider use of natural gas as a fuel. In it, he says the problem of imported oil is "one emergency we can't drill our way out of," which echoes what Pelosi and other Democrats have been saying. His ads also urge Congress and the next president to make reduction of oil imports "a top priority."

However, Pickens' ads started running July 8, 2008, well over a year after the stock purchase.