RE: Can Obama overcome his inept energy policy?
I think the really interesting thing is that they are crowing over the increase in domestic production, and acting as if it's Obama's doing.
Two things:
1. Remember back in 2008, when democrats were criticizing "drill baby drill" by saying it wouldn't have any effect for 10 years? Well, if that's true, then whatever is going on today must obviously be the result of what happened 10 years ago, and that wasn't Obama. Of course, it's actually a lie, as I pointed out then. Even the Department of Energy report that supposedly said 10 years didn't; it actually said 5 years if you read the report. Of course, that's exactly what the industry has said all along. So if that's right, we are looking at the results of decisions made 5 years ago. Who was president then? Not Obama.
2. If Obama wants to take credit, then Obama needs to point out what specifically he did to deserve credit. What did he do to help the energy sector produce more domestically? Answer is simple: He didn't. If you disagree, then please explain what he has done. And don't say green energy, because the green energy we are promoting--solar, wind, electric cars--have virtually no effect on oil.
Two other points in passing:
a. Funny how democrats have been opposing more drilling, but now that production is up they want to claim credit. A bit dishonest.
b. I have replicated the process used to prepare the graphs showing how we are producing more than 50% domestically, starting from raw data and getting to the reported results. You can do it, but you have to go through a few mental gymnastics and do some fairly strange classification of certain activity to get there. For example, there's something called "refinery gains" that amounts to about a million barrels a day. What happens is that crude oil is not a specific compound, but rather a bunch of different things--gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, etc.--all flowing together in one stream; different types of crude have different amounts of the various components. The refining process is not a chemical process but rather a physical process of separating the various component products into separate streams. When you do that, the total volume of all the components once separated exceeds the volume when they were all flowing together in one stream. That is "refinery gain" and the statistics being reported count that as domestic "production."
(This post was last modified: 02-21-2012 10:18 PM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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