OdontoBear66 said:Has nothing to do with media. Biden and fellow Dems have wanted to reduce carbon emissions in the US and decreasing extraction of fossil fuels is a big part of that policy. We were either energy independent or close to same when he came in. It is noble for all of us to reduce our carbon footprint, but when alternate energy systems can backfill the loss of energy. We are just not there yet. All for it. But when you decrease supply you increase demand and price.DiabloWags said:OdontoBear66 said:
The average Joe may be a tad smarter than you think...e.g. Only 6% think Putin is responsible for the price of gas going up.
Are they smart enough to blame our good "friends" the Saudi's and OPEC+ for that?
Or do they just listen to the talking heads at Faux News and parrot the typical Biden bashing narrative of
"He closed down the Keystone Pipeline, blah, blah, blah " - - - too dumb to know that the first 3 phases of Keystone have been open and in service for quite some time.
Then you increase energy source/dependence with someone's who you are at odds with, whether it be the Saudi's, Russia, Iran, is just weird. If oil comes out of the ground and we in the US use it, what difference does it make if we buy it abroad, or extract it ourselves. Until we can depend on alt sources, the current policy seems crazy to me. But the bent of the current administration is to not be energy independent, and then walk it back as we move to alt sources.
Unfortunately, your understanding of how the oil market works is very poor and just not accurate.
Not only is crude oil a global commodity that is priced at the margin which Unit2 so eloquently points out, the United States is still pumping the same 11.6 million barrels per day that it was pumping under the Trump Administration in Q-1 of 2019, pre-covid and three years ago. So your claim that a decrease in supply has lead to an increase in price is terribly erroneous.
Moreover, the claim that we were energy "independent" under Trump is not an accurate claim either.
Quite simply put, "energy independence" is a political phrase, not a literal phrase.
It's a term for the low IQ simpletons that watch Faux News.
For example, from the beginning of Trump's term to the end, the U.S. very much relied on oil and gas from abroad. In fact in 2020, the U.S. imported about 7.9 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products. The times in which the U.S. produced more crude than we consumed, were (as Unit2) pointed out, the result of decreased demand due to covid.
One of the reasons that we import crude is because there is a mismatch between many of the refineries in the U.S. that were designed to handle heavy crude oil, and the lighter crude that is produced in the U.S. through fracking.
Even when the U.S.was a net exporter of oil, our oil market remains tightly integrated into the world market for oil. Our refineries will import low cost crude from abroad, and turn it into higher-value petroleum products, and then export some of those products.
Dont even get me started on how the fracking business in the Permian Basin has changed over the years, to one in which producers are no longer drilling for the sake of showing drillilng growth to investors. Wall Street got tired of the fracking community generating over $200 Billion in red ink since 2010 and stopped financing the industry. As a result, frackers had to change their BUSINESS MODEL. They had to become capital expense conscious and more conservative with their cash and balance sheets, showing investors that they could become cash flow positive and return some of that cash to investors.
As for importing Russian crude, we did a lot of that when Trump was in office.
We imported 137 million barrels in 2018, 190 million in 2019, and 198 million in 2020.
Unfortunately, the Ron DeSantis' (FL) and Joni Ernst's (IA)of the political world "spin" quite the opposite narrative to the typical Faux News viewer who eats up the claim that:
"We were, before Biden took office, for the first time in any of our lifetimes, actually energy independent. Putin didn't matter. Now, they're importing millions of barrels of oil from Russia."
Biden's choices when he first came into office "put us in this tenuous position with energy independence in the United States. Instead of being an exporter of energy, we became a consumer of Russian oil."
