Warbird Information Exchange

My only point was that there is much, much more to oil prices than simple supply & demand.



I think we're in violent agreement here. There are a lot of factors that govern the oil market though. Much more than simple supply & demand. And so long as we import any of our oil, we will be subject to them.

Does that mean I think we should quit importing oil? No. It is a useful carrot and it means we'll be one of the last countries with oil when it finally does dry up.


No new refineries has more to do with EPA than anything else. But yes, a lack of refineries is most definitely impacting gasoline prices (we were talking about oil).


Naught you can do about this - you can nationalize everything & become communists, you can tax the hell out of it & hope to "even the score" that way, or you can work from a supply-side viewpoint. All have limitations, all have huge political impacts...


Never heard of this. Out west here, though, I do see acres upon acres of wind farms...

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Daddy always said, "If yer gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough" and I'm one tough sonofagun!

on the contrary.... i'd love to live by an airport!!

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tom d. friedman - hey!!! those fokkers were messerschmitts!! * without ammunition, the usaf would be just another flying club!!! * better to have piece of mind than piece of tail!!

You want the goverment to subsidize a new energy source?!?!?! It's already subsidizing ethanol and screwing it and the food supply system all up, now you want us taxpayers to spend more money after bad? The goverment screwed up the "energy crisis" back in the 70's, and you expect it to get it right this time? Remember when you say goverment, you mean taxpayer, you and me, are footing the bill.

I thought we were on the same track, I guess I phrased it to sound like I was interrogating you, rather than asking a question and providing my own thoughts.

What's the deal with the EPA? After Katrina all I heard was that it wasn't economicallly feasable to build more, because of new controls. Like always, corporations blame government controls as opposed to the reality: When a plant goes down they can charge more because suddenly the supply goes way down, and then when the supply goes back up the prices remain the same.

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"I knew the jig was up when I saw the P-51D-20-NA Mustang blue-nosed bastards from Bodney, and by the way the blue was more of a royal blue than an indigo and the inner landing gear interiors were NOT green, over Berlin."

Not economically feasible due to EPA requirements! There haven't been any new refineries built in probably 20-30 years because of ever more stringent EPA requirements. All the old refineries were "grandfathered" in for new rules regarding spills, containment, cleanup, emissions, etc.

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Daddy always said, "If yer gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough" and I'm one tough sonofagun!

Eh heh. And they've paid off the old ones by now...Oh wait, I bet the feds paid for them

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"I knew the jig was up when I saw the P-51D-20-NA Mustang blue-nosed bastards from Bodney, and by the way the blue was more of a royal blue than an indigo and the inner landing gear interiors were NOT green, over Berlin."

No new refineries have been built because of the time it takes to get one permitted. It's the same reason no new nuclear plants were being built. It takes 10+ years to clear the paperwork needed to build a refinery and by that point the regs have changed again. The oil companies (at the time) had plenty of excess capacity and thus had no driving need to spend the millions (if not billions) of dollars to do all of the reports (4 or 5 environmental impact studies), fill out all the paperwork (literally thousands of pages), and then start the process of actually building the refinery.

But wait. There's one problem. Where to build the refinery? There's the other problem - NIMBY. Everywhere they could build now has neighbors. And those neighbors don't want more refineries next door and in fact want the ones that are already there gone. Nevermind the economic impact (or the loss in jobs if the refineries close), they see a refinery as a dirty "blight" that is "tanking" their property values, and that's all they care about.

BTW, if you tax the living daylights out of the oil companies, guess what happens - the price of oil goes up. There's no law that says the oil companies can't pass on their hike in an already outrageous corporate tax structure to the consumer as they already are.

Actually bio-diesel has become so popular in some ares here, that savy resturants have started charging people for their used oil.