Gasoline Prices Options

[impala454]

Just thought it'd be some interesting questions to ask. As always, explain what your choices were and why. If there's a sensible choice in one of the questions I left out, I'll add it.

[Dogmeat]

How to fix gas prices:

1.) Stop allowing Barbara Streisand to dictate where we drill for oil in this country. Nobody but her gives a flying fuck if she sees offshore platforms 50 miles out into the ocean from her multimillion dollar porch in marthas vinyard while we're all paying $5.00 a gallon for gas.

It's been my experience that it does not matter where a given drilling propostion is proposed, be it on shore or off shore, that it will AUTOMATICALLY be opposed by every fucking "green" group in existance on evidence that is so whimsy and thin it just boggles my mind that the people who push it claim to be americans. seriously. I wanna know what the real motivation behind supporting some of this shit is, because for the benefits that would be created the "environmental impact" is virtually zero. It doesn't matter if it's offshore, on shore in the prarie, or the in the middle of a fucking desert, some group is going to sue to stop it for the sole purpose of garnering political power for themselves. I've seen this so many times it just fucking drives me nuts.

2.) If you're going to claim you support alternative energy, then fucking support it and stop your elitist mentality "oh well yeah wind power is great but only if the millions of wind turbines are somehwere I don thave to look at them all the time". I've seen this happen before on numerous occasions. People think nuclear power is great, but when it comes time to find a place to bury the waste a mile under ground, they flip out.

3.) If you drive anything bigger than a small sedan to commute in, you have zero right whatsoever to bitch about gas prices. NONE. you DO FUCKING NOT need a god damned truck or SUV to drive around town in, and I don't give a flying fuck what your opinion is, you DO NOT NEED IT. These are the people who piss meo ff more than anything. It is not your god-given right to drive a 6,000 pound truck around the pavement all day long for $1.00 a gallon. Get the fuck over it.

4.) If refining capacity is the problem, then expand and build more refineries. You people have no idea what a "red tape" nightmare this is. Do you realize that there hasn't been a new refinery built in this country in roughly 20 years, and the red tape you have to cut through to even EXPAND an existing refinery would take an army of lumberjacks 10 years to cut through? There are certain elements in the US government that make it so fucking hard to conduct business here it literally makes me wonder whose side some of these people are on. I mean I honest to god wonder how much of some people's campaign donations are ultimatley funneled from foreign powers. If refining capacity is the problem, expand it.....and I seriously don't wanna hear any bullshit about how "harmful to the environment" it is. I've worked in a refinery before, and it's absolutley amazing to me how little environmental impact it has on ground water and air quality considering the MILLIONS of gallons of gasoline that are produced daily.

5.) Understand what it takes to produce a gallon of gas. Most people are so incredibly naive about how the oil and gas industry works it just makes me laugh. They have absolutley no idea how in-depth the process is for actually taking a given volume of oil out of the ground and converting it to what you put in your tank....and this is just the on-shore stuff, the off-shore stuff is getting so advanced these days it's just amazing. People think all you have to do is drill a hole in the ground and oil exists in the ground in this big pools and it just comes shooting back out like in the olden days in the 1800's. Folks, it hasn't been that way in this country SINCE the 1800's. All the oil that was "that easy" to get to was found a century ago .... that's one of the reason the middle-east is so attractive .... the oil there is much easier to get out of the ground. Most people don't realize that in order to bring a given well online, it may have cost a company several million dollars .... it's not cheap to drill, it's not cheap to produce, and you don't even always know what the yield on a given well will be until it's actually flowing. believe me it's a hell of a lot more complicated than drilling a hole in the ground and sucking it out like it's a fucking milkshare.

so what can be done?

Well, alternative energy. Duh. The problem is, as i've stated, everyone "claims" they support it, but when push comes to shove, they don't, because they don't wanna look at the icky wind turbines, wah wah wah, or they dont wanna feel like nuclear waste will make them glow in the dark, wah wah wah wah...

bottom line is, politicians get elected by peddeling this shit to people because people want to be lied to. if politicians told the truth, they'd never get elected, because then the first politicain to lie about everything and paint a rosy picture that came along would win in a land slide.

you cannot have your cake and eat it too, and as a whole, the american public absolutley refuses to accept this fact, and we've been living blindly about it for so long it's gonna come back to bite us harder than we've ever been bit before in the near future.

[Seeker]

Dogmeat, please give me:

http://www.crystallik.com/images/misc_imag.../cliffnotes.jpg
NSFW!! AHHHH, did not expect to see that in NPR!

This post has been edited by Psykopath: May 24 2007, 01:02 PM