Don’t Blame Obama for High Gas Prices
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Why have gasoline prices increased since the start of the year? The simplest explanation is that the price of crude oil has increased. Specifically, the spot price for Brent (North Sea) crude has increased $16 a barrel since January. Given that there are 42 gallons to a barrel, that works out to a 38 cent increase in the price of a gallon of oil. Spot prices for gasoline trade in New York have increased about 41 cents per gallon over the same time frame. So there you go.
Oil Sanctions and the Pretense of Knowledge
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He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chose to impress upon it.
The Oil Market Panic
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Richard Epstein looks at the recent run up in gas prices and concludes that it’s mostly because of an increasingly hostile posture towards Iran. Without question, the problem can be traced back to a renegade Iran. For good and sufficient political reasons, the West has come to see that the Iranian nuclear threat is not [...]
U.S. oil gusher blows out projections
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I knew things were getting better, but this is unexpected. The United States’ rapidly declining crude oil supply has made a stunning about-face, shredding federal oil projections and putting energy independence in sight of some analyst forecasts. After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009. Drilling [...]
U.S. Is Already a Net Exporter of Oil
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I knew that the energy situation in the U.S. had been improving but I didn’t realize that it was already this good.
To be sure, part of the reason for this change is that demand for energy in the U.S. is down in the sluggish aftermath of the Great Recession, while demand for energy …
If You Must Be An Empire, Don’t Be An Incompetent Empire
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Jerry Pournelle, on foreign policy.
I was opposed to extending our Afghan adventure beyond the punishment of the Taliban for harboring out enemies; left to me we’d have been out as soon as Kabul fell to the anti-Taliban forces, with perhaps a billion dollars in bribe money squirreled away to be spent at the …
addicted to what now?
The Munchkin Wrangler had a great rant recently.
You know what I can’t stand to hear about anymore? That we Americans are addicted to oil. It’s a smarmy term that tries to couch an economic and environmental argument in pathological terms.
I’m not addicted to oil. I’m addicted to being …
The Case for Increasing Domestic Oil Production
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By increasing U.S. oil production (from off shore drilling, from natural gas fields, and from shale oil fields) we could cut our oil imports roughly in half.
Peak Oil Myths
Michael Lynch, the former director for Asian energy and security at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, debunks some of the claims surrounding peak oil, in an op-ed at the New York Times. Here’s a few of the highlights:
On the claim that oil companies are extracting increasing amounts of water …
Shale Oil
I’ve heard before that shale oil was energy intensive. In fact, that’s the most frequent criticism I’ve heard. But I had no idea it was this energy intensive:
Environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council have called oil shale one of the planet’s dirtiest fuels. It can be converted into liquid petroleum, …