The dirty little secret about oil

It has taken $100 per barrel oil but now the government can no longer hold back the new technologies that will someday replace oil.  Yes for at least 50 years the government has had a vested interest in keeping oil prices low.  It all comes down to the almighty buck, but not the bucks that Exxon or Shell are raking in, no it comes down to taxes.

So long as oil was priced low there is no interest in trying to figure out a less expensive, or cleaner, way to power our nation and the world for that matter.  Why would car companies work on developing vehicles that operate on different sources of power when a gallon of gas was $1.00?  That development costs money and consumers in the early nineties wouldn’t have paid for it.  So in the nineties liberals, mostly democrats but a few republicans along the way, began to monkey around with air quality standards.  The thinking was to make it so expensive for car makers to meet these standards that they would begin pouring money into cleaner technologies.  This didn’t happen on the scale that environmental movement wanted.  The standards did have an impact, we got vehicles that got fewer miles per gallon with less power, but less polluting.  The benefit of that was that people unwittingly fell for this hook line and sinker.  Gas was still relatively cheap so it wasn’t as big a deal to consumers that they were buying more gas.

Big deal right, well I believe it is.  You now have cleaner cars and that’s makes people feel better.  Great, but if we have to look at the fact that those cars get less mileage than their counterparts from a decade prior.  This results in the need to pump more oil, so our vehicles actually use more fuel but they burn it cleaner however we have to buy more gas.  Now at the same time liberals make it impossible to drill for oil in many regions of our country that have oil thus forcing us to continue to deal with third world thugs like Hugo Chavez, and that Nazi loving pinhead in Iran.

Now on to the almighty buck.  The liberals in this country love to rail against “Big Oil” and how mean they are for gouging us for fuel.  What you may not know is that oil profits are less than $0.10 per gallon.  Yet these oil companies invest all the money to find oil, extract it from the ground, refine it, formulate it with other things that the liberals tell them they have use to make it burn cleaner, ship it to gas stations where you get to go and pump it into your cars.  They do all that to make a lousy $0.10 per gallon and still have to listen to uneducated idiots complain about the price of gas and how they are to blame for it.  Yet between $0.45 and $0.70 per gallon, depending on where you live, is federal and state gas taxes.  Government does nothing to find sources of oil, does nothing to get it out of the ground, does nothing to get it to market.  They assume no risk in the venture but there they are with their hand out for their cut.  So yes with demand for oil up due to government regulation government also gets to profit on the back end as well.  When the price of gas goes out of sight then who’s there bad mouthing the profits of oil companies and complaining about how much money they’re making?  Those same liberals and they tell us they want to take more oil profits but do they ever tell us how much the government profits from the oil business, no.

So with the price of oil up a lot of investment has gone into clean technologies, electric vehicles, bio-diesel, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.  This is fine, I have no problem with these technologies in fact the biggest impediment now to getting these technologies to market is that government hasn’t yet figured out how to tax these things.  But never fear, they will, and whatever source of fuel we use in the future doesn’t matter.  Liberals will create the same circumstances with the next fuel, be it hydrogen or ethanol, makes no difference because to liberals it is all about raising taxes and gaining power.

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