Quote:
Originally Posted by Efthreeoh
It's a good discussion here, but my intent of this post was not to get into a political discussion. However, I've stated in the past that oil pricing is political and politicians can influence oil prices. I wish it were a true market economy for oil, but it's is not. I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm old enough to remember the OPEC oil embargos of the 1970's (there where two). There were gas lines at gas stations and rationing in effect, where one could only buy fuel every other day, and that's if one could find a gas station with gasoline. The embargos devastated the US car industry because the price of gasoline doubled practically overnight and far faster than the US industry could switch to more fuel efficient vehicles. It's an impact to the US economy we still feel today and it still affects US elections (re: Trump).
I've yet to believe any reasoning why oil prices rapidly went over $100 a barrel during Bush's era, but chalking it up to higher demand in India and China didn't fly with me.
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No discussion on future oil prices can leave politics out of it, I just don't believe the new administration will drastically lower prices or drastically increase the amount we drill (outside of the normal market) unless we are talking about subsidies to the producers, mainly because of where prices need to be for them to go get the oil. I believe we are at the point where we should drastically cut the government subsidies to oil production. These cuts would probably decrease some amount of production and possibly increase the price some but could also go to paying for other things we want but can't figure out how to pay for.
I was alive during the embargo, OPEC controlled most of the world's supply and cut it off and we were out of luck. Luckily we have proven oil reserves and the ability to get to them when needed and because of this and a lot of other countries that have oil and aren't in OPEC no one organization or country can control oil prices to the same level they could in the past.
I also think some level of regulations helps control the demand side in the U.S. (how much we use). We drove big, gas hogs right before the embargo and then when faced with the shortage it took many years to get to smaller, efficient cars. If we had realized the possibility of what eventually happened we could have planned ahead for it and reduced the pain we felt. I feel the same about our supply of water, once an area starts to run short we then start worrying about how to not use so much in this area.