|
Monday, November 28, 2005Instapundit is promising thoughts on politics and energy.Here are a few of my thoughts: 1. The oil companies want to make a profit. That's why their shareholders invest in them. If you have any kind of pension fund or mutual fund, this probably includes you. It includes me. To want the oil companies not to make money is to want the conservative, careful investor to be better off with a savings account than the markets. 2. When the politicians assail the fat-cat oil companies, they never seem to acknowledge that those fat-cats are small investors in Dow Dog funds, Dow dividend funds and the least sexy of the growth and income funds. Do they really think the CEO of Exxon lives in a house built of gold? Actually, when XOM goes zoom, the real result is slightly less modest appreciation for tens of thousands of ordinary joes. 3. The killer here is that with the problems we're having with refining capacity, drilling restrictions and differing gasoline regulations from state to state seem almost designed to constrain supply and push up prices any time there is even a minor kink in the supply chain. The old joke goes that markets fluctuate, but here there are structural problems that exacerbate the problems inherent in those fluctuations. 4. In order to better deal with energy costs, we should be addressing those structural problems that are most easily addressed: the regulatory problems. Making every car get 60mpg is going to take time; making it easier to use Missouri gas in Michigan when there's a problem in the pipeline can be done with modest legislation. Modest drilling rights for national parks and the like can allow us to expand our domestic oil infrastructure. Using "national" oil holdings could even allow the government to more effectively (and secretively) maintain the strategic reserve and government oil expenditures, helpful in a) stabilizing consumer markets and b) reducing the strategic utility of, say, bombing a refinery, in an attempt to sabotage our economy. 5. In the long run, we need to do more to reduce our dependence on oil, both foreign and domestic. And to use what we use more cleanly and efficiently. This would start, though, with modernizing our domestic energy infrastructure. That means cutting back on opposition to nuclear, building new, more efficient refineries and power plants. It means realizing that even solar farms, if seriously implemented, are going to be an ugly mess in the middle of someone's neighborhood. The environmentalists have made common cause with the NIMBY crowd to stop us from dealing with necessary improvements in our energy infrastructure. For the earth firsters, the consequences are fine. But a lot of the NIMBY crowd will, in time, be better described as the WNITBYs - Why Not In Their Back Yard - as it becomes apparent something has to be done and they have to deal with their real motivations, which are personal, not ideological. 
posted by gbarto at 3:22 PM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
