Re: Energy Protectionism

From: Tkalbfus1 (tkalbfus1_at_aol.com)
Date: 08/25/04 

Date: 25 Aug 2004 22:56:45 GMT

>Time travel, right?
>
>(I knew I shouldn't have sold that stock yesterday.)
>

Yes, time travel. If we all had time machines, we'd never make mistakes because
we could always go back and fix them.

George W. Bush doesn't have a time machine, so he can be criticized for making
mistakes just as any President can be. If Kerry is saying he'll never make
mistakes if elected President, he is selling you a bill of goods. While its
true that Kerry has never made mistakes as President of the United States and
George Bush has, that's no reason to suggest that Kerry would make a better
President.

One mistake we have made is relying on the free market principle in buying our
oil. In otherwords buying from the cheapest producer of oil. OPEC is the
cheapest producer of oil, no one can come close to producing a barrel of oil as
cheaply as the OPEC nations. Because OPEC can threaten to undercut any non-OPEC
producer of oil in pricing, this tends to discourage energy investments in
areas that compete with petroleum. Whenever someone comes up with a proposal,
be it solar power, wind power etc, the investors will ask, "how does this
compare with the same amount of energy produced by a barrel of oil at $50 a
barrel?" "Ok, so this energy source is compeditive with oil at this price, now
how about oil at $20 a barrel?" "Well it seems we won't recoup our investment
at this price of oil and we never know when the price of oil will fall, so we
better not invest our money now regardless of the current $50 per barrel
price." If government could force the price up and keep it up.

Tom

Relevant Pages

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