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The numbers suggest otherwise. Of the 36 billion barrels of oil believed to lie on federal land, mainly in the Rocky Mountain West and Alaska, almost two-thirds are accessible or will be after various land-use and environmental reviews. And of the 89 billion barrels of recoverable oil believed to lie offshore, the federal Mineral Management Service says fourth-fifths is open to industry, mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan waters.
Clearly, the oil companies are not starved for resources. Further, they do not seem to be doing nearly as much as they could with the land to which theyve already laid claim. Separate studies by the House Committee on Natural Resources and the Wilderness Society, a conservation group, show that roughly three-quarters of the 90 million-plus acres of federal land being leased by the oil companies onshore and off are not being used to produce energy. That is 68 million acres altogether, among them potentially highly productive leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.
With that in mind, four influential House Democrats Edward Markey, Nick Rahall, Rahm Emanuel and Maurice Hinchey have introduced use it or lose it bills that would force the companies to begin exploiting the leases they have before getting any more. Companion bills have been introduced in the Senate, where suspicions also run high that industrys main objective is to stockpile millions of additional acres of public land before the Bush administration leaves town.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/opinion/19thu1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
There is anothe article that I can't find right now that shows that the major US Oil companies are getting ready to fnalize deals with no bid contracts for Iraqi oil. Now when that happens, our troops will be there forever to protect them.
It really was about oil and not democracy, WMDs, Mushroom Peyotes, etc.
Let's Nationalize the oil companies.
heard on BBC this afternoon that China plans to reduce the subsidy it provides to keep its gasoline cheap for its citizens.
report said last year the subsidy last year was 1 percent of china's gdp
if they had tried to maintain it it would have cost like 6-7 gdp
report also said demand for oil is expected to drop (duh) and this is expected to cause a drop in oil prices.
really don't hear a lot about the effect of these subsidies on gas prices
Let's Nationalize the oil companies.
Oil dropped $4 on this news today.
China had to. Their refiners are getting crushed because they have to buy oil on the world markets. Plus, subsidies are becoming a bigger part of the Chinese budget.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/opinion/19thu1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
There is anothe article that I can't find right now that shows that the major US Oil companies are getting ready to fnalize deals with no bid contracts for Iraqi oil. Now when that happens, our troops will be there forever to protect them.
It really was about oil and not democracy, WMDs, Mushroom Peyotes, etc.
Let's Nationalize the oil companies.
But y'all suck that "change" shit right up. Remind me of a bunch of friggin' moonies.
Wrong once again. A lot of Dems are getting fed up with the do nothings that are in office right now. I will be voting against my incumbents.
Please don't make it sound like the Repubs did the right thing when they were in charge.
We don't need to nationalize the oil coming out of NATIONALLY OWNED land.
We, the American people already own that oil.
Nationalizing oil companies, something I do not subscribe to, is entirely a different matter.
Semantics, but I agree with your point. It would be nationalizing the oil companies, not the actual oil.
Can I use your argument down at the gas station when they ask for some coin? Hey! This shit's ALREADY mine!
I LOVE reading chicken little "the sky will fall" bullshit from free market capitalists who have given us exactly the economy that we complain about today full of rationalized outsourcing and a PWNED global strategy that allows japan, a CLOSED MARKET SYSTEM, to dominate the shit out of Americans.
If you want a pep talk about the Japanese economy, don't go see Atsushi Saito.
The head of the Tokyo Stock Exchange doesn't hold back when a Canadian visitor comes by his office expecting a simple rundown on the Japanese markets. Japan, he says, is walking toward the edge of a cliff. Unless it changes direction, the world's second-biggest economy faces financial ruin.
In an hour-long interview, Mr. Saito painted a grim picture of a country with a crushing national debt, a diminished stock market, a shrinking, aging work force and a ruling class too blinkered to learn from its mistakes.
Mr. Saito worked on Wall Street in the 1970s and remembers when New York faced bankruptcy. We are in the same situation, he said. We are the City of New York.
The difference is that New York had the U.S. government, which, after first refusing, helped rescue it from bankruptcy. We don't have any Washington, he said. So unless something changes, we will have to sell our country to someone else. ...
Mr. Saito said Japan's long-term problems are severe. The markets he presides over as president of the Tokyo exchange mirror the fall in Japan's fortunes, he said.
A second problem, he said, is Japan's immense national debt, which has climbed to 11/2 times its gross domestic product, the highest rate for an industrialized country. Throughout the lost decade that followed its 1989 market crash, Japan used floods of public money to try to spend its way back to economic health.
It has funded that debt partly by issuing bonds. In the next 30 years, Mr. Saito said, the government will somehow have to redeem $5.7-trillion worth of those bonds, a sum greater than Japan's current annual GDP.
And we have to do this with an aging society and a shrinking work force, he said. How can we really redeem this debt unless we raise productivity and economic growth.
According to the working-age population trend based on the differences on the assumptions of fertility rate in terms of high and low variant projections, the depopulation of this age group is rather slow due to the high fertility rate, and the population is expected to fall below 70 million in 2033. The depopulation continues down to 58.38 million in 2050 (see Table 2). The working-age population based on the low variant projections is expected to fall below 70 million in 2028, below 50 million in 2049, and eventually drop to 48.68 million in 2050 (see Table 3).
