Friday, February 24, 2012

Oil and Gas Exploration at 20 Year High

According to a commenter ... probably echoing a DNC talking point ... over at RCP on this Debbie Wasserman-Schultz video where she blames Republican "yes"-men saying yes to oil companies for high gas prices during the Bush administration.

The comment was:
There is no hypocrisy. Bush pursued policies that drove up oil prices and drove up gas prices. Obama has done just the opposite. Employment in oil and gas exploration is at a 20 year high under Obama.
The comment linked the accompanying graph as evidence.

Well of course everybody knows that "employment in oil and gas exploration" means that we're actually finding it and being allowed to drill for it ... right? FAIL #1

And if higher "employment in oil and gas exploration" is an indicator of energy policy that keeps supply high and prices low, then we can only deduce from the chart the commenter linked that horrible policy was pursued under Clinton, as it did all of its actual falling under the Clinton administration, then held steady during GW Bush's first term and began to rise sharply during his second term (you know, when all of the same people who blamed Bush for high gas prices were busy blaming him) -- and "employment in oil and gas exploration" first dropped sharply right after Obama took office, but in the last two years has increased again at about the same trajectory it was on before Obama took office. FAIL #2

FAIL #1 is much bigger, though, because looking for gas and oil is not the same as actually producing it. Remember the instructive joke:
Q: Three guys are sitting on a bridge. Two say they will jump off. How many are left?
A: Three. Because saying and doing are two different things.
Government doesn't do the exploring, and government doesn't do the drilling. They can allow exploring but not drilling - which is what pretty much what the administration has been doing.

A better explanation of what you see on the chart is that falling oil prices made oil less profitable, so less exploration was done over time. When oil prices started going up ... mostly due to increased world demand, companies (not Bush or Obama) started looking for more of it. And they have to look extra hard because of all the places they are not allowed to actually, you know, drill for it.

I mean ... duh, people!

5 comments:

Severian said...

Your comments, sir, are what we call "earth logic." Earth logic does not work on leftists.

Solidarity, comrade!

Whitehawk said...

True that.

I once had a manager make a telling comment while mixing proctology and sunshine... Someone was pointing out a problem with his blind optimism, he said, "Let's not get bogged down in reality here."

After an awkward silence he tried to recover but too late, the turd was on the table. His credibility was suddenly a matter of ridicule.

Liberals will become familiar with this "earth logic" in a crash course soon. Reality has a way of asserting itself.

Cylar said...

I've been going around and around with leftists on the "innerwebs" on the subject of gas prices, and as you'd imagine, most of them are actively engaged in the business of trying to disassociate Obama of any responsibility at all for $4 gasoline.

Some of them have posted links purporting to show that actual US oil production is at an all-time high...without bothering to note that A) this is in spite of Obama, not because of him, B) most of the new exploration is taking place on state and private lands, not federal and C) it's not enough anyway. If it were, we wouldn't be paying $4 for gas.

Another linked to an article showing that the US is exporting refined gasoline. (So? Are domestic oil companies somehow obligated to sell 100% of their product to American consumers?)

A third has blamed speculators for all the mess. In vain, I pointed out that speculators generally *follow* price spikes. They don't cause them. The snarky little cretin then asked me if I had any more "Fox News talking points for him to debunk."

Speculators are like any other investor - they want to buy low and sell high. (At most, they might make a bad situation worse. But you're not going to sit there and tell me that Wall Street got together and collectively decided to send the price of gas through the roof, all by themselves.)

My response to THAT clueless cluck, pointed out that demand for fuel in the developing world has been growing for years...and that investors are betting on an economic recovery at home, which in turn means higher consumption as business and consumer activity gradually picks up.

My argument has always been that expanding drilling increases supply, and that increasing supply only has ONE possible effect on prices - DOWN.

philmon said...

"most of them are actively engaged in the business of trying to disassociate Obama of any responsibility at all for $4 gasoline."

But if you go back approximately 4 years, those same people were most likely accepting as self-evident that Bush was responsible for the gas spike during his presidency.

And as for your snarky friend ... did you ask him what he'd "debunked" so far?

Cylar said...

But if you go back approximately 4 years, those same people were most likely accepting as self-evident that Bush was responsible for the gas spike during his presidency.

My very first thought, believe me. But if you point this out, they attempt to counter that Bush and Cheney were was "oilmen." Yeah, oilmen who sold all their stock before entering office. (Obama, meanwhile, never worked in oil. He was too busy hanging around with communists and domestic terrorists and running for some political office he wasn't qualified for.)

And as for your snarky friend ... did you ask him what he'd "debunked" so far?

He posted links purporting to "debunk" my claim that oil exploration/drilling had fallen off during the Obama years, and to my other claim that the US was experiencing a shortage of refined gasoline, hence the high prices.

I stood my ground. Putting more oil on the market drives prices down. Period.