All well and good but the wrong folks to impress, they need to do this in Washington DC, they did one but not big, or strong enough, this one needs to stop traffic in and out of DC, and right in front of the white house, and capitol hill...where the powers that be, live and go to work...
Chuck N. Wined wrote: And most importantly we need to start a "fuel race" just like JFK did with the "space race". We need a President who will stand up and say "we will develop a fuel that you can burn in your current gas and/or diesel vehicle that is made from a renewable, inexpensive and domestic resource. We will have this fuel within 3 years." We have the brain power and resources in this country to do it. We just need the will power and leadership to get it done.
I watched a program on the History Channel about the Manhattan Project in 1945, the year I was born. I was amazed at the magnitude of this project and it's success in just a few short years. Facilities were built in several places around the country, in order to develop and produce the atomic bomb. It was a necessary that we beat the Germans and Russians. It showed what this country was capable of with the right leadership and desire.
Could we do this today to solve our energy crisis? Absolutely not!
tom_kat wrote: there's going to be a truck convoy here with over a hundred trucks today on I-87 around the Saratoga county region up here causing a traffic back up protesting the price of diesel fuel.join in or pick a different route if your in a hurry.
Chuck N. Wined wrote: The people making those decisions are only concerned with profits and getting dividends to their shareholders. I believe that the vast majority of people who own these stocks (through mutual funds and retirement funds) would prefer to see a little less dividend and a lot lower fuel prices... Stockholders need to let the oil companies that they own stock in know they are unhappy with the gouging and lack of new refineries and new oil fields and if it doesn't change they will sell off their stock.
I'm not even sure where to begin explaining everything wrong with the above statements, but I'll try to illustrate the various fallacies in what you're saying by providing food for thought.
Perhaps most glaringly - why should American energy companies be held to different rules and standards than the rest of the corporate world? The fact that some people are emotionally attached to the product a company helps produce and therefore feel some sort of entitlement to at a price of their choosing is a reckless way to set policy and precedent. Does your business work that way? Who's next - pharmaceutical companies? Health care? Technology? (Hint: all of the sectors I just named tend to have higher profit margins than "big oil".) Do you understand the difference between profit and profit margin? If you do, please explain to me how the oil companies' profit margins are out of line with the rest of the corporate world. Do you understand the risk/reward relationship in oil exploration or technology development? If you artificially limit the reward on one side of the equation, are you also willing to limit the risk on the other side? In other words, are you willing to reimburse the oil companies when they lose money on exploration and technology development risks that don't pan out? If not, how do you think that would affect the American energy industries and their willingness to take developmental risks?
What do you think would be the effect of publicly held American oil companies being put under such restraints which the vastly larger, government-controlled oil companies in other countries didn't have to operate? You do realize that ExxonMobil (at approximately 3% of the world's oil production), the largest American oil company and the biggest publicly held oil company in the world, is only the 17th largest of all oil company in the world, and is much smaller than the nationalized, government run oil entities of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, to name just a few? How would it improve our situation to place the the big, bad, stockholder-held American companies under artificial constraints that foreign companies, who don't have to answer to free market stock holders, were not? How about if they just disappeared or moved overseas along with a good portion of their literally hundreds of thousands of industry-related jobs? How would it help us if there was nothing left but the giant government oil companies of other (mostly hostile) nations, who don't have to play by our silly, arbitrary rules?
Who sets the price of crude oil (or any commodity) on the world market? What is the effect of speculators and non-oil company stock holder investors on that price? How much of the price of crude oil is directly attributable to the strength or weakness of the US dollar? How much of the above is under the control of the publicly held American oil companies? Knowing the answers to those questions, please tell me - how would putting artificial pressure on the 17th largest company in the world (and smaller) affect the worldwide price of crude oil?
Do you really think that oil company stockholders, or the stockholders of any company, want lower (or no) dividends? How about the people who run the pension funds, who have a legal responsibility to the members of the funds? Do you understand the legal responsibility of a publicly held corporation? Author Jared Diamond explains it quite well -
"It is easy and cheap for the rest of us to blame a business for helping itself by hurting other people. But that blaming alone is unlikely to produce change. It ignores the fact that businesses are not non-profit charities but profit-making companies, and that publicly owned companies with shareholders are under obligation to those shareholders to maximize profits, provided they do so by legal means. Our laws make a company's directors legally liable for something termed "breach of fiduciary responsibility" if they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. The car manufacturer Henry Ford was in fact successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day: the courts declared that, while Ford's humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders." (p. 483)
Suffice to say your feel-good suggestions would redefine the whole free market system as we know it, with the emphasis on only one sector of the market, with what would be devastating effect on the economy as a whole.
My suggestion would be, as with everything, hedge your costs, and utilize the means available to everyone to mitigate your exposure. With every supposed downside in a free market system, there is opportunity available to those who would take advantage of it instead of complaining about how the system is "unfair", and waiting for someone else to come to the rescue. What have you done to make the situation work to your advantage? Judging by the complaints, I think I know the answer.
Chuck N. Wined wrote: The people making those decisions are only concerned with profits and getting dividends to their shareholders. I believe that the vast majority of people who own these stocks (through mutual funds and retirement funds) would prefer to see a little less dividend and a lot lower fuel prices... Stockholders need to let the oil companies that they own stock in know they are unhappy with the gouging and lack of new refineries and new oil fields and if it doesn't change they will sell off their stock.
I'm not even sure where to begin explaining everything wrong with the above statements,
OK, your right, lets just roll over and take. It is people like you who have sold this country down the river. Good luck when the economy is crippled. Just remember, you are part of this economy too.
Chuck
Chuck N. Wined wrote: The people making those decisions are only concerned with profits and getting dividends to their shareholders. I believe that the vast majority of people who own these stocks (through mutual funds and retirement funds) would prefer to see a little less dividend and a lot lower fuel prices... Stockholders need to let the oil companies that they own stock in know they are unhappy with the gouging and lack of new refineries and new oil fields and if it doesn't change they will sell off their stock.
I'm not even sure where to begin explaining everything wrong with the above statements,
OK, your right, lets just roll over and take. It is people like you who have sold this country down the river. Good luck when the economy is crippled. Just remember, you are part of this economy too.
Chuck
Irony is funny. Unintentional irony is even better.
Oh well. I suspected my efforts would be in vain, but I had to try. Call me an eternal optimist.
Yes, I'm part of this economy, too. However, unlike the professional victims who complain about things they don't understand, and who then find refuge in conspiracy theories, it's an economy I understand (see: Econ 101).
I notice that none of the questions I posed were answered, nor were the points I made refuted, except with more finger pointing and emotionalism. I'm quite aware that rational, fact-based approaches to areas where people feel entitled frequently meet with resistance and hostility. Those people aren't looking for real answers. What they really want is reinforcement of something about which they've already made up their minds. In their way of thinking, if you don't go along with the lynch mob mentality, you must be the enemy. Rational discourse is the last thing such people desire.
I'm reminded at this point of an old analogy about leading a horse to water...
I watched that meeting where Congress grilled the Oil Companies about last years record profits.....I shut the TV off when they asked one CEO from Chevron what his yearly salary was, and the guy couldn't remember and said it was printed in a financial report somewhere.
31 ft Four Winds
Chevy Tracker 4x4 Blue Ox We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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