It was a sillly pissing match. Of course - you still lost. No, we shouldn't continue to be dependent on foreign oil, which is what makes the energy policy of the last 8 years and the contempt that Cheney et al hold for conservation movements, and the resulting damage as a direct result of their policies, to be all the more inexplicable.
1. sam was there any reason why you ignored the offshore drilling aspect and only focused on anwr? 2. basso, is there any reason why you chose to forget the republican weak dollar policy that has increased the cost of oil by nearly $50/barrel for americans? 3. are we ever going to get off this stupid corn ethanol subsidy? no drilling but we will fund corn ethanol which has helped drive up food prices and cause food shortages. and yes i do know the primary thing we need to do is cut consumption but i wanted to ask these questions.
No it hasn't always been that way. You should have seen it in the 1950's. It wasn't Florida, but it was pretty damn nice and the beaches were huge. Where's this oil shale we have in gigantic amounts? I'm more interested in that. ANWAR is such a small amount, so expensive to get out of the ground, and in such a fragile area that we may as well hang on to it as part of our national reserve. You know... for when all the oil really is fixin' to run out.
i'm pretty sure it's the bakken shale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_Formation someone with more knowledge feel free to correct me.
The problem in Galveston has ZERO to do with oil. It has everything to do with silt dumped out of the Mississippi River into the Gulf. Since Miami and LA do not have similar rivers, they will not have the "nasty *ss water" problem.
LA oceans get very nasty after a rain, and the stuff that gets washed out into the ocean. Surfers know to not go in a day or two after it rains, because the water is so horrible.
The worst argument made in this thread of immature arguments is the lie that drilling in ANWR would only drop prices by $0.01. First of all, that quote is straight from the enviro-hippie lunatic fringe. Second, it's a lie. Drilling in ANWR sends a strong production signal to the world market that America plans to develop it's own resources. It would also be the US' largest oil field. It would dramatically increase tax revenues, and the lease revenue from bonus bids would be mammoth. It would also create jobs and shareholder wealth for US oil companies and their US investors. The economic impact would be very large. The supply-side impact for domestic production would be sizable. Oil is priced at the margin. Increasing production at the margin drops the price by more than the % change in supply. Again, return to my queuing theory post for details there. Read, friends, the game-changing post of the year in this sub-forum. http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=148801&page=6&pp=20&highlight=queuing+theory Learn the facts people. Don't accept lies from self-interested environmental groups who have never produced a barrel of oil in their lives. They don't know how the price is set. They don't know how production comes on line. They don't understand energy. If you applied their standard to every drilling project, there would be no more domestic production in 10 years. None. To think that we are penalizing our own country's citizens by not exploring our own vast resources is mind boggling. What for? To save the moonscape of frozen tundra that is ANWR? To not disturb caribou from humping one another? Americans are willing to trade that in exchange for higher prices at the gas station? It makes no sense, people. No sense.
Specifically because Republicans - from the President on down to loyal lemmings like bassoblunt - are the ones that make it seem like a Panacea for energy needs because they find that oil to be politically more important than conservation or offshore drilling. See, e.g., the incredibly distorted chart.
the thread is about drilling, but in any case, the comment i linked to said: "Retail gasoline prices are the result of literally hundreds of factors including crude oil supply, global demand, refinery capacity, regulation, taxes, weather, the value of the dollar, etc. Therefore it is impossible to say with certainty what one individual action will do to the overall price." folks see what they want to see i guess, and we get 3 pages of sam's high dudgeon on one aspect of a multi-threaded issue.
To be fair, most of the reason that the water in Galveston is so nasty is that we get all the runoff from the Mississippi River, which causes our water to look cloudy as a result of the silt.
I don't know how Galveston got into this but I've had a little house on the beach for 35 years. The water has always been brown. Drive down 59 and look down on the bridges that cross the Brazos, Colorado and San Bernard rivers. Sometimes the water in them more than brown, it's red, like clay. Because Galveston is a barrier island the water near it is almost always stirred up by wave action. Last week when the wind was blowing 30 mph you couldn't even swim because the waves were churning up large pieces of broken up shell...heavy stuff compared to silt and clay. I have seen it where you could see you feet on the rare occasions that the winds let it settle out for a week or two. 10 or 12 years ago there were tarballs everywhere on the beach. We always kept paper towels and lighter fluid downstairs and had to clean up every time we went upstairs. Back then they said it was natural seepage but at the same time the Coast Guard started enforcing rules against tankers washing out their bilges inside federal waters. Since then, we don't have tarballs anymore, just good ol' nasty Sargasso seaweed. The beaches are smaller because of the erosive currents and the fact that the dams on Texas rivers have reduced the sand that washed down them. We get the light particle clay silt from below the dams but we don't get the larger particle sands that washed from farther west out of the limestones. East Beach by down town is actually accreting though. I assume that's where West Beaches sand is going. Two years ago using a federal Grant the City of Jamaica Beach hauled a huge load of sand from East Beach to Jamaica Beach and rebuilt our dunes. The City of Galveston gave us the sand very very cheaply because there was actually too much of it on East beach and cars were getting stuck to often.
The water is not desirable in any place west of the Mississippi delta because the silt/debris from the MS River flows counter-clockwise upon being dumped into the Gulf. That's why Florida has such nice beaches and we don't.
