As for gas, bring back the electric car, bitches. This need for big car and oil companies to make the rest of us suck at their tit when the tech exists is ridiculous.
The problem is that you still need oil to make the cheap-ass plastic the thing would be made of, and you'll need electricity made using fossil fuels (coal, natural gas) or nuclear powet. There's still so much that must be addressed, but there's a good way and a bad way to jumpstart this. Taxing the shit out of energy producers and jacking up prices in the meanwhile is the bad way.
I heard the us oil people are charging the same amount that opec is charging even though the oil isn't imported. Is this true? If so then some people need to be killed.
You're probably thinking about
what Noire said about it on BONR. The short version is that it's not that simple.
Oil is traded on an open market, and companies won't sell an openly-rated product significantly below market price, or they'd lose their ass. Regulation could be used to reduce the amount they take in, but the problem with that is that any losses will invariably be passed on to the consumer. Just deal with the fact that companies exist to make money; otherwise, you're looking at socialized oil, which would be more of a disaster than socialized health-care will be. And the fact that they do make money is good for everyone who owns a mutual fund or IRA, as those accounts often invest in and therefore benefit from profits in the oil industry.
The open market is also where OPEC wields its powet...because it controls such a large percentage of oil output and monitors the output of other nations, it can restrict or increase production at will to control the prices. This is where many get the idea that it'd do no good to drill on our own, because it'd be a drop in the bucket that wouldn't make much difference, and OPEC would change output to compensate. Which I can't really fault them for, as oil production is pretty much all those asshats are good for with regard to the rest of the world.
However, there are at least two problems with the argument that it'd do no good. First, it'd be a hell of a lot more than a drop in the bucket. The U.S. is the third-largest oil producer in the world behind Russia and OPEC. Considering the recent finds in the Rockies and availability in the Gulf of Mexico and ANWR, the U.S. could produce far, far more than it already is without fear of running out anytime soon. And that doesn't even consider the absolutely enormous find off the coast of Brazil, a country that's already largely on an sugar cane ethynol economy and can now be energy independent as well as a huge exporter of oil.
Therefore, the impact of any retaliatory OPEC action will be minimized...not that they can afford to restrict oil reserves too much; they don't have anything else that makes money, except the tourism industry which is fucked because of crazy-ass terrorists running around lopping off the heads of the infidel. And they can't drink oil to live, so they're over a barrel (or an oil drum, as the case may be) any way you look at it.
In addition to increasing supplies and marginalizing OPEC, it would deal a killer one-two punch to the economics of the market that keep the prices up. For starters, just as more dollars on the market lower their value, more oil on the market lowers cost. This is particularly important given the increasing demand for it...just as the old woman who pissed in the sea, even a little bit helps. Also, oil from us is automatically cheaper on the world market precisely because of the weak dollar, so we'd have another advantage going in. It would also drastically lower speculation of oil futures, as having a more stable supply from a country not ruled by barbarians from the 7th century will reduce market risk. The futures market is a huge factor in current crude costs.
But even if all U.S. companies procured their own oil (most have supply deals with individual exporters, but that doesn't change the market price), enabling them to drill for more oil domestically makes a hell of a lot more sense, as then we could regulate exports to keep the oil in a closed market and thereby price it to whatever the fuck we wanted. But the fact that it's not a closed market is what makes regulation a poor option that does nothing to help the situation as it exists.
