Monday, August 11, 2008

If It's Such a God-Damned Good Idea....

...then why didn't it work?

According to BO (Big Oil) and the Religious Right (Faith-Based economics, among others), drilling domestic supplies wherever they may be found is going to save us from all having to drive Priuses (and thereby bankrupting Detroit who can't figure out how to get 40 MPG). Well, there happens to be a test case and guess what, I'm living in it.

Colorado, it seems, gets very nearly all of its oil from domestic production and Canada. You would think, given the press McCain and Big Oil are giving the potential for vast reductions of the price of oil price through drilling everywhere and adding supply equal to 1% of US demand to the world market, that Colorado fuel would be dirt cheap. After all, the oil we're refining at Suncor in Commerce City comes from here, it's domestic supply (with a nod to Sad's Canadianness). Well, during the great oil price runup, we weren't much below the national average, despite the luxury of not having to import our oil (again with a nod to our neighbors to the north). Here in Denver we were a few cents below the national average, probably because the refinery is ten miles from here and transportation costs are very low but nothing to compare with the promises BO (Big Oil) McCain promises us if we'd only do the 'Murkan thing and drill what we have. Aspen and Summit County blew the national averages away with their $4+ prices for regular.

Turns out his common sense is just another way of saying conventional wisdom. Once the oil produced at the expense of our beaches and wilderness goes into the Big Bathtub, as does ours and Canada's, the price isn't all that much affected by a piddling increase in domestic production.

Like tax increases costing jobs, this right-wing hypothesis, one repeated so often it's accepted more places than the Gospel of Mark, doesn't survive contact with reality.
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