[ale] [STILL OT] Re: BP knew of problems 11 months before the rig blew - further OT

[Tom Freeman]

Well, except for presumption of the price spike two years ago as being 
a deliberate test, I'll pretty much agree with you.

My point wasn't to suggest a tax increase (although I'd suggest it if I 
thought it might go through which it would not), but that the cost of 
oil based products doesn't reflect the total cost of production/
exploration/exploitation. In fact, some aspects of the production cost 
would appear to subsidized in effect (and if true - so much for the 
purity of our free market)

I think it is worth pointing out, that while most of us associate oil 
wells with gasoline for transportation, oil wells tie into a lot more 
products and services for our society. Most plastics, most detergents, 
most paints, most dyes, a large (half??) percentage of fabrics, and god 
knows what else take their base raw material from an oil well. Plus, 
the "atom efficiency" for many processes isn't all that great either, 
nor the energy utilization.

Random weird "for instance". Pencil leads. I personally happen to like 
inexpensive pencils, and the "lead" comes from an oil well. The price 
of oil goes up ( or worse the supply is disrupted) the price of pencil 
lead goes up due to increased raw material costs, scarcity, and 
transportation. 

I did not advocate public budget balancing with a "gas tax", and rather 
object to the suggestion that I did. For the love of heaven, lets not 
even consider straying into that bramble patch!

On 06/01/2010 05:48:03 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> um. yeah. good luck with a budget balancing effort that involves
> raising the
> gas tax to pay for the war to keep cheap oil that priced spiked 2
> years ago
> anyway as a test to see what we would tolerate before cutting back on
> driving ($5/gal). That was probably also a test run on the software
> that did
> the market "hiccup" a few weeks back </snark>
> 
> I may not be right but my cynicism is genuine.
> 
> On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:36 PM, Tom Freeman
> <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net>wrote:
> 
> > On 06/01/2010 02:06:58 PM, Damon L. Chesser wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 13:45 -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
> > >
> > > First things first:  Jim you are a non-name caller!  There, I 
> said
> > > it.
> > >
> > > Second, in a more serious vain:  When I heard the news I thought
> this
> > > was an example of corners cut.  I am former Navy, 10years, 
> working
> > > the
> > > flight deck of carriers.  Accidents don't just happen, they 
> result
> > > from
> > > either previous unknown conditions are from cutting corners. 
> Ocean
> > > drilling has been going on for some time, so I have to think we
> were
> > > cutting corners (figurative we).  I am not against business, love
> > > capitalism systems and wish we had one, but it is my gut reaction
> > > that
> > > BP is negligent on this and also the Government is to slow to 
> move
> on
> > > this and they should have been moving much, much faster.  This
> kind
> > > of
> > > thing is what The Government is for.
> > >
> > > I do not believe this should curtail further drilling.  We should
> > > perform postmortem to find the root cause and then make the
> resulting
> > > conclusions codified to prevent the event from happening again.
> > >
> > > The post by some one else listing the retired oil guy was
> > > informative:
> > > If he is right, this happened due to lack of experience in 
> dealing
> > > the
> > > the pressure.  It will still be expensive to fix (the damage of
> > > surrounding shore line and economic effects of Gulf based
> > > businesses).
> > > But until we can replace petrol, we need to exploit what we have.
> > <<snipage>>
> > An OT alert added just because...
> >
> > I _think_ we have had some discussions around here about some
> > approaches to replacing/supplimenting drilled petroleum, but it has
> > been a while. On this list we do have some people with enough
> > engeneering background  to make a decent beginning on some
> approaches.
> >
> > For the most part, those approaches are not on the table due to the
> > percieved cost. After all, the _cost_ of most oil spills seems to
> get
> > dropped on the area residents, the area critters, and so forth, and
> not
> > directly passed on to the rest of the economic system as a price
> > increase for well produced petroleum.
> >
> > Keeping troops stationed in the Middle East appears to have helped
> keep
> > crude oil prices stable. But have we charged a fraction of that 
> cost
> to
> > the cost of fuel/chemicals? (And a great accounting question would
> be -
> > how to apportion that cost)
> >
> > IMHO, YMMV and so forth.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> -- 
> James P. Kinney III
> Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
> Doing pretty well on all 3 pursuits
> 

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