That’s right, I’m standing up for Big Oil this morning – but I’ll let George Will do the talking. Here's his salient points:
In the 20 years from 1987 to 2006, Exxon Mobil invested more ($279 billion) than it earned ($266 billion). Five weeks after the company announced its 2006 earnings, it said it will invest $60 billion in oil and gas projects over the next three years.
Oil companies make about 13 cents on a gallon of gas. Government makes much more: The federal tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. New York collects 42.4 cents a gallon. Forty-nine states - all but Alaska - make more than the oil companies do on every gallon.
Oh – and do you really want to end global warming? Tim Blair pointed out we could save the world simply by “shifting” to manual transmissions (which would save 5,650,000,000 barrels of oil per year in the US alone), from the less fuel-efficient automatic variety. Mr. Will has another common-sense suggestion:
...what can be done immediately about the gasoline "crisis" du jour? Americans could save 1.2 billion of the 130 billion gallons of gasoline they use a year if they would properly inflate their tires.
Of course, neither of these modest ideas are acceptable to the Democrats and the liberal elite:
- they don’t require the lifestyle changes and sacrifice that the Left wants to force upon the American middle class in order to change the world into their "paradise of the downtrodden".
- The real object of the “Global Warming” scam is to distract attention from the war against Islamic fundamentalists. Democrats cannot face the fight against these deadly foes; they are not willing to make the adjustments in their ideology necessary (military action, tighter borders, increased surveillance) to win such a war, and they know it. So they created a new enemy – Mother Nature herself, to an extent - whom they can fight by implementing their unpopular agenda. Because this agenda requires sacrifices that they approve of, the Democrats have trumpeted this make-believe danger as a greater threat than people who, you know, actually take up arms and kill Americans.
Earth itself, as the ultimate Democratic straw man. Maybe I could forgive them if, you know, they weren’t so complicit in the “soaring price” of gasoline…
1 comment:
...and a stick shift is usually about $1000 less than an automatic!
But you are right, the Democrats are not about recommending ways for gas-efficient driving (like the stick, and proper tire inflation, and steady acceleration, and moderate speeds, and disengaging 4WD systems), they are about imposing taxes and dictating behavior in order to fit their progressive scheme.
Too bad - a little common sense instead of political hysteria would go a long way.
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