Bruzilla said:
Your first mistake is that you forget that at this point in time there are no alternatives to oil. Absent any alternatives, if everyone concerves across the board the price of oil would not go down, but oil production would. If we cut consumption across the board OPEC can decrease production and demand higher prices to make up for the loss to their revenues since they don't have to worry about hearing that their customers will go elsewehere or buy a different product.
Your second mistake is in thinking that conservation is anything but a transitory thing. We are a country that demands growth in our economy and our lifestyles. We like big cars, road trips, AC, and turning up the heat in winter. Yes, you can get a lot of folks to conserve for a short period of time when prices get high, but they won't do it for long.
You're right about the way that oil is sold globally, but the point that you're missing is we don't have to do business that way. We should be de-globablizing oil - not paying through the nose to keep it globalized. We quit developing oil fields in the US because at $20 a barrel it wasn't worth the effort. So let's say we benchmark US crude at $35 a barrel. That makes it profitable to drill and develop US fields while keeping prices at about $1 to $1.50 a gallon. We tell OPEC to stuff it and we use our own oil. We only have to make up about a 45% hit to our current oil consumption and we have more than enough oil to do that.
We used to rely on US oil for most of our needs, and we didn't move away from that because of lack of oil, just lack of profitability. Now that we're acclimated to paying more for oil lets benchmark the price of our oil and get off the global bandwagon.
Show me some numbers that says we have enough oil reserves, at any price, proven or unproven to sustain 25+ million barrels per day of consumption (for at least 25 years). Plain and simple, we don't. Most in the know would say we have 20 years of oil left under our feet (if we were to stop importing), and then it's over. Alaska and Texas have been past their peak production for decades. 80% of the oil that was originally below Texas and Oklahoma is gone. Offshore resources, perhaps, could hold some promise, but this is very costly stuff and very incremental in terms of finds. As we stand today, if we were to fully exploit our remaining oil resources, it would be sold on a global market to the highest bidder. If we were to try to deglobalize it as you suggest, we wouldn't have enough left. Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and a lot of the other oil exporters are playing us pretty well by nationalizing as much of their oil as they can for either their own use,to ensure that the profits come back home and not to Exxon, or to use as geopolitical capital. We can't act like Russia or Bolivia and secure our oil future by nationalizing the system. We don't have enough oil under our feet or under the caribou's feet to make your plan last more than a decade. What are we going to do, slap tarriffs on foreign oil?
Your point that our country demands luxury is a good one. The proof is on the road, where at this point in time few of us obviously care about how much oil we consume. The short-sightedness of this line of thought is that there are price point going forward where we are going to suffer big time. They have us by the balls, and if we want to burn oil we are going to pay for it, until it breaks our bank, until we demand alternatives, or until we consume less (as a matter of lifestyle change or technological advance). We think we 'need' a high-rolling lifestyle, this will, as a matter of fact, change as oil prices increase. Conservation will not be a vogue concept, it will be necessary. As Cheney has stated, the market will take care of conservation. To think otherwise is to contradict all known laws of economics.
