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Is Biden right that oil companies can lower prices at the pump but won’t? (1 Viewer)

ekbeats said:
You’re creating a straw man that Biden’s war in fossil fuels should somehow lead to US gas prices being the highest in the world?  I never said that and no one else said that. US gas prices will never be as high as European countries, no matter how badly Biden screws it up.  The US is the largest oil producing country in the world - and it’s not even close.  We produce 80% more oil than the #2 country - Saudi Arabia.

The problem in the US is lack of refining capacity.  We should be building a new refinery right now.  But the oil companies aren’t going to invest billions of dollars when Biden and the Democrats are hell bent on moving away from fossil fuels - even if we aren’t ready for it.  That’s the issue.  Not the Putin Price Hike.
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They've had decades to build a new refinery and chose not to. That's not a Biden admin problem. 

 
moleculo said:
A (partial) list of US presidents in office with no new refineries being built:

  • Ronald Reagan
  • George H W Bush
  • Bill Clinton
  • George W Bush
  • Barack Obama
  • Donald Trump
  • Joe Biden
Yet, lack of refinery capacity is attributed to the man who has been in office for less than two years?
Click to expand...
We also shouldn't confuse "lack of refinery capacity" with "no new refineries being built".  We have expanded refining capacity without building entirely new facilities.  It's true that the last major refinery built went on line in 1977.  At that time it's capacity was 200k bpd.  It can now do 600k bpd.  So they have effectively built two more of those refineries through expansion/increased efficiencies.  And this is just one facility.  

 
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parrot said:
We also shouldn't confuse "lack of refinery capacity" with "no new refineries being built".  We have expanded refining capacity without building entirely new facilities.  It's true that the last major refinery built went on line in 1977.  At that time it's capacity was 200k bpd.  It can now do 600k bpd.  So they have effectively built two more of those refineries through expansion/increased efficiencies.  
Click to expand...
lets do more of that.

 
parrot said:
We also shouldn't confuse "lack of refinery capacity" with "no new refineries being built".  We have expanded refining capacity without building entirely new facilities.  It's true that the last major refinery built went on line in 1977.  At that time it's capacity was 200k bpd.  It can now do 600k bpd.  So they have effectively built two more of those refineries through expansion/increased efficiencies.  
Click to expand...
Always retrofitting.    Build a new one.   From scratch.  Modern tech.

 
moleculo said:
So if I'm understanding you correctly, Big Oil, airlines, I assume Republicans, etc are all working to keep gas prices high, simply because it makes Biden look bad.   I'm not going to argue but that's a pretty sorry state of affairs.

Cards on the table - I'm a guy who believes we need to transition away from fossil fuels.  I assumed (wrongly, it seems) that people smarter than me had a smoother transition in mind besides "force the issue by restricting supply and raising prices"...but maybe this really is the only way.  You clearly can't do it legislatively because some 30% of Americans (and the majority of one party) refuse to believe in Climate Change.
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You are not understanding this correctly.

The GOP is taking advantage of the opportunity presented (non stop Team Blue failures provide media/public perception/public sentiment cover to overturn Roe with as little backlash as entirely possible given the inciting nature of the general abortion topic/conflict) , they are not taking advantage of the situation ( They are not advocating for higher gasoline/diesel prices and not creating a pathway to increase those prices. They are not the Party in power. )

Gasoline prices are an end result of a complex web of total factors. Big Oil can't snap their fingers and make gas stations drop the price by 2 dollars a gallon. What Big Oil can do is project that the GOP will take the Mid Terms this year and the general cycle in 2024 and take POTUS. They could increase investment based on the likelihood that the new regime will be Pro Oil and relax restrictions and regulation and turn more to Trump's kind of energy policies. But to do that now would open up massive criticism by Biden ( really Susan Rice) to say "Look, Big Oil could have done something but they didn't until now, blame them for everything!"

Big Oil wants Biden out of office. They aren't going to lift a finger to help him win reelection. That means no capital investment at this stage. They aren't keeping prices high, what they are doing is slow walking the ramp in for when  this madness and idiotic policy ends. They have legitimate media optics reasons and financial reasons not to do it ( it's not guaranteed that someone like Newsom or Abrams won't win 2024 at this point, in which case they are still screwed)

The airlines are slow walking the Biden Administration because Biden Administration has cuffed them at every opportunity. They don't want him or any Obama loyalist in power as well. They were just attacked by Pete Buttigieg in public, in the national daily media cycle, who said he would force them to start hiring people after his own flight was cancelled.

You can't keep attacking these industries over and over again, then expect them to bend to your demands that don't help their interests at all, I mean literally at all, so they can help you get reelected to further punish them. That makes no sense at all.

The only answer is Biden is not in control of his own Administration. He has severe cognitive decline and/or dementia and someone else is pulling the strings ( Susan Rice as a proxy for Obama, this is the worst kept secret in professional politics and the media optics world)  Thus Biden is saying things that no rational POTUS who wants reelection and not to be vilified as political legacy would ever say or do.

This  is the end result of what happens when you have a cabal who was never elected and is not accountable to the American people nor any formal Checks And Balances to be in control.

So no, you are not understanding me correctly.

Even if Big Oil started making massive capital investments today, gas prices would still be out of control until the 2024 cycle and probably beyond that. There is no quick fix to this. There is no short term relief here. This is where DeSantis was right - The economy should have never been shut down. There shouldn't have been lock downs and school closures and all the rest. Trump was right - The cure can't be worse than the disease. Ben Shapiro was right - The best "stimulus" was just letting people go back to work.

I was right what I said over a year and a half ago - If the US economy collapses, if the world economy collapses, we all die. The children of everyone here dies. That it's easy for Fauci to spout off when he's not responsible for the rest of the complex web of public administration and the internal US economy to keep the machine running. I said everyone can do their best to limit the risk of COVID19 but the economy can't shut down, that it was basically delaying self inflicted suicide to our great nation.

 
MAC_32 said:
They've had decades to build a new refinery and chose not to. That's not a Biden admin problem. 
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Biden shut down the US economy. Then he started printing money to provide a "stimulus" because politically if Trump did one, he was going to do one. That's it. That's the entire reason for it. For a political talking point. Do you know the other time Biden wanted a "talking point" Well it was the withdrawal from Afghanistan so he could get a "political win", except he armed terrorists all over the world with our tax dollars, turn 19 million women and little girls into sexual slaves, ended up starving that entire country, and gave the CCP, our largest natural threat, basically one of the largest caches of lithium in the entire world, which is used to make EV car batteries that Biden is forcing onto all Americans.

By shutting down the economy and doing lock downs and closing down schools for COVID19, Biden Administration caused irreparable damage to the diesel industry ( among tons of other industries). That's a larger push/pull factor for inflation than the gasoline crisis, which is bad enough on it's own. I have an entire top level thread topic just on diesel alone.

Failing to drill domestically also hampers natural gas production, which powers over a third of our current energy grid. Biden's policies aren't also insane, and threaten our national security, but he's making it impossible to charge those electric cars he's demanding everyone buy instead where 64 percent of Americans are living check to check and a month and a half away from being homeless and can't afford them.

You can't lock down the US economy and print money like it's going out of style and not destroy our entire economy. DO NOT TRY TO PASS ALL THIS ONTO OTHER ADMINISTRATIONS PRIOR.

I have nothing against you MAC32, but you are an educator, I'm sure you are great at that job and career path, but this is an entirely different animal. You are asking questions for the sole purpose to say "Blame Everyone" when much of this, in context, is not the case. Everything Biden touches gets worse to the point of catastrophic. If you want to deny that, go ahead, the problem is the stacking threat to our national security. That means your children are less safe. That means your children are under threat. You are selectively applying context. You'll say apply context here in that many of these problems extend beyond this administration without applying context under the inexplicable failures of this administration that violates even the most understanding of practical economic policy. 

For every parent here, the Obama/Biden/Harris/Rice regime made it easier for your children to be under threat, suffer and die. That's it. Everything these people touch turns to chaos and destroys the stability of our great nation.

Part of the context you are ignoring is that none of the other administrations enacted these kind of lock downs, while also printing money at this kind of rate and refused to project the demand curve for oil once the economy was turned on back again. This is the same with the baby formula situation and the same with Afghanistan and everywhere else. Failure to be proactive, failure to avoid self inflicting more problems, failure to react properly. These are fundamental leadership failures.

You are defending the pathway that makes your children less safe and under more threat.

I can't control that. It's your free speech. And I don't think you are a bad poster at all. Most of the time, I see you as pretty reasonable.  But ask yourself why you are doing that.

 
Shula-holic said:
Gas averaged $2.42 in Feb 2021.  It had moved to $3.61 by the time Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February.  We are at $5.03 by June.  No doubt the Russian invasion impacted things, but we had a pretty big issue ongoing prior to that.  It's fine to say Russia made it worse, it's obvious that was not the initial driver and even without that we were on a trajectory to be well over $4.00 during the summer of '22.  Again, not everything in that was Biden's fault.  My grievance is every instinct they have is to jerk the wheel in the wrong direction to correct the problem.  It's not a quick solution either.
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It was OPEC cutting production in mid 2020.

Reduce supply >> increase in price assuming demand remains flat.

Thing is, demand increased as people started going about their normal life.

That's the start of the current price situation. Russian/Ukraine was the proverbial gasoline on the fire.

 
moleculo said:
A (partial) list of US presidents in office with no new refineries being built:

  • Ronald Reagan
  • George H W Bush
  • Bill Clinton
  • George W Bush
  • Barack Obama
  • Donald Trump
  • Joe Biden
Yet, lack of refinery capacity is attributed to the man who has been in office for less than two years?
Click to expand...
Refineries have been expanding over the years to accommodate the increases in demand.

 
moleculo said:
lets do more of that.
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Refinery expansion also costs money and investment.  When the Democrats and President Biden so hostile to fossil fuels, no one in their right mind is going to invest.

 
Maurile Tremblay said:
The people doing the sarcastic repeating are usually trying to mock Biden, as if Biden is really the one responsible for high gas prices.
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From todays Wall St. Journal:

Bidenomics 101 - The President doesn’t appear to know anything about how the private economy works.

Business leaders have chalked up President Biden’s attacks on oil companies to political cynicism, but maybe they’re too generous. His tweet over the weekend ordering gas stations to lower prices betrayed a willful ignorance about the private economy. 

“My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril,” Mr. Biden tweeted Saturday. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.” Had Donald Trump issued such a command as President, the left would have cried “authoritarian.”

It’s embarrassing for the leader of the free world to sound like he’s channeling Hugo Chávez. A Chinese state media flack praised Mr. Biden’s tweet: “Now US President finally realized that capitalism is all about exploitation. He didn’t believe this before.” Or maybe he did, and nobody wanted to believe it.

You’d think that the President’s Ivy League-educated economic advisers would have informed him that large refiners own fewer than 5% of all gas stations in America. More than 60% are operated by an individual or family that owns a single store, and the rest are independently owned chains or grocery stores that sell fuel. Many license brands from refiners.

Refiners largely exited the retail business in the 2000s because of thin profit margins. The Energy Information Administration says distribution and marketing made up about 5% of the price of gasoline in May, or about 22 cents a gallon. This covers the cost of freight, labor, utilities, real estate and credit-card fees (which can average more than 10 cents a gallon).

Most gas stations make a few cents a gallon in profit and stay in business mainly by selling food and cigarettes. The National Association of Convenience Stores says its members are struggling amid high gas prices because customers are making fewer stops and buying less.

More than a quarter of gas stations have closed since the 1990s because they couldn’t make the economics work. If retailers were to sell fuel at cost, most would go out of business. Perhaps those owned by large refiners would survive, but they’d be accused of predatory pricing by Mr. Biden’s antitrust cops.

The President’s economic ignorance isn’t a one-off. In recent months he has accused oil and gas companies of price gouging and demanded that they increase production even while his Administration threatens to put them out of business. Mr. Biden doesn’t understand that businesses make long-term decisions based on demand expectations and policy signals. Jeff Bezos called the President’s weekend tweet “either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics.” They aren’t mutually exclusive.

Asked about the tweet on Fox News Sunday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that “anybody that knows President Biden knows he’s plain spoken and he tells exactly what he’s thinking in terms that everybody can understand,” adding that “we obviously take great exception of the idea that this is somehow misdirection.”

That isn’t reassuring.

 
ekbeats said:
You’d think that the President’s Ivy League-educated economic advisers would have informed him that large refiners own fewer than 5% of all gas stations in America. More than 60% are operated by an individual or family that owns a single store, and the rest are independently owned chains or grocery stores that sell fuel. Many license brands from refiners.
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I like how they throw that in as an afterthought, because brands are what really control the whole retail market.  If you want reliable supply, you sign up under a brand.  This may be the actual refiner, or it may be a middle man.  Typically these are 10 year contracts.  Under that contract you are required to sell their fuel exclusively, and you pay their price, whatever they say it is.  You have no negotiating ability whatsoever within the term of your contract.  Selling unbranded fuel through your pumps is immediate breach of contract.  So whether they own the stations or not, the major oil companies absolutely control the street price to a large extent.  

 
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ekbeats said:
The best response to Biden’s tweet was this one from the US Oil and Gas Industry:

“Working on it Mr. President.  In the meantime - have a Happy 4th and please make sure the WH intern who posted this tweet registers for Econ 101 for the fall semester...”
Click to expand...
That’s not a good response. Given the fact that we give these folks millions every year in subsidies and tax write-offs that’s a terrible response. 

 
Biden may be wrong, but I don’t think he needs to be lectured to by people who take tons of my tax money every year. #### them. 

 
timschochet said:
Biden may be wrong, but I don’t think he needs to be lectured to by people who take tons of my tax money every year. #### them. 
Click to expand...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2022/04/24/if-oil-companies-control-prices-why-do-they-ever-lose-money/?sh=3c6be022cf9d
 

Consider that in the past 10 years, major oil and gas companies suffered tremendous losses in 2014, 2015, and 2020. In fact, in 2020 the five integrated supermajors (i.e., “Big Oil”) – ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and Total – lost $76 billion. Oil prices plunged into negative territory in 2020.

 
ekbeats said:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2022/04/24/if-oil-companies-control-prices-why-do-they-ever-lose-money/?sh=3c6be022cf9d
 

Consider that in the past 10 years, major oil and gas companies suffered tremendous losses in 2014, 2015, and 2020. In fact, in 2020 the five integrated supermajors (i.e., “Big Oil”) – ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and Total – lost $76 billion. Oil prices plunged into negative territory in 2020.
Click to expand...
Weird.  Other articles discuss a big YoY drop of 2019 to 2020, but still claim there was a 4 Billion dollar profit in 2020.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/total-earnings-q4-full-year-2020.html

 
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djmich said:
What does one have to do with the other.  It was a stupid statement.
Click to expand...
I’m not sure it was stupid. I don’t necessarily agree with it but I can appreciate the sentiment. 
 

Oil companies are NOT the good guys in this situation. Let’s not pretend that they are or that their “solutions” are moves we should consider. They’ve managed to bilk the taxpayer for decades and they are a protected industry. That’s not capitalism, it’s not a free market, and it’s certainly not any part of Econ 101 that I remember. So again, #### them. 

 
It’s always amazing to me that many of the same people who are constantly complaining that illegal immigrants are costing us money (they’re not) seem to have no problem with the robber barons of the oil industry that have taken billions from the taxpayers. Maybe worry a little less about the border and more about the corrupt folks already here? 

 
parrot said:
We also shouldn't confuse "lack of refinery capacity" with "no new refineries being built".  We have expanded refining capacity without building entirely new facilities.  It's true that the last major refinery built went on line in 1977.  At that time it's capacity was 200k bpd.  It can now do 600k bpd.  So they have effectively built two more of those refineries through expansion/increased efficiencies.  And this is just one facility.  
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We have also built re-refineries which allow refineries to make more virgin products. 

 
Max Power said:
Yes and No.  Can they lower the price... Yes.  Will they suffer a financial loss... Also yes. 

The problem from the O&G CEO perspective is that the Biden administration is committed to phasing out oil and gas.  The fact that oil companies can't get any long term guarantees or stability means they are less likely to invest in themselves or grow current operations. 

You're not going to throw a ton of money into an old car to make it run better if you've already committed to a new car.  This is the same principle. 
Click to expand...


Oil rigs and pipelines take years to set up and have a lifespan of 50-100+ years.  Oil companies have never made decisions on whether to invest in expansion based on the current administration.  They think far more long-term than that.  By the time those investments are up and running the current administration will likely be gone, and those investments will have decades of use ahead of them.

There's a pretty good explanation of it here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQbmpecxS2w

 
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GordonGekko said:
Biden shut down the US economy. Then he started printing money to provide a "stimulus" because politically if Trump did one, he was going to do one. That's it. That's the entire reason for it. For a political talking point. Do you know the other time Biden wanted a "talking point" Well it was the withdrawal from Afghanistan so he could get a "political win", except he armed terrorists all over the world with our tax dollars, turn 19 million women and little girls into sexual slaves, ended up starving that entire country, and gave the CCP, our largest natural threat, basically one of the largest caches of lithium in the entire world, which is used to make EV car batteries that Biden is forcing onto all Americans.

By shutting down the economy and doing lock downs and closing down schools for COVID19, Biden Administration caused irreparable damage to the diesel industry ( among tons of other industries). That's a larger push/pull factor for inflation than the gasoline crisis, which is bad enough on it's own. I have an entire top level thread topic just on diesel alone.

Failing to drill domestically also hampers natural gas production, which powers over a third of our current energy grid. Biden's policies aren't also insane, and threaten our national security, but he's making it impossible to charge those electric cars he's demanding everyone buy instead where 64 percent of Americans are living check to check and a month and a half away from being homeless and can't afford them.

You can't lock down the US economy and print money like it's going out of style and not destroy our entire economy. DO NOT TRY TO PASS ALL THIS ONTO OTHER ADMINISTRATIONS PRIOR.

I have nothing against you MAC32, but you are an educator, I'm sure you are great at that job and career path, but this is an entirely different animal. You are asking questions for the sole purpose to say "Blame Everyone" when much of this, in context, is not the case. Everything Biden touches gets worse to the point of catastrophic. If you want to deny that, go ahead, the problem is the stacking threat to our national security. That means your children are less safe. That means your children are under threat. You are selectively applying context. You'll say apply context here in that many of these problems extend beyond this administration without applying context under the inexplicable failures of this administration that violates even the most understanding of practical economic policy. 

For every parent here, the Obama/Biden/Harris/Rice regime made it easier for your children to be under threat, suffer and die. That's it. Everything these people touch turns to chaos and destroys the stability of our great nation.

Part of the context you are ignoring is that none of the other administrations enacted these kind of lock downs, while also printing money at this kind of rate and refused to project the demand curve for oil once the economy was turned on back again. This is the same with the baby formula situation and the same with Afghanistan and everywhere else. Failure to be proactive, failure to avoid self inflicting more problems, failure to react properly. These are fundamental leadership failures.

You are defending the pathway that makes your children less safe and under more threat.

I can't control that. It's your free speech. And I don't think you are a bad poster at all. Most of the time, I see you as pretty reasonable.  But ask yourself why you are doing that.
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Oh, I'm no educator. I'm a controller at an educational institution. I think where a lot of my questions come from become crystal clear once in that context. I'm in a world of irrespinsible spenders (libs), but the problem is the alternatives are too. It's who we are. 

 
timschochet said:
It’s always amazing to me that many of the same people who are constantly complaining that illegal immigrants are costing us money (they’re not) seem to have no problem with the robber barons of the oil industry that have taken billions from the taxpayers. Maybe worry a little less about the border and more about the corrupt folks already here? 
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Tim, you’re worrying about climate control, and wanting cheap gas also.  

 
I ask this question with 100% sincerity.  I've asked many knowledgeable people over the years and generally get the same answer, but it's obviously wrong.

So here it is. Oil went down roughly 9% yesterday.  The price at pump didn't change. However on the oil price spike over the last several months it went up almost instantaneously as it always does.  I've been told the reason for this phenomenon is because of oil futures that service stations are always buying so that they will continue to have inventory and that cost needs to be passed to the consumer. That made sense but when there is a precipitatious move as there was yesterday the price of gasoline doesn't move.  Why? 

 
2Squirrels1Nut said:
I ask this question with 100% sincerity.  I've asked many knowledgeable people over the years and generally get the same answer, but it's obviously wrong.

So here it is. Oil went down roughly 9% yesterday.  The price at pump didn't change. However on the oil price spike over the last several months it went up almost instantaneously as it always does.  I've been told the reason for this phenomenon is because of oil futures that service stations are always buying so that they will continue to have inventory and that cost needs to be passed to the consumer. That made sense but when there is a precipitatious move as there was yesterday the price of gasoline doesn't move.  Why? 
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"Up like a rocket, down like a feather."

I think the general industry line is that the current price of oil is not indicative necessarily of what the product in your tank cost to make/supply at any point in time.  When prices rise they talk about replacement cost - "We're going to have to pay more to replace that product..." -  and when prices drop they talk about actual cost - "Those gallons cost us X so we have to sell them for X+...".  It's a bit of a shell game/moving goal post honestly.   

There is also a theory that there is more comparison shopping during rising prices but once they level off or start falling people become less price sensitive so you don't have to be in a hurry to drop your price.   

The real reason of course is once your margin has been squeezed by rising prices you're not going to be in a huge hurry to drop your price once you start getting some margin again.  And you're hoping no one else is either.  

 
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parrot said:
"Up like a rocket, down like a feather."

I think the general industry line is that the current price of oil is not indicative necessarily of what the product in your tank cost to make/supply at any point in time.  When prices rise they talk about replacement cost - "We're going to have to pay more to replace that product..." -  and when prices drop they talk about actual cost - "Those gallons cost us X so we have to sell them for X+...".  It's a bit of a shell game/moving goal post honestly.   

There is also a theory that there is more comparison shopping during rising prices but once they level off or start falling people become less price sensitive so you don't have to be in a hurry to drop your price.   

The real reason of course is once your margin has been squeezed by rising prices you're not going to be in a huge hurry to drop your price once you start getting some margin again.  And you're hoping no one else is either.  
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This is the conclusion I came to.  They play both sides. 

 
When prices of oil move up, prices of gas move up immediately because their costs have increased and they want to keep the same profit margins and they KNOW that all other gas companies will do the same.

When prices fall, it goes slow so they can let the market recalibrate to set a new price and enjoy excess profit margins while the market adjusts.

 
I don't know why no one talks about or reports on this, maybe it doesn't have any affect but I think it's notable that oil prices are down almost 30% over the last 3 weeks and that lines up almost EXACTLY with Trump's mid-covid OPEC deal expiring.

When oil crashed during covid Trump signed a deal with Opec to LIMIT oil production and RAISE oil prices.  For some reason they signed that deal for 2 years.  It just recently expired almost to the day that oil prices recently started dropping back down pretty substantially.

 
FreeBaGeL said:
I don't know why no one talks about or reports on this, maybe it doesn't have any affect but I think it's notable that oil prices are down almost 30% over the last 3 weeks and that lines up almost EXACTLY with Trump's mid-covid OPEC deal expiring.

When oil crashed during covid Trump signed a deal with Opec to LIMIT oil production and RAISE oil prices.  For some reason they signed that deal for 2 years.  It just recently expired almost to the day that oil prices recently started dropping back down pretty substantially.
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I brought it up way earlier in the thread and it was ignored mostly.

I'm not saying Joe is perfect, but Trump owns more of the present high prices than he does IMO.

 
(HULK) said:
I brought it up way earlier in the thread and it was ignored mostly.

I'm not saying Joe is perfect, but Trump owns more of the present high prices than he does IMO.
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When oil went negative in 2020 the government should have offered to take every barrel free of charge.  

Instead we got another "two weeks". 

Drowning in crude, U.S. drillers say Trump strategic reserve plan is no lifeline

Then there's this from another far left publication

“So after 50 years of being virtually empty, I built up our oil reserves during my administration, and low energy prices, to 100% full. It’s called the Strategic National Reserves, and it hasn’t been full for many decades. In fact, it’s been mostly empty.”

There’s just nothing about that statement that is true. As you can see in the graphic below, the SPR levels have never fallen below 500,000 thousand (i.e., 500 million) barrels of crude oil since the 1980s

 
2Squirrels1Nut said:
When oil went negative in 2020 the government should have offered to take every barrel free of charge.  

Instead we got another "two weeks". 

Drowning in crude, U.S. drillers say Trump strategic reserve plan is no lifeline

Then there's this from another far left publication

“So after 50 years of being virtually empty, I built up our oil reserves during my administration, and low energy prices, to 100% full. It’s called the Strategic National Reserves, and it hasn’t been full for many decades. In fact, it’s been mostly empty.”

There’s just nothing about that statement that is true. As you can see in the graphic below, the SPR levels have never fallen below 500,000 thousand (i.e., 500 million) barrels of crude oil since the 1980s
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Trump literally pressured Saudi Arabia into the agreement to cut production.

 
(HULK) said:
It was OPEC cutting production in mid 2020.

Reduce supply >> increase in price assuming demand remains flat.

Thing is, demand increased as people started going about their normal life.

That's the start of the current price situation. Russian/Ukraine was the proverbial gasoline on the fire.
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Right, you're referring to the negative priced oil timeline.  The Saudi's can ramp up production with a snap of the finger.  They have way more excess capacity than we do.  If you recall, at the levels we were at in 2020, many US producers were going under and we were going to lose many more.  Sometimes cutting production is a good thing, sometimes raising it is a good thing.  Doing those things for OPEC, in particular the Saudis, can be done easily within their capacity.  

 
(HULK) said:
Trump literally pressured Saudi Arabia into the agreement to cut production.
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Yes, I remember and thought it was one of the very few good things he did.  Biden does something similar and according to the far right it is more proof he's so full of dementia he needs to be removed from office. 

 
Maurile Tremblay said:
I don't understand how this became something everybody repeats sarcastically.

Somebody earlier in the thread said to google why gas prices are so high, so I did. From the first result not behind a paywall: "Geopolitical instability has added to crude oil price volatility. At the end of May, the European Union announced it would ban around 90% of oil imports from Russia due to the war in Ukraine—and it continues to rattle crude oil markets and keep prices far above pre-pandemic levels."

Of course the Russia-Ukraine conflict has significantly affected gas prices. There is nothing more obvious than that, right?

The people doing the sarcastic repeating are usually trying to mock Biden, as if Biden is really the one responsible for high gas prices. But gas prices in the U.S. are cheaper than just about anywhere else in the world (besides Russia and Japan). Is Biden the president of all of western Europe?

It's a super weird thing to use a sarcastic tone about.
Click to expand...


Welcome to the PSF new guy!

 
I guess this is the right thread for this. Easily the best commercial I've seen in years:

youtu.be

Chevron Ad

SUBSCRIBE: https://bit.ly/Hyperobject-SubscribeNothing is more precious than life.CREDITS: Writer Adam McKayVoice Steven San MiguelEditor Bruce HerrmanProduc...
youtu.be youtu.be
 
(HULK) said:
I guess this is the right thread for this. Easily the best commercial I've seen in years:

youtu.be

Chevron Ad

SUBSCRIBE: https://bit.ly/Hyperobject-SubscribeNothing is more precious than life.CREDITS: Writer Adam McKayVoice Steven San MiguelEditor Bruce HerrmanProduc...
youtu.be youtu.be
Click to expand...

Sadly accurate.

I was thinking about this thread yesterday after seeing the headline declaring GOP states suing so student loans couldn't be forgiven in their states. If I were Biden, I would have immediately agreed to their terms and let them know all federal subsidies to companies in their states will also immediately be retracted.
 
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