Thats probably the best solution since it will completely remove speculation thus reducing the price gouging.

I personally would love to see the world stand behind this effort the US congress is putting together to deter OPEC from price gouging.

Another solution would be for the USA to start charging all the world powers for the protection and stop giving aid to all these countries.

Particually our Canadian neighbors, who are evidently begining to hate us (for no rason), based on the prior post in this thread.

I appologize if Im perceived as being arrogant, but Canada need the USA to protect itself. Canadas army is very weak compared to other nations. Its the USA that deters a take over of Canada.

We really need to be smarter with out spending and start charging for our military protection we provide to all these other nations.

our population is growing. need some of our own supply.

we have our own oil. (100′s of billions of barrels)
and 1 trillion foot lbs. of natural gas or more.

we can’t seem to get it because of a political party{dems).

the chi-coms and cuba are drilling 60 miles from international waters with the U.S.A.

even if we could get it, we have no gasoline refining capacity-(we need to build more refineries)
we import 25% of our GASOLINE now.

WE NEED NUCLEAR POWER ALSO

If france and india have enuf for themselves, why can’t we? it’s the cleanest and safest energy around!

if anyone is evil, it’s the dems in congress that are for making us suffer, and bowing to the alter of the environmentalist kooks who also, make us suffer, under a complete hoax= global warming.

by the way, type in “light bulbs” in the search engine at the walmart site, and not one bulb there is under 6$ dollars! get out the debit card, we’re in for a ride.

Why wouldn’t Bush side with the American consumers?

Well the main reason is that the US hasn’t done enough to give itself leverage in this area. Since the inception of the Strategic Oil Reserve we only have 56 days of consumption covered by government.

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/spr/spr-facts.html

If you are gonna try to strong arm OPEC you need to be able to offset completely the oil they could withhold. If you don’t have electric cars or a coal gasification process, ethanol, whatever, the average consumer will suffer more than they might if nothing was done.

Besides which OPEC is doing everybody in the industrialised world a favour – in deliberately keeping the price of oil high by keeping output throttled back ( if thats what they are doing and not just struggling with accelerating depletion) they are encouraging the development of and investment in alternative energy supplies, and energy efficient technologies and systems.

If Oil was still at $10 a barrel, as at the end of the 90′s, nobody would ever want to build another windmill or invest in energy efficiency technologies – all you would see would be more oil fired electricity generating plant, more oil fired heating of poorly insulated buildings, more and bigger SUV’s

OPECis doing everybody the same service that the Texas Railroad commission used to, encouraging rational rather than irresponsible use of a valuable finite resource by keeping prices high and relatively stable. Cyclical boom and bust swings do nobody any good. More power to their elbow.

The arrogance this legislation conveys is unbelievable and completely irresponsible. As an American, I’m ashamed. As far as I’m concerned, we can’t do much about this problem until we change our way of living. And not just a little. The oil’s going to keep more expensive because the demand has started (or will start soon) to outstrip supply. This is the most basic rule of economics and our leaders don’t seem to appreciate it.

Is there a lot of greed in the oil industry? Of course there is. But guess what? It’s not much different than anyone who goes about driving a Ford Expedition from point A (home) to point B to point A to point C to point A to point Z without even giving it a second thought, because it’s MY oil to use. Get out of the way, because I’m getting mine! The US is so overrun with cars now that in many cases it’s not even remotely safe to travel otherwise. The good news for bicyclists is that once the middle class can no longer afford to drive quite so much, there’ll be a little more room for us.

Instead of funneling our energy into making some real changes to a more sustainable way of life, politicians are catering to our desire, and (even worse!) our belief that we’re entitled to consume forever more. Just as James Howard Kunstler says, we’re sleepwalking into the future.

It’s way past time for a politician with the balls to tell us what we are about to face. And it’s not the hydrogen economy.

Worthy of note: If OPEC nations expand and diversify their economies they will consume MORE oil not less, meaning they will export less oil and prices will go up. This is a simple demonstration of logic. Also, U.S oil refinerers are not at fault, oil all over the world is growing more and more sour instead of ‘sweet’. The result is oil refineries need more down time. Simple because most U.S refineries can only handle sweet crude, and 10 years ago refiners did not see this as being a problem, in fact few people did.

Also, refinery capacity has been reduced by NIMBY-ism, not price gouging oil companies. Simply it is the american publics fault for not letting more oil refineries be built. Don’t like high oil prices? Then enjoy having an oil refinery in your back yard! Capeesh? and one more thing, ethanol is not the answer because it consumes more energy to make than it puts out, and has less energy per unit in it than normal gasoline, meaning you’ll need more ethanol to go the same distance. So ethanol is not the answer either. In a concise, nice way to put this, You guys better sell your SUV’s for scrap and ride a bike to work instead of whining about high oil prices. Got it? Consumerist pigs.

rob prince/denver