Thread: No free lunch!!!

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brick, gotta love your passion on this. That's how things get started.

I would like to know if you have hard data on the highest profit ever comment. I can't find any other than veiled implication (and again, let's not confuse numbers with real value in adjusted dollars). Here's how I evaluate that notion. If you go to www.bigcharts.com and enter the oil company (ies) of your choice and bring up a 5 or 10 year chart, you'll see that their stock price today is approx what it was two years ago (varies somewhat from company to compay, but in general I'll stand by my statement). True, it's going to be up significantly from a year ago, but that was a very down time frame for the oil industry. That's why I prefer to look at a time span to even out the short term affects of market cycles. The charlatins in the media play that info cherry pick game for distortion sake, fries my nuts!!! I consider the stock market value as a good indicator of true profit performance since the market tends to reward stock value by that yardstick. To that point I will stay with my earlier comment in another thread that the oil industry enjoyed it's greatest profits (at least for the "modern" era) during the period of Federal Government controls (read market distortion) during the '70's. In that period of approx 7 years many oil company stocks went through multiple splits as their stock prices escalated routinely.

As for their building more refineries I don't think you know just how difficult that would be. Look at what's happened with nuclear power plant construction, it's the same type of deal. I agree with you that there should be a point where we come to a realization that we must do it or strangle our own economy for it. But in this era of over-regulation in the name of environmental control building something like a refinery is virtually impossible. Even in the remote areas you mention I seriously doubt that it could happen unless we had a protracted period of consumers standing in line for gasoline. Even then we'd have to live through the name calling and blame game until reality finally settled in and people really did believe that more refining capacity was necessary. You need to keep in mind that the numbers of Americans who are unaware of the numbers I've posted here is probably somewhere around 99%, even though it's all in the public domain. And even if we could build in those remote areas, we'd still have to have pipelines to move the product to where the consumers are. Again, we're talking HUGE amounts of capital expense. If you owned an oil company I'd bet you'd have the wrassle of your life trying to find investors to pony up. And lastly, building something usefull in a remote location is still anethema to at least half our politicians, and too many of our uninformed citizenry. On that let me just say; ANWR!

Your last question is precisely why I felt compelled to express my views. Given the lack of leadership, and/or will, in the political arena, it needs to perk up. This is my small contribution to trying to get more folks informed. Perhaps we'll find the will.

As for the politicians, I'm sadly reminded of an old saying; A politician looks to the next election, a statesman looks to the next generation. That's what makes me frustrated about this election year. In my opinion, on the war on Islamofascist terror Bush is a statesman, on most everything else he's a politician. Even more unfortunate, Kerry strikes me as a politician on everything.