2007 Soap Box Archives

Oil

Several years ago I was talking to an acquaintance who worked in the crude oil industry and asked him why we had so many capped, (non-producing) oil wells in our western states while we continued to buy oil from our enemies in the Middle East.

As I said this has been several years ago but his answer was that if the price of oil got to about fifty dollars a barrel it would be profitable to uncap our domestic sources and start producing our own crude oil.

Well we all know that oil is hovering around twice that price now and we still have not opened those wells.

I can't help but wonder what the problem is. Now I know very little about the petroleum business but if I may venture a guess I'd say that one of the problems is that we couldn't refine the crude even if we produced it.

This country has not built a new refinery since the Seventies and the reason is mainly blamed on the environmentalists. If that is so it is insanity beyond reason.

The only thing the terrorists who want to destroy us have is oil.

When you take a customer like America out of the Iran, Saudi Arabia equation, even though China, India and some of the Pacific Rim countries are becoming big consumers, it would knock a hole in the market.

As it is we finance the weapons and technology that the terrorists intend to use against us. If we could become independent of Middle Eastern/Southwest Asian petroleum what do you think would happen to the world price of crude oil?

It would tumble of course and set off a panic that would take a lot of the wind out of our enemy's sails.

Yet this craziness goes on year after year. We leave our wells capped, we refuse to drill vast oil reserves in our country, we sit by while foreign nations drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and we let pitiful little tin dictators like Hugo Chavez insult us and grow more dangerous every day.

We sit here with everything we need to take our cajones out of the hands of terrorist nations and we can't do it because a hand full of tree huggers are afraid of harming the cross winged flam doodle or some such thing. And
nuclear power literally scares the pants off the greens.

But what else do you expect from people who think even cow flatulence causes global warming.

These are the same people who never utter a word when Saddam Hussein pours raw crude into the Persian Gulf and sets fire to oil wells in Kuwait. Boy, talk about a carbon footprint.

They never raise a protest to China opening a new coal burning power plant every few days or Al Gore and ilk fly around the country in big jet planes. Oh well, they can offset it by buying carbon credits, whatever they are.

Shame on you, Al. If you're going to talk the talk how about walking the walk. Move into a one room cabin, use kerosene lamps for light and do your cooking with wood you've chopped by hand.

Remember no chain saws, they leave a carbon footprint.

Pray for our troops.

What do you think?

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels

December 10, 2007