[MEDIK418]

I've watched this argument for many years now. It always goes the same way. Yes there are side tracks that some folks take in order to fix blame on this politician or that one but it's always the same. Poor lil us and our plight with the big oil companies.
You want gas prices to go down? Stop driving so much. Don't hand me the crap about the kid down the block who can't afford to commute to his job at Mikkey Dee's since gas costs so much. There's a McDonalds on every other corner and the thought that someone has to commute hundreds of miles a week to get to one is a load of hogwash. Young people as a rule blow through gas like it's like the air we breathe. . . free for the taking.
For more than 40 years now the federal and state governments have been legislating us into this mess we're in right now and the voters who keep these idiots in office are more to blame than the idiots themselves. The problem in this country with high gas prices has nothing to do with the price of crude oil. Most oil companies in this world produce as much crude oil and they buy. It's a kind of break even for most of the bigger companies.
I've heard all sorts of schemes on how we should all only buy gas on even days, or only on Tesdays and Thursdays. Everything in the book to bring the majors to their knees. Forget it! All you're going to do there is postpone the inevitable. If you don't buy gas on 5 of the 7 days that are in a week, all you do is leave the gas station attendants with some clean-up time 5 days a week. They buy gas in big tankfulls, they can go for a couple of weeks without you buying their gas and it will have no affect whatsoever on any oil company no matter how far up the food chain they are. Let's boycott Mobile gas stations. All you do there is punsih the owner/operator who just paid a rediculous price for the gas he can't sell now and pretty soon, we've run his mangy butt out of business. One more station for the major oil companies to take over or replace with one of their corporate minimarts.
You folks in California??? Congratulations. You've spent decades trying to get rid of the giant polluting oil refineries and now guess what? You've got the highest prices in the nation. Not just now but forever. San Diego typically has the highest gas prices in the nation. Wanna guess why? Because you people legislated yourselves into it!
How many refineries have we as a country built in the last 80 years? I'm not talking about state sponsored construction, I'm talking about refineries that have been built by Americans on American soil? Not one!
How many have we shut down in that same time frame? Hundreds! IT's easy for our government jackasses in state and federal houses of congress to legilate the latest anti-polluting laws on refiners. Unfortunately, ALL of the smaller refiners who didn't have the extra 10 million bucks in the bank to bring their refineries up to snuff had to either close down or, as is the case in most, they sellout to the bigger oil companies who have the deeper pockets and can afford the midifications. Unfortunately, any time a small oil company is taken over, more than 80 percent of their small refineries are sold for scrap bacause even the big guys have a limit to the amount of money they can throw at old technology.
By now you may start to suspect I work for an oil company. Yes I do. I've done so for 25 years now and hopefully will continue to do so for another 10 years or so. One ot the two refineries along the gulf coast that cannot start up for a few months is one of ours. We're looking at anohter 3 months before production can resume. There are over 700 additional people on site as we speak trying feverishly to get it back up and running. Every day the plant is down is costing the company 8.8 million dollars in lost opportunities. This is just lost sales. This doesn't even include the cost of tearing the entire plant down to clear the salt water and the 700 contractors they had to hire to do the work.
The bottom line is that we as a country are depending on a fraction of the refineries we once had to do the work of twice that number could do 40 years ago. We cannot build new refineries. . . period and that, coupled with our exhorbitant driving habits is why gas prices are so high.
You want gas prices to come down? Stop driving so much. Lose those gas guzzling hogs we drive and stop driving to a store two blocks away when it would do all of us good to walk that far once in a while.
I'm just as guilty as the next guy. I drive an Avalanche that takes a hunnert dollar bill to fill up now and I'm building a Mustang right now that I'm sure will eat more gas than the truck but guess what. . .I'm not moaning and groaning and yes, my gas costs just as much as yours does.
Oil companies raise gas prices in times like these for many reasons and yes profit is one. Another is that they are trying to slow the depletion of a resource they can see is going to be in short supply for a while. Another still is the amount of money they stuff back into finding more crude and designing ways to make the refineries we have more efficient and productive. Legislation killed the refining capacity in this country. You want to blame someone? Go hang a politician who keeps voting to keep us out of areas where the oil is just to save a mud flat where virtually nothing lives. "but it's a wilderness" the argument goes. How many of you have ever gone to the Northern end of Alaska to visit the swamp there? That's what I thought.
Stern words? Yup! I've seen first hand how the government and liberal tree huggers have destroyed any hopes we have of lowering gas prices and it makes me sick to see so many people aiming their frustrations in the wrong direction. Want to hear something hikarious? Does the government realize that they have done this to us? You bet they do. Right now, due to the mess Katrina made, Congress is trying to pass legislation that will allow refiners to forgo the clean gasoline restrictions until the refining shortage is over. They know damn well they have caused this mess and this little stop gap measure won't help much at all. You see, to go back to making gasoline with a little higher sulfur content, they'd have to "unbuild" the newer technology that they threw away after the previous legislation Congress passed. What better way for our government to force refiners to spend more money at the whim of some politician in Washington. That will sure make gas prices go back down huh?
Want to get some of that money back? Right now the oil field is rife with work for people wanting to actually work. I mean back-breaking, noisy, dirty work that pays a kid out of high school close to a hundred thousand dollars a year. It's not glamorous and you won't learn anything that will get you a white collar job later but it's there and it's going to be for some years to come. We're in another oil and gas boom right now folks. It's going to take years to reach the level of oil and gas production in this country to match what we are using every day.
Remember who you voted for come next election. Are they part of the poroblem or part of the solution?