Quote:
Originally Posted by VitaMan
Comments ?
Want to give thanks to anyone ?
|
No one person or thing is responsible for this. A lot deserve credit. The bats. The people who originally caught and spread the disease within China. And of course Chairman Xi and his fellow leaders and functionaries who helped it spread throughout the world, before imposing draconian restrictions that virtually eliminated COVID 19 from China. A little too late for the rest of us though.
You can attribute lower prices in large part to COVID 19. News about the Omicron variant was what caused the lion's share of the fall in oil prices. Analysts and the futures market were predicting the price would drop long before the announcement was made about the release from the strategic petroleum reserve. Back on October 1, oil for December, 2022 delivery was trading at $68. That's about where it is now.
As to the proposed SPR release, yes, that had an effect on the price, but it's looking like OPEC and Russia will cut back on production to compensate.
NiceGuy53 has some excellent points. We were a net oil exporter not that long ago. Biden tried to knee cap the industry when he first took office, although his attempts to stop issuing drilling permits and leases on federal lands and the federal offshore were later struck back by the courts. Now that there will be no Keystone pipeline, perhaps the Canadians will lay pipelines to their west coast, so that China will have the security of the extra oil supply, instead of our refineries.
So note who the beneficiaries are. Russia, China, OPEC. And who's getting fucked. The people in the oil patch in Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming and other parts of the country.
There's a huge amount of hypocrisy on display here. Biden should want higher oil prices, and higher gasoline prices, if he were really concerned about carbon emissions. Higher prices would reduce demand. And at $80 a barrel, prices weren't really that high, certainly not high enough to justify a release from our strategic reserves, which are meant for emergencies. Gasoline costs no where near what it does in Europe.
crude oil at lowest price since August
