How to Achieve Energy Security and Fair Gas Prices
Saturday
The following email was sent to ACT! for America members by Kelly Cook, ACT's National Field Director. We at Citizen Warrior fully support ACT's commitment to this issue, and we urge you to help make this happen. The stakes could not be higher. And now, Kelly Cook's message:
Face it. We’ve been played.
OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) is playing a deadly game with America. Their oil price fixing mechanism is legendary in the unjust world of anti-trust schemes.
The fact is that oil prices in the $15 to $20 a barrel range provide plenty of fair and reasonable profits for any oil exporting nation. Then why are oil prices today over $100 per barrel? OPEC is laughing all the way to the bank.
Here’s the game: OPEC, through the willingness to price fix among its 12 nation partners, gradually ratchets up the price of oil through secretly agreed-to reductions in supply. They don’t care if they’re not producing as much oil. The skyrocketing prices on the oil they do produce are more than enough to provide for their lavish lifestyles and...their generous donations to worldwide Islamic jihadist operations.
As soon as the American public starts to really feel the pain at the pump and begin to lobby their members of Congress to do something about it, oil supplies “magically” increase and the price of gas settles down just enough to prevent the outrage that was about to boil over. And so the cycle goes — by design!
We at ACT! for America are tired of being played in this deadly game of supplying the enemy with the resources to attack us. This is why we are fully supporting the Open Fuel Standard ACT of 2011. We are calling for Members of Congress to enthusiastically co-sponsor this vital legislation.
Why the Open Fuel Standard Act? Imagine you’ve got a flex fuel car — a car that has been retro-fitted to accept at least 2 different kinds of fuel. You notice the price of regular gas just hit $4.10 per gallon. Because you can also run on methanol (or electricity, natural gas, etc), you check the current price for methanol which is approximately $1.65! Now that you’ve got “Fuel Choice,” you fill up with methanol! Methanol can be produced from natural gas and biomass (common trash, plant wastes, landfill materials, etc). Therefore, it’s a potential environmental winner as well.
What happens when tens of millions of consumers start taking advantage of fuel choice and switch to other fuels? OPEC is forced to bring down its prices in order to compete. Game over. The price of oil per barrel would plummet down to its natural market trading range of $10 to $25 per barrel.
How can we be so sure of this? Brazil has already done it — back in the 80’s and it’s still working for them! Do you know that two of the major car suppliers to Brazil’s flex fuel market are GM and Ford? Brazil’s proven success demonstrates that a single nation can employ this strategy successfully as a solitary nation against the forces of worldwide markets.
Why shouldn’t the U.S. and other major oil consuming countries follow suit? The transition costs are minimal when compared to the tremendous savings and security we all will enjoy through fuel choice!
I know some of you are asking: “What about Drill Baby Drill”? We are enthusiastically in favor of developing all strategies to disarm OPEC and their deadly allies. We need to develop all forms of energy, especially our unfathomable supplies of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear energy technologies. Encouraging fuel choice through the Open Fuel Standard ACT of 2011 will only enhance these and other needed developments.
***Action Items***
1) Invest 5 minutes to support fuel choice for your gas tank and for the nation! Contact your member of Congress and urge them to be a co-sponsor for H.R. 1687, the Open Fuel Standard Act of 2011. We are starting to pick up real momentum in this process! Please make sure your member of Congress is a co-sponsor. Click Here to complete this simple process.
2) Check out the amazing new website dedicated to the passage of the Open Fuel Standard Act of 2011. Please sign up for email updates and find out the many reasons we need to actively promote this bill. The resources this site has amassed are considerable. There are many factors involved that we just don’t have the space to cover in a single email. Please avail yourself to this vital information. Click Here for this creative new website!
11 comments:
On re-reading this perhaps it is the single most important counter-jihadist focus point in the US.
If Brazil allows such consumer choice how on earth does the US not allow it?
Does anyone know what the Europeans are up to in this regard? They need to be weaned off OPEC oil as quickly as possible.
They also need to stop rushing into Solar Maghreb - that will be their next Islamic Noose.
I think you're right. It took me awhile for the importance of this bill to sink in, but I finally got how much of a linchpin it is.
The main objections to the bill are that it is a government mandate, that we should drill our own oil (which isn't really an objection because it doesn't conflict), and that food prices will rise or it will cause starvation (this was a deliberate propaganda campaign in 2008 by Big Food so they could keep their corn subsidies).
The mandate one is the only objection that really has any legitimacy, but it really doesn't either because the purpose of keeping government out of business is so the free market can decide.
But the free market is not deciding because there is a virtual monopoly in two different ways: OPEC is a large enough cartel it can control the worldwide price of oil, and at the pump there are no options. The reason there are no options (except oil) is that our cars cannot burn anything but gas.
So this "mandate" is actually a counter-mandate. It introduces freedom by law where there is at present no freedom (if you want to drive, you have to use oil).
What OPEC does is illegal. And technically they should be sued. But nobody will sue them. Why? We need oil. Why? Because that is the ONLY thing our whole transportation sector (and therefore our whole economy) runs on.
It is the responsibility of our government to protect us from monopolies that harm our citizens. OPEC is a monopoly that harms our citizens.
The government's responsibility is to break the monopoly to protect its citizens. It can do that by passing the Open Fuel Standard Act.
Every voice counts. Please PLEASE contact your representative and let him or her know you want him or her to co-sponsor the bill. Please do it today. We have no time to lose!
This bill would attempt to jerry rig the free market sale of automobiles by incrementally imposing unreasonable fuel economy standards on the auto manufactures. This bill(H.R.1687)is just more government meddling.
Judge for yourself......
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h1687/text?version=ih&nid=t0:ih:18
-Timly5000
The bill contains no fuel-economy standards. The bill simply makes it a law that by 2017, no cars will be sold in America without the small, 100-dollar tweak that makes the car capable of burning other fuels in addition to gasoline.
We bailed out the car companies. They owe us this small thing.
The free market will naturally move away from fossil fuels once there is a viable option. No matter how vehemently the greenies propagandize for "green energy", we are not in a post fossil fuel era. Subsidized fuel that is crafted from what most of us consider food, is not a viable alternative to fossil fuel.
There are already viable alternatives to gasoline, but most cars don't have the right kind of fuel lines to use them.
This bill is an improvement on the previous one introduced into the last Congress. Specifically, it doesn't favor any one fuel. It is all-inclusive. And because it includes methanol, which can be made out of practically anything, including waste and something the U.S. has in abundance, natural gas, it will likely out-compete ethanol, which would eliminate your concern.
Right now methanol is cheaper than ethanol, and that's without subsidies. Methanol doesn't get any subsidies. Ethanol does. And those subsidies will probably be dropped, anyway. In fact, they're dropping already:
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=0A908CC9-925B-4636-960B-9E2EF916164B
The reason: There is a steadier market for corn. So subsidies are no longer necessary.
According to Anne Korin and Gal Luft, this bad press about ethanol raising food prices is a concerted effort by Big Oil and Big Food.
http://www.openfuelstandard.org/2011/05/question-since-corn-is-such-important.html
Oil companies don't like ethanol, of course, because it competes as a fuel. But food companies are against it because it will take away their subsidies.
Take a look at this bill. You'll see it is a clean, technology-neutral, subsidy-free bill. Here is the bill:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/56286702/The-Open-Fuel-Standard-Act-of-2011
Give it a few seconds to load. It's a PDF document.
I admire your optimism and I truly hope you're right. Being a California native I see this sort of legislation all the time, and it always ends the same way...... mandating that the technology(eg.alternative energy source) be made available to the masses winds up being the easy part, getting people to use it isn't that simple. If California is any indicator as to how HR 1687 will unfold, fossil fuel may be illegal somewhere down the road, for better or worse. Again, I hope you're right, I prey you're right.
Funny you would mention California. The woman who really made flex fuel cars feasible started in California, and she was using methanol as the fuel. She worked with Ford and they eventually had a fleet of cars on the road, but fuel stations were hard to come by, so eventually the project was a flop.
That's exactly what the Open Fuel Standard is designed to avoid. When all cars on the road are capable, alternative fuels will be widely available, and when you're in a place where they're not available, or where gasoline is cheaper, you can always just put gasoline in the car.
Brazil has had a very similar law for years, and it is working very well for them. Check it out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4581955.stm
Fossil fuel may be illegal? I guess that's possible. But it doesn't seem very likely, at least for a very long time. The U.S. is producing 40 percent of its own oil right now. And most of these alcohol fuels are part petroleum. They are commonly M85 or E85, which means 85 percent methanol, 15 percent gasoline, and 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline respectively.
This bill goes one better than Brazil. They have been focused on ethanol only. The US may get so good at making our own diverse fuels we shift from an oil IMPORTING country to an oil EXPORTING country. That's what happened to Brazil.
In response to Timly5000s concerns about yet more government interference.
The free market should be allowed to operate and competing alternatives to oil for powering cars should be the natural result of free market practice.
Prohibiting alternatives to oil would be against the free market.
Now assuming a simplistic segmentation of say:
a) one third of US voters being of the Left and “anti-imperialist”, hence anti-West;
b) one third of US Voters being politically correct – hence enabling the Soft Jihad by default;
c) one third of US Voters being informed about the dangers of Islamic Global Jihad.
Then in this model us “c) folk” would favour alternative fuel as consumers to help mitigate against Soft Jihad (although as such consumers we would boycott say alternative options transmitted hypothetically from Solar Maghreb, which would be Green Energy under Islamic control).
Fortunately the PCs are also Green so that would swing more consumers our way.
And some of the Left prioritise Green as much as their "anti-imperialist" war cry.
So more there as well ...
The free market would demand that our consumer choices be respected without interference from the government.
Hence the supply starts swinging away from oil through consumer choice.
So it is about less interference from government - not about more!
Unfortunately what often passes for “free market” practice is often not.
Citizen Warrior, I bring your attention to the following article on Newsmax
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Oilprices-Saudi-prince-US/2011/05/30/id/398219
"We don't want the West to go and find alternatives, because, clearly, the higher the price of oil goes, the more they have incentives to go and find alternatives," - Saudi Arabia’s Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal
Looks like some of the major players are getting a big worried with legislation like this being actively pushed.
On the comment about free market. Sometimes you need regulation to push the market in the direction you want it to go. I'll give a good example because it has had an impact. In the past, Hearing impaired and deaf people tried to get TV manufacturers to include closed captioning on their TV sets. We were given the excuse "Its too expensive", "It's not something the public wants" excuses for many years. Despite the fact that there are 36 million deaf or hard of hearing individuals in the US, TV manufacturers went out of their way to make excuses why not to include this in their TV sets. Finally this was included in the ADA law that forced TV manufacturers to include Closed Captioning on all tv's made after 1995. This gave TV manufacturers two years to come up with ways to include it at an affordable price. Now all TV's made in the US have Closed Captioning and it only costs $1 to put the chip in. How hard was that? Why did it take forced regulation to make manufacturers include this simple option on TV's for 36 million americans who couldn't enjoy Television without paying $300 - $500 for a box to convert the lines on their set? Most deaf are not rich and have a hard enough time finding work when hearing people decide to hire us. So its not like we are made of money to pay the $300+ for the closed captioning box.
In some cases, forced regulation can be a good thing that will achieve a good result. Yes, it can be used badly and in the past there are examples of that. Not all regulation is bad.
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