Libyan No-Fly ZoneFollow

Or laugh at it because it's not reality. You know, whichever.

That's correct. He had a scheduled executive trip to several S. American nations which was planned well in advance. Is that the "reality" you talk about avoiding?


If no new permits were being issued, you might have a point. Might. Maybe.


Germany was never part of the coalition. Italy is wanting NATO to take the command role although that seems somewhat unwise given that several NATO nations didn't want to be part of it to begin with. Although you now have Germany saying it will take on an expanded role in Afghanistan to free up US planes for Libya. Turkey was opposed to a NATO effort but is now saying it will send warships and submarines for a NATO-led arms embargo. Qatar is sending fighters. Jordan and Kuwait are sending support/aid aircraft. Egypt is offering bases. God only knows what the UAE is up to (fighters, no fighters, Crete saying they got word from UAE to expect fighters for refueling, etc) although they're more hung up about US/UK response to Bahrain than actually opposed to Libya.

More complicated than your sound bites, huh? The real world can be hard :(

Edited, Mar 23rd 2011 11:54am by Jophiel

I think we should save that one for a special occasion.

Really? That's all you can muster? Might as well just say "You were right".


Which is... what? 1/25th of what we give in US oil & gas subsidies? Well, maybe if I TYPE REAL BIG, it'll seem scarier without meaning anything.


You'd save a lot of time if you just wrote "My **** is still bleeding on account of you scary liberals from 2001-2009" as every post you made.

Edited, Mar 23rd 2011 3:18pm by Jophiel

That's fine. It should be 25x that less for US oil companies. They don't need the subsidies anyway.


You only lose credibility (ha!) that way.


No, but then I never said Bush acted unilaterally either.

You could all make an effort to use a lot less energy in the first place. Then you wouldn't need to spend so much time and effort looking for new sources.


Just a thought........

You forgot to /soapbox. Careful, or you'll get stuck in a preachy, sanctimonious loop.

Edited, Mar 23rd 2011 5:18pm by Eske

Except it's more like "Oh. you found oil in that field? Well you can't drill there because it's a um... protected area! Yeah... That's the ticket. Um... There's got to be some rare animal or topography on that land which means you can't drill there. But here's some money so you can look in these other areas, but you have to let us know if you find anything there too. Good luck!".

That's basically how oil and gas subsidies work right now. Maybe exaggerated slightly, but not too far off the mark.



Sure. So let's not pretend that since the government spends X amount on oil and gas subsidies that this actually means that they're helping those industries expand their operations and to produce more oil and gas, ok?

Except for when it's not.

That's only for the tax break portion of the hand-outs. Surely rather than giving money to encourage production followed by giving money to discourage production we can just give out zero tax breaks at all and call it a day?

First off, a "tax break" isn't the same as a subsidy. The tax breaks are industry wide and can certainly be said to encourage growth. But the subsidies, as you just quoted, are provided for "conflicting" purposes, which often have the effect of effectively wasting a hell of a lot of money in those industries on things which aren't as productive.

We really don't spend subsidies paying oil companies to drill for more oil. We spend that subsidy money encouraging oil companies to do things *other* than drilling for more oil.


Combine that with increased regulation and red tape related to oil exploration and heaven forbid actually starting up a new production area, and the net effect of government action does tend to have the effect of discouraging domestic oil production. At the end of the day, the proof is in the result. If our government was acting to make domestic oil production as cheap and easy as possible, then why do we do so little of it? Clearly, just pointing at the dollar amount of subsidies and tax breaks isn't telling even close to the whole picture. Thus, those things aren't a valid counter to the argument that domestic drilling is being discouraged.

It *should* be less expensive to drill and produce oil products locally than to buy it by the barrel from other parts of the world and ship it here. Yet in many cases, it isn't. That can only occur because some combination of government actions are making it less cost effective to produce locally instead of just buying from foreign markets. Feebly pointing at this subsidy or that tax break doesn't change the factual reality one bit.

Um... Joph? You do understand that when you provide very little money subsidizing actual exploration, much less drilling for oil, and tons of subsidies for generating "alternatives", the net effect is to discourage the exploration and drilling and to encourage them to do other things, right?


Let me give you a simple example: Let's say your company could produce donuts, or bagels. The government gives you a $1/bagel subsidy to make bagels, and a 10c/donut subsidy to make donuts. Which of those two things is your company going to focus its efforts on? Now, add to this regulations which make it incredibly expensive to buy a donut making machine, or to acquire donut making ingredients, how much fewer donuts are you going to make compared to bagels? Now, add in the fact that there are foreign donut makers from whom you can simply buy donuts and sell them for a profit. It's not hard to see that the collective effect of all of those things will dramatically reduce the number of donuts produced domestically.

That's what we're doing with our oil industry. That's why we don't produce much oil in this country, and haven't expanded oil production pretty much at all for a couple decades. At the risk of repeating myself, the proof is in the result. If all those government subsidies and tax breaks were so incredibly valuable compared to the cost of domestic drilling, we'd see a lot more domestic oil production. But we don't, do we?

...you didn't have anything to back up your blather?

Yup, I noticed right away. Stopped reading right about then as well. Although I did get far enough to actually laugh out loud at the fact that you've suddenly shifted gears from "All that subsidy money is for exploration because they won't let them dig! That's what the subsidies REALLY are! You DO know this... right??" to "See?! They won't give them ANY money for exploration because they hate oil!! You DID know this... right??"

'Cause apparently it was news to you :D

Edited, Mar 23rd 2011 9:40pm by Jophiel