138 comments on May 15th Senate Hearings on Oil and Gas: We May Have A Problem
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When Sankey said
"One of the subtleties here is that we may not be adding a tremendous amount of capacity, but in terms or our ability to upgrade more complex heavy, sour crude there is very definitely a surge of investment going on."
Instead of completely not listening and questioning the lack of investment, an intelligent person paying attention might have probed the type of investments rather than keep asking why there is no investments (when it was clearly stated that there were).
You assume these politicians are not intelligent. I assure you that they are but their focus is on their own personal power and on getting re-elected, not on solving problems. Now you may say that is not intelligent but from their perspective they are bombarded every year with supposed threats to civilization and most of them have not blown up in their faces yet. So they feel fully justified in ignoring such dire cries and instead in believing that things will continue exactly as they have continued. In other words, these politicians are intelligent, very literate, but completely innumerate. See my sig. ;)
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
The presence of the television cameras changes the debate. Suddenly it becomes an infomercial aimed at the American couch potato. Reasoned analysis is neither desired nor useful.
Later on they will read the report or have one of their staffers do so and (hopefully) that, along with the ususal political concerns, will guide policy.
I think you are correct, the staffers have a lot to do with matters. I know many politicians. Some are extremely intelligent, some are not at all. Their effectiveness almost always depends in no small part to the skill of staff and operatives working on their behalf.
All politicians I've met (bar one) have been very intelligent or at least very cunning when lacking in hard IQ.
What all politicians who run for more than one election term understand: You need to get re-elected. All else stems from that.
The longer versions goes something like this:
1) Change is slow
2) To be able to fuel change, you must keep working at it
3) Due to 1+2, you need to be at it for a long time
4) To be at it for a long time, you need to get re-elected
5) To get re-elected you need to be popular
6) To be popular, you need to echo the sentiments of the voting masses (not minorities)
7) To really compete against others, who are also popular, you need to have a lot of funding to get coverage
8) To get lot on funding, you need to echo the sentiments of those who can fund you
9) Often the sentiments of masses and funders are in direct conflict and you have to betray one or the other
10) When in doubt, betray the masses, because priority no. 1 is to get re-elected and funders have longer memory than voters and in this day and age coverage means more than being popular due to your opinions.
Q.E.D.
And once you do the loop 1-10 plenty of times, it becomes an automaton. It runs by and feeds itself. Pretty soon, it becomes the major goal, not just the sub-goal to help you get things done.
Thus, everything is for sale, except the ability to get re-elected.
There are of course the select few who have strong principles, but they don't usually last for very long in this game, unless their principles happen to be miraculously in-line with both the voters and the funders.
exactement. For those interested, I would direct you to Richard Fenno's Homestyle or David Mayhew's The Electoral Connection.
This is pretty correct. Most local politicians that i know personally are intelligent and highly principled.
When it comes to advancing an agenda (say putting more of the budget into transit rather than road widening) they rely on their staff to tell them how far they can push it without getting thrown out of office, or what aspects of issues are really important to voters so compromises can be struck etc.
At the federal level its probably all too easy to become divorced from reality.
Presumably at higher levels the game becomes much harder as well, so to survive one has to throw those principles away (if one had them to begin with).
10 sums it up, the rest is chaff.
OH my GOSH!
BRAVO to You! This sums it all up. I'll drink to that, and I'll buy the house a round, heck, make mine a double with that!
You have just officially summed it up for all career politicians. It's all about re-election. It's all sad but true. (Metallica song ring a bell?) It all boils down to re-election. Tell them what they want to hear, must get re-elected. The means justifies the end!
I had thought about running for politics in my younger days, but on reflection, i just couldn't sleep comfortably!
sheisters
Why would the refiners want to add capacity when there will not be any more oil available to refine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is so simple even a congressman could understand it if they knew the facts!!!!!! We need to add more capacity to other forms of energy not gasoline because the capacity will not be used long enough to pay for the large investment.
Nowhere is Now Here!
I just got raked over the coals about this statement in particular, and my partner informed me of:
Spectacular finds in Bohai Bay
Nine billion barrels of crude in open pools in Iraq
Giant discoveries off the Gulf Coast
Russian expansion in crude output
All I did was opine that perhaps refinery construction was low priority because the oil experts already knew that there wasn't all that much to refine.
Am I crazy?
No, you absolutely correct. Unfortunately, the correct view is held by a very small minority at this time. But, give it time.....
As with most people, including so called experts, she's completely missing the point ... there's loads of fossil fuels around ... we just can't get at it quickly enough to supply the desires of 6.7 billion people.
Xeroid.