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Leave the SPR alone already

Posted by Yankee on August 22, 2005 - 10:29am
Topic: Supply/Production

Peakguy sent me a link to the Brattleboro Reformer this weekend, which has an article about how some Democrats are urging Bush to open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to alleviate prices.

I thought this was just Schumer's pipe dream, but no, now Sen. Patrick Leahy of VT is advocating it too. I find this so frustrating, because it means that (some) politicians are so fundamentally uninformed about why oil prices are high right now (which Peter Maass also noted in the NYTimes piece this weekend), and delusional about how to solve the problem. Even worse, by promoting this kind of solution, they make it even harder for the public to understand what the real problem is, since it makes people think that high prices will go away just by opening up the SPR and putting a little more oil out there.

Fortunately, some politicians do seem to understand what the problem is:

"What good does it do to release oil from the reserve," said Rep. John Olver, D-Mass. "The real problem is we are using more oil every year."

Hmmm. Maybe this is a function of being in the Senate vs. the House of Representatives. Could it be that Bartlett has rubbed off on his House colleagues? Now we just need a preacher in the Senate, too.

If your senator is one of the ones calling for opening the SPR, please consider sending (a personalized version of) my letter to Schumer to your own senator. (Not that I've heard anything back from Schumer, of course.)

(This article also appeared in Energy Bulletin.)

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