Which leads to the whole Chicken-Egg quandary. We do need more oil, but without expanding or new refineries there is a constriction on the pipeline.

Of course the Angry Left doesn’t want oil, they don’t want refineries, they don’t want wind because it (choose your excuse) a) causes seizures, or at least nausea and vomiting b) Upsets their view of Cape Cod, they don’t want nuclear because they’ve watched The Simpsons and fear Montgomery Burns, they don’t want hydro because it could drown some snail darter or something to that effect, and they don’t want ethanol because they don’t want to get stuck behind Farmer John’s tractor and be late to Brown County for a tree hugging festival.

Michael, the reality is that we probably have close to adequate refining capability, but the location stinks. So much of the capacity is around the Gulf which means that something like a hurricane shuts down a huge percentage of our refining capacity. I would like to see some geographical diversity (of course meaning that we would still have to build refining capability somewhere).

The Dakotas have been mentioned.

Ummm the reason no new refinery is built for over 30 years is because the environuts fight it every turn. She Who Is Never Mentioned By Name Here By Me wrote many times on her blog of her opposition to the expansion of BP in Whiting.

I read a link off Drudge from the UK about a group of environuts that vandalized a power generating station. The court ruled the action was justified in order to protect the environment.

I hope that sort of judicial insanity doesn’t wash up on the shores of the USA. Can you imagine the environmentalists teaming up with Al-Queda to bomb oil refineries or power plants?

we have more or less kept pace with CAPACITY.

Between 1985 and 2008, capacity grew from 19,412.16 to 19,512.85 thousand bbl/day. That’s 0.5% increase in capacity.

Load grew from 14,365 to 17,464 thousand bbl/day. That’s 22% growth. We’re not keeping up.

Strangely, we have not really increased our gasoline usage in 25 years.

What’s even more strange is that you think growing from 6,539 to 9,286 thousand bbl/day - 42% growth in gasoline usage - is not really an increase.

a HUGE set of oil reserves being worked on up there (the Bakken Formation)

They’re playing around, but they haven’t figured out how to produce much yet.

while we are at a multi-year high on unemployment, 6.1% isn’t exactly HUGE unemployment that requires idiotic “public works projects”.

Last year, when we averaged 3.7% unemployment, construction unemployment was 7.6%. Both overall and construction unemployment is higher now.

And I’m not advocating idiotic public works projects. Most of our infrastructure in this country dates from the 1930s. It needs to be ungraded - and like the guy in the Fram oil commercial used to say, “Pay me now or pay me later.”

Right after WWII, we replaced the infrastructure for Japan and Germany - and twenty years later, they were eating our lunch. We need to be working on OUR infrastructure, not Iraq’s.

There was a day when “public works” projects did some good and many of those are still standing to this day - Hoover Dam and the TVA’s system of dams and hydro plants. You could call Golden Gate bridge a “public works” project even though it was private property owners in San Francisco and Marin County that invested to build the bridge. Those were done back in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Modern public works projects - The Massachusetts Big Dig is a prime example. Rife with cost overruns, political corruption, and subpar construction.

This indicates that total gasoline deliveries in 1983 were 51 million gallons per day.

That’s just the RETAIL deliveries. There are a lot of wholesale purchasers, such as farmers, fleet operators, fishing boats, airplanes, etc. The page you should be looking at is
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mgfupus2a.htm

I expect that we will figure out what to do with the particular type of crude that will be coming from there.

So when is it going to be coming? The Bakken formation was discovered in 1951, and in a half century of playing around, they still haven’t figured out how to get it out of the ground. Take a look at the North Dakota state website. It shows how many new wells are being drilled each month - and how many are being abandoned. There’s lots of interest, but not much success.

I have no idea what you are talking about having an average 3.7% unemployment last year. That is just plainly wrong. I see 4.6%. By the same measure, the average is 5.3% this year.

The average unemployment rate for men over 16 last year was 4.7%, not 3.7%; my apologies for the typo. The current unemployment rate is 6.1%. The average for the construction industry last year was 7.6%, though, and it’s continuing to rise. In the construction industry, 388,000 have been laid off since 2006.
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat25.txt
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

But you don’t fix it by spending bunches of money in order to reduce unemployment.

I never said it should be done to reduce unemployment. I said it’s cheaper to do it now, because you save the cost of paying unemployment compensation.

When a bridge collapses, you not only lose the bridge and the people crossing it at the moment, but you lose the ability of fire departments to put out fires on the opposite side, you lose industrial output because skilled workers can’t get to their jobs and they are replaced with incompetent workers, and because factories can’t get material in and finished products out.

And when a dam collapses, families die, houses are destroyed, and mortgages never get paid.

You see what’s happening to the markets right now because of mortgages going bad. Silver State Bank, which had John McCain’s son as a director, failed a week ago. Fannie and Freddie failed a day or two later. Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch failed this weekend. All we need is for a few dams to fail to put the icing on the cake.

And it’s not a small problem. More than half the bridges in this country are problematic. More than half the dams in this country are past the lifetime they were designed to last.

Saying “it costs too much” doesn’t work; ignoring the problems until we get disasters simply makes it cost even more.

You seem to be arguing that the mortgage collapse is connected to weak infrastructure? Or is that just a fear?

No, not at all. On the other hand, we have a lot of financial institutions in deep trouble because of the credit crisis. Everybody said Morgan Stanley would be the end of it. Then everybody said Fannie & Freddie would be the end of it. Then we get Morgan Stanley. Nobody’s saying this will be the end. That’s why the stock market collapsed; people are afraid.

It’s not just mortgage money at this point. If a bank is severely crippled because of mortgage loan losses, they no longer have the capital to invest in other kinds of loans, industry no longer can buy materials, so they lay off workers, which clobbers retailers. Everything goes south.

There were some pretty big losses with Ike. Nobody knows yet how big they are, but the fact that the feds have established a “no fly zone” suggests that they don’t want news organizations to let people know how bad it is. And homeowner’s insurance covers storm losses.

But when a dam breaks, that’s strictly flooding, and your insurance does NOT cover that, whether you have form 2 or form 3 insurance. The only thing that covers that is flood insurance - which nobody has.

I would argue that it is not the Federal government’s job to build dams and bridges.

Yes? When you take the interstate to Florida, you’re supposed to ford the Ohio river?

Hoover Dam is owned by the Federal government. That would make, I don’t know, maybe Starbucks responsible for it?

I would argue that over regulation and over taxation of its citizens has removed capital from the cities and states so that the ones that have constitutional authority to build bridges and dams do not have the resources to do so. Government intervention has given rise to the huge conglomerates that we “can’t afford” to let fail.

Tax levels are pretty much meaningless. Taxes always equal spending. It’s just that there are two types of tax - the explicit tax, which government admits to imposing, and the implicit tax, which is a debasement of the currency.

Jack Kemp was promoting the idea of the Laffer Curve, which has some limited merit, but the tax cuts that Bush favored (and which John McCain was against before he was for) didn’t increase tax revenues. However, Kemp managed to convince the GOP that it wasn’t necessary to balance the budget, as long as you controlled spending. Once they abandoned the discipline imposed by the desire to balance the budget, the GOP has been spending money like a drunken sailor, causing the dollar to lose 37% of its value since 2001.

And now, we’re running a sailor with a history of hard drinking for President.

Most of the new regulations that are impairing productivity in this country are in the name of “homeland security,” and yet they aren’t accomplishing a damnable thing. China sends us toys painted with poison paint, and gluten, used in foods as well as dog food, which contains poison melamine. We’re turning back more than 90% of all peppers at the border, and yet the 10% we’re allowing in are killing people.

Security is like a house with 100 doors and windows. If you have armed guards at 99 of those 100 doors and windows, it doesn’t help a bit, if miscreants can easily walk through the 100th.

We have been pretty arrogant in our international relations, not just in the last decade, but for well over a century. Think about the Dida Beard scandal. Think about United Fruit Company’s repeated scandals. Today, companies like Texaco, ARCO, and Pepsi are engaged in slavery - admittedly at arm’s length - in Burma.

We can’t afford to pull that kind of crap any longer, because it’s getting easier and easier for victims to strike back - and if you have nothing to lose, what’s to stop you? We need to practice the Good Neighbor Policy that Herbert Hoover announced in 1928.

If the Grand Dutchy of Fenwick finds us a profitable trade partner, and we treat them with respect, then Grand Fenwickians are unlikely to attack us - you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

When two people swap, each getting something they prefer in exchange for something they value less, they both profit. The Good Neighbor Policy isn’t just touchy-feely nice, it’s highly profitable. The GOP always promoted the idea of “Peace Through Strength” and it’s only been in the last few years that it’s promoted a “Piddle Away Our Military Strength and Make A Lot of Enemies” policy. We need a good Republican president - but we haven’t had one in this century, and we haven’t got one running this year.