Dirty Harry Reid, and his eco-freak friends, don’t like oil and they don’t like us producing our own oil. Dirty Harry would have us conserve out way out of current mess. James Hamilton, Econobrowser [1], has posted a long, detailed article with plenty of graphs, exploring the recent and possible future price of oil.
We simply can not conserve our way out of oil driven economic woes. Conservation will not lower the price of oil. The bottom like is the more oil we conserve, the more oil China uses. Conservation is squeezing money out of our economy to fuel China, Read what James has to say here [2].
But don’t forget, while you’re doing these calculations, you’ll need to meet Chinese demand for 2009, and 2010, and 2011…. Which, if you project the current trend [3] and tried to satisfy entirely by cuts in U.S. consumption, would have us down to consuming zero barrels of oil in the United States in about 17 years.
On the other hand, increased domestic production would keep more of our money in our economy and could import Chinese money into our economy. The Chinese are using more oil and their economy is growing. We are using less oil and our economy is stagnent.
Drill here, drill now.