Pat Dollard | Young Americans

I … {SIGHHHHH …} Where do I begin that I already haven’t been before? Huh??

Where’s the fucking Tylenol?

by John Crudele - NYPost:

HELENA, Mont. - Here’s some very good news about oil that the manipulators on Wall Street don’t want you to know: there could be as much as 40 billion barrels of crude lying untouched in eastern Montana.

That’s billion with a “b” - as in a ball-breaking amount for those speculators who are purposely pushing oil higher for their own selfish reasons.

Who says? Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer does, adding that his state - with fewer than 1 million residents - would be thrilled to bail the US out of its current energy predicament.

While on a visit to Wyoming and Montana, I popped in on Schweitzer, the Democratic governor, who was more than happy to answer my questions about the rumors of huge oil deposits in the so-called Bakken area of his state.

Right now, the US Geological Service estimates that there are 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Bakken region, which also reaches into North Dakota.

“They are always conservative,” said Schweitzer, who greeted me in his office dressed in jeans, a white shirt and a string tie. “There will be more. It’ll probably be more like 40 billion.”

It’s so much, in fact, that a discovery like that - or even hints of such a find - could ruin speculators’ chances of getting the price of oil much higher than it already is.

In fact, just the knowledge of such big oil deposits - together with a drop off in fuel use because of the recession and the inevitable development of alternative energy sources - might cause gasoline prices to fall substantially in the future.

As it is today, Americans are being cheated on the price of oil. I’ve been writing about this for the past couple of years and now even a do-nothing Congress is getting concerned, although its ire is misplaced.

Wall Street speculators, aided by cheap money from the Federal Reserve and an ill-informed press, have kidnapped oil in much the same way that the Hunt brothers cornered the silver market in the 1970s.

The only difference is that the Hunt escapades didn’t come close to ruining the country’s economy. Congress is blaming the oil companies, which certainly are benefiting from the surge in oil prices. President Bush did his part by groveling to the Saudis for more oil - and was offered a token increase, but was essentially turned down.

But maybe if we start digging in Montana, we just might get our national dignity back - and even save our economy.

“We’ve been drilling out there for 70 years,” said Schweitzer of the Bakken area. “People there like new oil production. In fact, the city of Sydney [the county seat] wants to build a refinery. Where else in America do you have a community that says, ‘we want to build a refinery in our backyard?’ ”

Schweitzer, an agronomist with an advanced degree in soil science, has a picture on his office wall of his grandfather operating a one-man refinery.

If you let him - and I did - Schweitzer will explain how oil deposits come to be formed over millions of years. He also explains how the Bakken contains so-called oil shale, which means that the crude needs to be flushed out of tight rock formations.

With improved technology today and higher prices, this recovery method is now very feasible.

“And the nice thing,” Schweitzer said, “is it’s one drill hole per section.” For you city slickers, a “section” is a huge 640 acres.

By comparison, Saudi Arabia has the largest known oil reserves at 260 billion barrels.

Now … Montana Gov. Schweitzer (D) was on Glenn Beck’s radio show the other day. The man does have his head on very straight with gun control and oil drilling domestically:

Governor Schweitzer: Well, we’re not going to lose our gun rights in Montana. You can bet on that, but I can assure you of this: Montana will continue to take the lead to make America energy independent. We’re not going to allow dictators to push us around anymore. We have an infinite supply of energy in this country. We just have a finite supply of resolve to get it right … (on Cap and Trade) We’re already giving $2 a gallon to dictators who are trying to destroy our way of life. Look, I support the concerns that people world have with carbon dioxide but we have the technology right now to produce all of our energy domestically, to drive all of your cars, run of all trains and plains, light all of your light bulbs without importing oil from them and we can sequester our CO2 … (on domestic drilling and Congress) Here’s what I’d say to you. We don’t ask much from Congress and they don’t deliver much. Most of us as governors are building our own energy proposals. We’re putting together our own energy independence because God help us if Congress was the only ones responsible to save this country. Here’s a couple of things that we would need from Congress. There are some certain things that have to be passed at a Federal level. Otherwise, you create problems with competition between states in a bad way. In other words, people will just run over the border to do something because you can’t do it in another state.

Some Of Gov. Schweitzer’s ideas: No. 1, Congress passes two pieces of legislation. The first one would be a 15 percent tax credit for any consumer that buys a plug in hybrid car SUV or pickup that gets a minimum of 40 miles on a charge and runs on electricity for the first 40 miles. Let me tell you what that would do. Pacific Northwest Labs, a primary contractor of the Department of Energy, has already studied this. They found that we could decrease the consumption of oil in all of our transportation fleet by 83 percent if we had plug-in hybrids the first 40 miles. 93 percent of all the cars in America drive less than 40 miles a day. That means we could run the whole fleet on electricity 93 percent of the time.
Second, every utility in America, they must buy electricity from anybody on the system that they sell electricity to, so that when you drive home from work, you plug your car in, you walk in, you turn on your light and the electricity comes from the charge power in your car. You make your meal with your battery in your car and in the middle of the night when we have excess electricity three times as much electricity grid capacity as we actually need because we build this grid for today, your car recharges. The next day, if you don’t need a full 40 miles, you start selling electricity right back into the grid for three or four times what you paid for it. We make every consumer a better consumer, a bar capitalist. We couldn’t have to put up one copper wire. Northwest, this same lab, they found that we have the grid capacity to level the electrons and then, with coal gasification, places like Montana, with wind power, solar power, we can tell the dictators to boil in their own oil.

I don’t agree with cap and trade. I have a better idea, one that’s better for this country, better for the world, and it’s simply this: I wouldn’t give another nickel to the Federal government because they’ll find some play to pee it away. What I would do is I would say instead of a cap and trade system, folks, I want you to understand what cap and trade means. If you’re a big utility that’s been using coal over the last 100 years, Congress is going to franchise you to produce that quantity of CO2. You could turn around and sell out of the business and put a trillion dollars in your pocket. What we’re doing is we’re shifting wealth from the population as a whole to a few utilities and it’s not going to do a dang thing about developing new technology. Here’s what I would do: Those of us who produce carbon dioxide, I would put a technology fee of $12.50 per ton. I would use 100 percent of that money as a technology fee. I wouldn’t give it to the Federal government. We would create a quasi-private corporation that would do all the research and development. Those of us who pay in will own the intellectual property and we’ll be able to sell this technology all over the world in China, in India, and other places that are producing great quantities of CO2 and the consumer, the consumer will not see their energy prices go up because that $12.50 a ton, we can start decreasing the carbon dioxide emissions by at least 5 percent per year. It won’t increase the cost of your energy, and we’ll develop the technologies that the be giving the greatest boom to America’s industry since the industrial revolution. What’s wrong with that?

(Full Transcript Of the interview)