Low gas prices yields complacency
I just received an email from T. Boone Pickens' email subscriptions... The subject line read: "URGENT: OPEC is tightening the noose around our neck"
From the desk of T. Boone Pickens
Hey Army,
I’ve told you this all along — our addiction to foreign oil could bring us to our knees, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing we could do about it. Now take a look at today’s headlines. OPEC just announced it’s cutting production by 2.2 million barrels. Remember – this is on top of the 2 million barrels in cuts they’ve already made since this summer! These guys are serious about getting the price of oil back up right where they like it: $75 a barrel, $100 a barrel, $150 a barrel.
This is exactly why now is the time to pull together and Push the Pickens Plan. Every time the price of oil drops, America falls asleep. The Saudis don’t. The Iranians don’t. The Venezuelans don’t. But we do.
President-elect Obama said it best a few weeks ago on 60 Minutes. “Oil prices go up, gas prices at the pump go up, everybody goes into a flurry of activity. And then the prices go back down and suddenly we act like it’s not important, and we start, you know, filling up our SUVs again. And, as a consequence, we never make any progress. It’s part of the addiction, all right. That has to be broken. Now is the time to break it.”
I couldn’t agree more. We’ve got to break that addiction now. Before it breaks us.
Click here to join your Pickens Plan District Group. Better yet, sign up to be the leader if there isn't one already so you can help bring in 500 more members to the New Energy Army in your Congressional District before Inauguration Day. Those first 100 days are right around the corner, and the way OPEC is playing we’re going to have to move fast.
-Boone
The sad thing is, everything in this email happens in real life. Now that gas prices are down again... people are happy. They've already forgotten how bad it felt to pay $4.00 per gallon. As a matter of fact, gas prices are so low, they're as low as they were in the early 2000's. However, people should really be upset because we've had to go into a recession to witness gas prices this low. Did we forget that part of the equation? Shouldn't we be more upset over recession/depression than we were over $4.00 gas prices? Why do we experience a level of satisfication with ourselves as a nation when gas prices go down? The situation at hand today is even worse because we're actually stepping back in time to 2002 or so where gas was as cheap as it is in the 4th quarter of 2008. We've seen a decline never seen before. We should ask "why did this happen?" Instead, we say "well, its really cheap, let's go on another vacation" which yields more and more consumption. Over time, when we start demanding more gas, the prices will skyrocket since the supplies are at reduced levels.
In summary:
We've cut our consumption as a result of $4.00 gasoline. We've seen the prices fall through teh floor. We've realized how bad it is because we're now acknowledging that we're in a recession, but we're not maintaining our consumption, in terms of gasoline. OPEC is cutting production at record rates. We're likely going to increase consumption of gasoline because of the return of the lowest levels of gas prices in the last decade. Thusly, gas prices will skyrocket once again. And this time, we're in a recession. Keep that in mind people.
Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!
