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we could just pump our own oil, and we wouldn't have this problem!
What do you mean "our own oil" ???
Does it belong to us? The American public? Sounds like you want to nationalize our oil industry then.
First off, American oil production peaked in the 1970s. Alaskan oil production peaked as well. Simply put: if there were that much easy to get at oil in the US we would have gotten at it already. It's simply not there, otherwise we wouldn't be going for deep water oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico that are costly and dangerous to develop. You could start a last ditch "lets drill every last inch of land we can" effort to squeeze every last drop of oil out of this country, and you still wouldn't make an appreciable change in oil prices because it would take years to get that oil to market. It can take decades to bring fields up to full production. Now when you're bringing those fields up to full production you at best make up for fields that are falling out of production. Not only here in the US, but across the world. Saudi Arabia accounts for a full 20% of the world's oil supply and there are great fears they are at peak production.
So even if you found another Saudi Arabia sized oil field you would at best keep supply constant, and that's assuming other countries don't decline in their production as well. Not to mention that these other wells you would be drilling are not conventional cheap wells. They require new, more expensive drilling techniques, or in the case of shale oil very costly and energy intensive refining techniques. Even if you got that system up and running it would require a lot of investment, and like I pointed out earlier, a lot of time. Time in which other conventional sources will be used up.
Now that I'm done explaining THAT, back to my first question: do you want to nationalize American oil? Because that oil is going to be extracted by companies that will sell that oil on the WORLD MARKET. Some of it will be sold to China, and India, and whoever else wants it and can pay for it, and honestly, in our current economic position we are really not in a position to compete for resources with China.
Not necessarily. Tax burdened NJ has some of the lowest gas prices nation wide... CT on the other hand, sheesh, they always have expensive gas prices.
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