So, can Biden nationalize US oil companies because they won't pump more oil?

[Samrob]

Oil companies received pumping permits for pumping on Federal land. Why can't the Feds revoke their permits and take over the pumping? Shouldn't Dems be making the point that these companies with their tax loopholes are refusing to pump more to just to hurt the Dems and to help the GOP who keep giving them their tax loopholes?

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

1. Would more oil be helpful?

As I understand it, oil companies shut down some refineries when the pandemic reduced demand. Apparently, they have no intention of restarting the refineries, prefering to simply enjoy the profits from current refining capacity.

I don't know if the refineries are able to be restarted, or if they have been demolished to some degree.

[Samrob]

4. If nationalized, the military could reopen. nt

[mahatmakanejeeves]

8. How many troops shall we set aside for that? NT

[Autumn]

26. I live by an amy base and 2 air force bases. We have plenty of troops "practicing" We can spare some

for that. Not like we are under attack. Unless we count the oil companies robbing us..

[MichMan]

9. When did the military become experts on oil and gas production?

[Amishman]

25. good point. After Venezuela nationalized their oil industry it imploded due to inexperience

They didn't know how to run and maintain it long term, and production fell by 75% over time.

[In It to Win It]

28. Yeah, I was about to make the same point

I doubt the military has the expertise to operate a refinery.

[madville]

13. Are they gonna hold the workers at gunpoint ?

Or you mean the military actually run the refinery, with no experience?

[Lurker Deluxe]

20. Don'cha know

As someone who has worked in various trades, including offshore, I have run into this thinking all my life.

Anyone in the trades is an idiot and their job can be performed by anyone.

Refinery? Easy peasy, there is a switch on the wall in the corner office. Just turn it on, like the light switch in your bathroom.

Anyone with an advanced education can do it, after all the trades men and women are all uneducated.

Constant.

[sarisataka]

22. MOS 92OR

Oil Roustabout?

[GoCubsGo]

14. Some of them were shut down for other reasons.

Hurricane damage, fires, explosions, too old and expensive to be repaired. Those refineries aren't going to get restarted any time soon, whether the oil companies want it or not. The fixable ones can only be repaired so quickly.

[Thunderbeast]

2. Keep it in the ground.

[oioioi]

10. The price of gas needs to quadruple

https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=gasoline&graph=consumption&display=rank

Back to the office, my ass.

[Demsrule86]

18. That is just plain nuts...and then the GOP forms a dictatorship when we lose multiple elections.

The Republic is on life support.

[oioioi]

21. Sorry, the planet is on life support. Gas is way too cheap.

What's actually nuts is suggesting that the US produce more fossil fuel to lower gas prices when it already has the cheapest gas in the western world and consumes almost as much as every other country on earth combined.

https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=gasoline&graph=consumption&display=rank

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

At the current rate of growth in CO2, levels will hit 500 ppm within 50 years, putting us on track to reach temperature boosts of perhaps more than 3 degrees C (5.4°F) — a level that climate scientists say would cause bouts of extreme weather and sea level rise that would endanger global food supplies, cause disruptive mass migrations, and even destroy the Amazon rainforest through drought and fire.

Each landmark event has given scientists and environmentalists a reason to restate their worries about what humans are doing to the climate. “Reaching 400 ppm is a stark reminder that the world is still not on a track to limit CO2 emissions and therefore climate impacts,” said Annmarie Eldering, deputy project scientist for NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Passing this mark should motivate us to advocate for focused efforts to reduce emissions across the globe.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-the-world-passed-a-carbon-threshold-400ppm-and-why-it-matters

[madville]

27. The US uses 20% of the world's produced oil

We do use a lot more automobile gas compared to the rest of the world though because the rest of the world uses mostly diesel fuel in their automobiles, so that’s what skews that gas number so high for the US.

[oioioi]

30. Agreed - but the US burns much more oil per capita than other major consumers...

Dependency on fossil fuels is killing us. Increasing oil production is junkie thinking.



https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-oil?country=USA~GBR~CHN~BRA~ZAF~IND~RUS~JPN~European+Union+%2827%29~IDN

[Patton French]

3. Of course!

[Walleye]

5. Nationalizing the oil companies is the one unforgivable thing in the global capitalist world

For example, Cuba and Iran. We will never have relations with them because they took their own oil for themselves. I still think that’s why we attacked Saddam. Maybe we could do the defense production act to make them produce more but I think it’s counterproductive. Yes, high prices are bad for us politically, but look at the interest all of a sudden an electric vehicles

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer

I am not a lawyer. This is not an obscure ruling.

1952 steel strike

The 1952 steel strike was a strike by the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) against U.S. Steel (USS) and nine other steelmakers. The strike was scheduled to begin on April 9, 1952, but US President Harry Truman nationalized the American steel industry hours before the workers walked out. The steel companies sued to regain control of their facilities. On June 2, 1952, in a landmark decision, the US Supreme Court ruled in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), that the President lacked the authority to seize the steel mills.

{snip}

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer

Argued: May 12–13, 1952
Decided: June 2, 1952
Holding: The President did not have the inherent authority to seize private property in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the Constitution or statutory authority conferred on him by Congress.

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), also commonly referred to as the Steel Seizure Case or the Youngstown Steel case, was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision that limited the power of the President of the United States to seize private property. The case served as a check on the most far-reaching claims of executive power at the time and signaled the Court's increased willingness to intervene in political questions.

{snip}

Majority opinion

Justice Black wrote for the majority opinion that was delivered exactly three weeks after the oral hearing on June 2. Black took, as he often did, an absolutist view by holding that the President had no power to act except in those cases that are expressly or implicitly authorized by the Constitution or an Act of Congress. Black wrote that the President's role in law-making is solely to recommend or veto laws. He cannot overtake Congress's role to create new laws.[4]

Concurring opinions

William O. Douglas

Douglas took a similarly-absolutist approach to the President's assertion of inherent power to cope with a national emergency.

Felix Frankfurter

Frankfurter avoided the sweeping condemnation of the administration's claims that Black and Douglas had offered. While he would not rule out the possibility that the President might acquire the power to take certain actions by a long course of conduct that was unobjected to by Congress, he found the statutory history persuasive evidence that Congress had not acquiesced, much less authorized, seizure of private property in the absence of a formal declaration of war.

Robert Jackson

Jackson's opinion took a similarly flexible approach to the issue by eschewing any fixed boundaries between the powers of Congress and the President. He divided Presidential authority towards Congress into three categories (in descending order of legitimacy):

• Cases in which the President was acting with express or implied authority from Congress
• Cases in which Congress had thus far been silent, referred to as a "zone of twilight"
• Cases in which the President was defying congressional orders ( the "third category" )

Jackson's framework would influence future Supreme Court cases on the president's powers and the relation between Congress and the presidency. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett elaborated during her Supreme Court nomination hearings in October 2020 the core content of Justice Jackson's concurring opinion:

In his concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring), Justice Jackson laid out the “familiar tripartite scheme” that the Supreme Court has since called “the accepted framework for evaluating executive action”:

{snip}

Medellin v. Texas, 552 U.S. 491, 524–25 (2008) (quoting Youngstown, 343 U.S. at 635-38).

{snip}

[MichMan]

7. Under what grounds would it be a national emergency?

Poll numbers?

Since gas is readily available and we are not at war, I'm not clear why it would constitute a national emergency. The courts would rule against him immediately and it would likely come across as a brazen move of desperation.

Might as well just order them to sell gas at $3 per gallon and throw the CEO in jail if they refuse if that's the reason. I dont think it would turn out the way you think it would.

[JohnSJ]

11. Exactly. It isn't going to happen.

[GoCubsGo]

12. And, what happens when they can't refine it fast enough?

A significant part of the problem lies in refining capacity, and not in how much crude oil is getting pumped here. Several refineries have been shuttered due to damage from fires, explosions, or hurricanes, or because they're too old and expensive to repair. We're trying to transition AWAY from oil, so the old refineries aren't getting replaced. The rest of the world is having similar issues

[madville]

15. Sounds like a great path to shortages

Couple this with price controls and we’d be lucky to have gas at any price.

[Strelnikov_]

16. 10 refineries in the Houston metro . . . 14.3 percent of the nation's production

The 10 refineries in the Houston metro process 2.6 million barrels of crude oil per calendar day – 45.4 percent of the state’s total production and 14.3 percent of the nation’s production. The entire Gulf Coast Region – including Corpus Christi, Port Arthur and Beaumont – accounts for 87.3 percent of the state’s total production and more than a quarter of production in the United States.

All with a major hurricane season approaching, with no excess refinery capacity available.

And therein lies the problem, a lack of regulatory oversight for a national strategic asset, refinery capacity.

Regulating excess capacity, with a mechanism to compensate for excess capacity maintained, would be where I would start.

[MichMan]

19. Do you really think there is political will for subsidizing refineries that sit idle

just in case they are needed as backups? Just do not see that happening

[onenote]

17. No he can't. And he wouldn't.

[sinkingfeeling]

23. We have the oil, but can't refine it or it costs too much.

We just increased our exports.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-20/u-s-oil-exports-soar-as-world-works-to-replace-russian-supplies

Exports of U.S. crude and petroleum products surged to a weekly record of 10.6 million barrels a day during the week ending April 15, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The country’s exports also outweighed its imports by the most ever in government data going back to 1990.  

[iemanja]

24. No Biden can't nationalize oil

Our constitution prioritizes individual property rights.

[In It to Win It]

29. If Biden could do that, that is a sure way to lose the midterm.

"Let's give Republicans an actual socialist or communist leg to stand on"

I would rather not give people more reasons to vote for Republicans