Success! The Arctic is open for drilling!

[sofa king]

64. I don't think domestic production influences prices at all.

I'm not going to try to prove it, but I would not be surprised to learn that even if the US tapped its entire oil production infrastructure, including wells that are too expensive to run, it would not be able to significantly influence the price of oil per barrel.

That problem is compounded by the generally low quality of the crude left to us. As I believe I noted above, most US refineries don't even process US crude; we sell that crap to the Chinese.

So the system is already--and very intentionally--set up to rely on foreign oil production while we keep our own reserves safe for, say, a war in some hotspot area in which international crude shipments can be strangled. If domestic production had been controlled as a strategic asset instead of a vein of profit to be converted into cocaine and snorted by George Bush, we wouldn't be in a position where our own production is powerless to influence the market.

We keep a strategic petroleum reserve sufficient to run the country in wartime for a few weeks or months, but our domestic production and refining capability won't allow us to fight for much longer than that. So in any war where our imports are cut off, we'll have to consider nuking the living shit out of whomever we are fighting in order to keep the war short. Want to guess how that's going to turn out?

That is the kind of national security issue that I'm talking about.