What do you think about with current News and Opinions?

Beerman, BSN · Mar 8, 2022

3 minutes ago, toomuchbaloney said:

It's difficult to examine all of the facets of American oil production and then lay all, or even most, blame for what concerns us about access and cost solely on the desk of the president. IMV

Bahaha.....during the Trump administration, a cloudy day in Seattle was blamed on him.

Beerman, BSN · Mar 8, 2022

8 minutes ago, Tweety said:

But during the pandemic recovery is seems they made a deliberate decision not to drill more oil. Driven in part by greed, I mean stock holders. I'm sure my retirement funds benefited from it some so I'm not complaining.

Greed? Why would you invest so much to get a product low in demand. And then add in the possibility of a new, unfriendly administration and/or congress.

Tweety, BSN, RN · Mar 8, 2022

13 minutes ago, Beerman said:

Yes, as I mentioned another time, when one of your first actions as President is to cancel a project a private enterprise has spent billions on, and a "green" faction of your party help get you elected, that makes fossil fuel investors skiddish.

That is a interesting article. Some things I hadn't given much thought to.

I will say, it seems attracting workers shouldn't be a problem. They typically pay high wages for not many unique skills and education required.

I lived in western Colorado during a natural gas boom. We'll just say when I went shopping at WalMart, there were an awful lot of nice trucks of shoppers with out of state plates.....gas rig workers.

During the Great Recession with the oil boom in North Dakota there were towns with negative unemployment rates while the rest of the country had high unemployment and much of the workers were from out of state, including a lot of homeless looking for work.

With 3.9% unemployment the labor pool is smaller, but people do tend to go where the money is, so time will tell.

I've read a time or two that it's the competition, renewables that seems to be causing some of the shortages. I think too workers have been burned by lay offs in the past and perhaps want something more stable.

Quote

More than half of workers in oil and gas, 56 percent, said they would look for employment opportunities in the renewables energy sector, according to the survey. Last year, that percentage was 38.8 percent, highlighting the shortages the oil industry is facing as it looks to hire again, after letting go in 2020 thousands of workers in oil and gas and related services in the supply chain.

The survey also showed that 43 percent of workers want out of the energy sector within the next five years.

As more workers look to move to renewables or to ditch the energy sector altogether, recruiters in the oil and gas business find attracting talent with the right skills increasingly difficult.

Labor shortages have already become evident this year in the U.S. shale patch and in the Canadian oil sands as demand recovers and companies put rigs back into operation.

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/The-Oil-Industry-Is-Facing-A-Labor-Shortage.html

Like I've already said Biden clearly is for renewables and campaigned on that.

Tweety, BSN, RN · Mar 8, 2022

12 minutes ago, Beerman said:

Bahaha.....during the Trump administration, a cloudy day in Seattle was blamed on him.

Wasn't big news and I can't even find that story on Google. So I don't think there was widespread blame on Trump for the weather, like there is say for high gas prices on a President. Just sayin'

10 minutes ago, Beerman said:

Greed? Why would you invest so much to get a product low in demand. And then add in the possibility of a new, unfriendly administration and/or congress.

Um...perhaps to lower the demand on foreign imports perhaps? Seems like that is high on the agenda right now. But I suppose at the time it wasn't. We're only a reactionary society, not one forward look. Best to make immediate profits.

Beerman, BSN · Mar 8, 2022

11 minutes ago, Tweety said:

During the Great Recession with the oil boom in North Dakota there were towns with negative unemployment rates while the rest of the country had high unemployment and much of the workers were from out of state, including a lot of homeless looking for work.

With 3.9% unemployment the labor pool is smaller, but people do tend to go where the money is, so time will tell.

I've read a time or two that it's the competition, renewables that seems to be causing some of the shortages. I think too workers have been burned by lay offs in the past and perhaps want something more stable.

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/The-Oil-Industry-Is-Facing-A-Labor-Shortage.html

Like I've already said Biden clearly is for renewables and campaigned on that.

Hmmm, yes....good points.

Tweety, BSN, RN · Mar 8, 2022

1 hour ago, Beerman said:

Greed? Why would you invest so much to get a product low in demand. And then add in the possibility of a new, unfriendly administration and/or congress.

I will take back my comment on "greed". I thought about it and I'm too much of a capitalist at heart to call it greed. But what was good for the stockholders at the time is now biting us in the butt today it seems.

MunoRN, RN · Mar 9, 2022

3 hours ago, Beerman said:

The article I posted mentioned the leases. As a reminded, the industry says they are drilling as much as they can under todays regulatory environment. For better or worse, that's what it is. Don't see why they would make that up.

Except that's not what they said, what they said was that there's a lack of interest in developing oil extraction which they suggested was due to some sort of oddly nonspecific regulatory restrictions. I would think if there were specific regulations we need to revisit then they could name them

The thing is we know why there's more interest in investment elsewhere, it's because the vast majority of undeveloped oil extraction and refining that left in the US is types of oil that is extremely expensive to extract, transport, and refine.

As you pointed out earlier regarding the release of oil from the strategic oil reserve, increasing the availability of extractable oil is unlikely to have any effect in prices at the pump.

The only reliable way we've seen to do that is to reduce demand. The best way to do that is to focus on shifting our energy reliance away from oil, which is what the vague term "anti-fossil fuel" agenda, rhetoric, etc seems to refer to.

I get that many may have little interest in the "save the planet" thing which is fine, you can completely ignore that aspect of it but if you want lower gas prices then it's to your benefit for there to be lower overall demand.

chare · Mar 9, 2022

Quote

The first person to have his failing heart replaced with that of a genetically altered pig in a groundbreaking operation died Tuesday afternoon at the University of Maryland Medical Center, two months after the transplant surgery.

David Bennett Sr., who lived in Maryland, was 57. He had severe heart disease, and had agreed to receive the experimental pig’s heart after he was rejected from several waiting lists to receive a human heart.

It was unclear whether his body had rejected the foreign organ. “There was no obvious cause identified at the time of his death,” a hospital spokeswoman said.

[...]

Patient in Groundbreaking Heart Transplant Dies

subee, MSN, CRNA · Mar 9, 2022

13 hours ago, MunoRN said:

Except that's not what they said, what they said was that there's a lack of interest in developing oil extraction which they suggested was due to some sort of oddly nonspecific regulatory restrictions. I would think if there were specific regulations we need to revisit then they could name them

The thing is we know why there's more interest in investment elsewhere, it's because the vast majority of undeveloped oil extraction and refining that left in the US is types of oil that is extremely expensive to extract, transport, and refine.

As you pointed out earlier regarding the release of oil from the strategic oil reserve, increasing the availability of extractable oil is unlikely to have any effect in prices at the pump.

The only reliable way we've seen to do that is to reduce demand. The best way to do that is to focus on shifting our energy reliance away from oil, which is what the vague term "anti-fossil fuel" agenda, rhetoric, etc seems to refer to.

I get that many may have little interest in the "save the planet" thing which is fine, you can completely ignore that aspect of it but if you want lower gas prices then it's to your benefit for there to be lower overall demand.

I am not interested hearing from folks driving non-commercial trucks the size of living rooms whining about the price of gas. You bought the guzzler; you fill it and be quiet. But it's even worst now that we have allowed ourselves, decades after the original oil-embargoes of the 70's, to continue to ignore the dangers of buying from bad players. Reducing demand is the only realistic option left to us.

Tweety, BSN, RN · Mar 9, 2022

2 minutes ago, subee said:

I am not interested hearing from folks driving non-commercial trucks the size of living rooms whining about the price of gas.

What about Toyota Corolla driving families making low wages? Care to hear about their struggles with high gas prices?

subee, MSN, CRNA · Mar 9, 2022

Just now, Tweety said:

What about Toyota driving families making low wages? Care to hear about their struggles with high gas prices?

Pretty irrelevant when you consider that it's now been 50 years since the first oil embargos and yet, our government has done nothing but cater to the oil industry which has gotten us to the point. In the end, it's up to the family to decide how poor they want to be. No one has to have kids before they are financially ready. Why I never had kids. I despised being poor. When things go south, it's always the poorest who will suffer the most. It would be better to give them a 0% loan to buy a car that get's great mileage if they are driving a guzzler. Do you have another solution?

subee, MSN, CRNA · Mar 9, 2022

24 minutes ago, chare said:

Patient in Groundbreaking Heart Transplant Dies

I hope they make public the series of events that led to this failure. But I suspect that this patient already had multiple organ damage before he was given the heart which contributed to his demise. We don't know about his liver or kidney function. If was brave of him to try.