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High Gas Prices and Elections

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I decided to be fair to the Democrats and research what they’re proposing to lower gas prices. Here is what ChatGPT found for me. If you have better sources, please list them in the comments, but what the notoriously left-leaning AI engine found is this:

  1. Prohibit exports of crude oil, gasoline, and diesel;
  2. Tax oil-company windfall profits and rebate the money to households;
  3. Create an FTC unit specifically to monitor fuel markets for manipulation or fraudulent behavior, increase transparency;
  4. Restoring clean-energy tax credits, speeding permitting, expanding transmission and storage, making large data centers pay more of the costs they impose on the electricity grid, and strengthening consumer protections against energy-price increases.

What do you notice in these measures? Trump is already proposing to ban diesel sales overseas and send dividends to voters. This takes care of numbers 1 and 2. Number 3 is create more bureaucracy.
Number 4 is go back to the Green New Deal.
If people are planning to vote Democrat over high gas prices, which is a very legitimate concern, can they please point out which of these measures proposed by the Democrats to address the issue makes them confident that they will manage to tackle it?

12 responses to “High Gas Prices and Elections”

  1. Avatar
    Anonymous

    From what I understand, we don’t actually produce Crude Oil here. Our oil fields produce Light Sweet or Sweet Light, I’m not sure which way that is said.

    However our refineries can only refine heavy crude oil. So what the oil companies do is they sell what is pumped out of the US, and import heavy crude from places like Canada, Venezuela, the Middle East, etc. Then refine it here into Diesel, gasoline, jet-fuel, and other things. None of which are actually sold outside the country in the first place.

    So effectively that first point will do absolutely nothing. Which to be fair is quite typical of politicians.

    A side note. From the way it was explained to me, replacing the refineries with ones that can refine Light Sweet Oil has been hampered from numerous directions. You have the leftists and greens who keep trying to reduce the number of refineries. You have the Bureaucrats who basically have made it so construction would likely take half a decade if not longer. You have the price tag, which is astronomically high in the first place. And lastly the oil companies get half their income from selling the Light Sweet overseas. If they were required to refine it here, it would cut off half their income before expenses or taxes and this would take years to correct. Frankly they would not be willing to do so without a major amount of funding from the government pumped into the system before starting.

    The second point isn’t likely to happen. Assuming no politicians were bribed to gum up the process, the oil companies have enough lawyers to strangle it in court for decades. Assuming it was pushed through via presidential decree, they could simply reduce production to force prices up to “reimburse themselves from the loss.”

    The third point is also pointless. Every group we currently have who’s job is to monitor stuff is actively doing the opposite. The FDA is allowing poison into the food. The FBI are actively turning a blind eye to treason and infiltration. Until recently ICE was turning a blind eye to foreign invaders. The CIA is so f-ing dirty that every time a bit more of what they were up to sixty to eighty years was released it makes me want to ask the Lord to burn my nation with fire. And all indications that have been given by those who have worked in groups near the CIA had all had the same impression. That the CIA of today is so much worse than the monsters of their past that it is not even funny.

    Lastly the fourth point. Why would any of this take place? There is no political will on either side to do this, and I would wager there is plenty to do the opposite.

    The clean energy tax credits were a flop as they were used to punish not help. There is nothing to force the government to start issuing permits faster. In fact they would lose some of their power and control if they were forced so that won’t happen. I am not sure what ChatGPT meant by “expanding transmission and storage.”

    And as for making large data centers pay more of the costs for the electrical grid. I highly doubt this would even make it into the proposal list, much less a serious vote. After all.

    These data centers could be built anywhere. They require lots of power and use lots of water to keep them cool. It was known ahead of time they would strain the electrical grid and badly.

    Yet they are they being put in residential areas. There is tons of land near the Canadian border which is freezing cold for most of the year. Places that are far away from residential zones. Places where no one would think twice about having a nuclear plant or what have you being plopped down solely to power them.

    But no, they are being placed inside residential areas. You can go on youtube and find dozens if not hundreds of town hall videos where the officials who agreed to letting the data centers be built in their towns and cities refuse to answer if they were bribed. They refuse to listen to criticism. They refuse to do anything that might impede these the construction of these data centers.

    This is deliberate. This has maybe not full governmental backing, but certainly have majority government backing and from both sides.

    That fourth point of theirs was a LIE.

    No this is all a pack of lies and distractions. And yet many people will fall for it. It is quite frustrating and rage inducing really.

    • – W

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I agree with everything you say here. Democrats are not even bothering to come up with a plan. I gave them a chance to investigate to see if they have any proposals on the one issue that is likely to give them a win, but they are not even trying to propose anything. They either parrot Trump’s policies or come up with these old ideas that have been tried a million times and always failed. I would be very curious to hear from people who are going to vote for Democrats over this issue. Which one of the policies listed here sounds appealing to them?

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      1. ed Avatar
        ed

        China meanwhile has shocked the world with how well they’re handling this crisis by pivoting away from oil into renewable energy; it has been an immense shock absorber and allows them to weather this storm.

        Meanwhile here in the USA, smooth brain Republicans wanted oil dependance and outright hostility to any other fuel options.

        Did you not consider that?

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          It’s true that the Chinese have saved Europe from a terrible fuel crisis by dramatically reducing their own consumption. I wonder what could have prompted the Chinese to do that. Given the events of today, I think it’s pretty obvious.

          Liked by 1 person

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  2. ed Avatar
    ed

    How about not be a drooling idiot and start any more wars in the middle east?

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yes, great, but how will the existing problem with the diesel prices be solved?

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      1. ed Avatar
        ed

        Iran is giving Trump the Jimmy Carter treatment. He killed their current leader’s family and also their former leader and religious figurehead, I doubt they’re in a negotiating mood with Trump.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          You do know that the diesel inventories started running unusually low in the U.S. before the war with Iran, right? The Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz definitely didn’t help, but the problem was already there before that.

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          1. Avatar
            Anonymous

            –You do know that the diesel inventories started running unusually low in the U.S. before the war with Iran, right?

            Do you know why?

            But since you connected it with the elections – you will not be able to magically restart the clock now and insist the only thing that matters is the plan to solve the problem. People will attribute high oil prices to Iran war. Now that I think of it – even Trump attempted to attribute diesel prices to war… in Ukraine.

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              Yes, I know why. Because of the exports. The volume of the exports became unusually high. Admittedly, it was the absolute worst time to start the war in Iran. Because the problem was already there and the war in Iran exacerbated it. And, of course, Ukraine destroying one-third of Russia’s refining capacity is a big contributor. Did anybody expect that there was going to be a 4.5-year-long slaughter of high-IQ, ingenious white people with those white people agreeing to play victims, lie down, and die quietly? The Russian war is a problem that needed to be solved years ago, ideally back in 2014 or every day since, but it wasn’t. Now all of these things have come together and are creating major consequences.

              And of course, I understand that 99.9% of the voters are unable even to process what I just said, let alone allow this kind of reasoning to guide their electoral choices, but I’m not writing for them, nor would they come here. I’m writing for intelligent people.

              Based on what we know, which might be only part of the truth, the war in Iran was a terrible mistake. I understand it will probably cost us the midterms. All I want is for people to understand that what this means is that we will have all of the same problems as now, plus wide-open borders and the fresh round of struggle sessions on a daily basis. Obama destabilized the Middle East. Biden sabotaged Ukraine’s counteroffensive and turned the war into an endless quagmire. Voting for their party because you are opposed to wars is nonsensical.

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              1. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                War with Iran was never partisan. It would’ve happened no matter who was in office. The US goes to war with (or otherwise “takes action” against) pretty much any oil-exporting country that either 1) promises to switch to a gold-backed currency, or 2) sells oil in denominations other than US dollars. It’s necessary to maintain the petrodollar, and does not depend on who is in office. Iran, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela… look at the list of who was in office for all those. This is not a Republican thing. It’s a deep state thing. You can add Saudi to that list in that… we don’t go to war with them even when we have reason, because they carefully avoid doing those things.

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              2. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                This is true. The memory of the Obama administration is still fresh. The dude was endlessly messing with the Middle East. Created extreme dysfunction there on top of the existing mountains of dysfunction. And then there was Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that inspired Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Why should I assume that the Democrats would not be doing exactly what they were always doing?

                In what concerns Ukraine, Obama and Biden are directly responsible, first, for the appeasement of Putin and the invasion and, second, for the war being so drawn out and bloody. Trump did not manage to end the war and has been handling things in a clumsy way. But his culpability is enormously less than Obama’s and, of course, Merkel’s. He didn’t manage to solve the problem that they created. But they created it in the first place.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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