by Thing From Snowy MountainIf I may use one of these mountains for a soapbox for a moment...
Over at Slashdot there's a thread about widespread corruption in the oil industry, in particular a great deal about a Morocco-based company called Unaoil.
The comments thread there, where I tried to reply but couldn't, thanks to what's either a technical glitch or a "shadowban" masquerading as a technical glitch, is what one would typically expect. Look at how corrupt the oilfield is. "We" should do more to cripple it. Et cetera.
It and its larger brother on reddit are basically long involved threads (over a thousand comments in the reddit one by now, I'm sure) about how, if we'd only listened to King Laius and killed the baby, none of this stuff would have happened and Sophocles wouldn't have had anything to write home about.
Leaving aside my personal circumstances: according to this article, oil majors have replaced 75% of the production they'd used up in 2015. If this year continues like last year, this will result in production in January 2017 that will be (hmm... (* .75 .75)) 56.25% of what it was in Dec. 2014. Basically, US production is on a course to decline to half of what it was at peak production, and we'll be dependent on people like the Saudis, who are encouraged in their dumping by the fact that the US government, and its electorate, think they're fighting corruption by exporting the industry. Any attempts at recovery will be exacerbated by the likely new president's promise to eviscerate what's left of the coal industry, which will greatly hurt our ability to produce the steel products that are used to extract oil and natural gas.
We're about halfway through a process that will leave us dependent on imports for half of our oil. AGAIN. And the popular reaction to the corrupt governments that demand bribes as the cost of doing business is that more should be done to inhibit domestic production.
The modern US is continually meeting its fate on the road it takes to avoid it.