About 100 big rig drivers -- along with their trucks -- held a protest at the Capitol building in DC today. You can probably guess what it was about. High gasoline prices. Another protest is planned to take place on Wall Street on Thursday.
The soaring price of gas is one of those things that can rile up a citizenry precisely because it is sudden, drastic, and deeply affects them personally. Today's trucker protest may be just the beginning of some serious agitation.
Warning: If you're already agitated, what follows is something that definitely won't help your mood.
The truckers who circumnavigated Congress today were demanding, among other things, that the federal government release supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a bid to drive down prices. More supply, lower prices, right? Many DC pols (Clinton, Pelosi, McCain) are calling for a pause in adding to the reserve, which is aimed at the same effect.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was established in 1975 in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo. The intent, of course, is to keep in storage enough oil to see the country through another embargo or other sudden restriction in our imported oil supply. Probably not a bad idea, generally speaking.
The SPR -- four petroleum-filled salt caverns on the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana, with a fifth to open soon in Mississippi -- currently holds over 700 million barrels of oil, enough to get through a two-month cutoff of imports. It's well over 95% full.
And yet, with the price at the pump jumping higher and faster than a startled cat, Bush is continuing to add oil to the reserve.
(The price jump, by the way, also affects the price we taxpayers are paying for the oil currently going into the reserve. Previous administrations' strategies have been to add to the reserve when prices were low.)
Not only is Bush paying a premium to keep adding to the SPR, according to a chart at the Dept of Energy's SPR website, over the coming months the plan is to increase the rate at which oil is being pumped into the SPR.
In all the articles I've read on this, the inevitable "experts" seem to agree that pausing additions to the SPR, or even releasing some of the reserves onto the market, would have but a modest effect on the price we pay at the corner station. So?
I'd think that Bush wouldn't mind a little positive PR in light of his historically low popularity ratings. Save us a dime a gallon, George, and you'd be a hero again in no time. (OK, not a hero, exactly. But 10% fewer people despising him is surely a worthwhile goal, isn't it?)
The SPR was established, remember, for two reasons. To get us through another oil embargo. Or some other sudden restriction in our imports.
Saudi Arabia and Iraq are not about to start an embargo against the US. Not with one enjoying the windfall profits they're making, and the other currently under military occupation by the US.
That leaves a sudden restriction in imported supplies as a possible explanation for why Bush continues to pump oil into salt caverns when the price is going crazy.
Who could suddenly constrict our imports? How about a retaliatory Iran, after Bush bombs the crap out of that country? All they'd have to do is sink one or two ships in the narrow Strait of Hormuz and there goes the entire Middle East oil supply. For a month or two.
Bush is getting ready.
