Teutonic Knight

What’s the Right Price for Oil?

To the Daily Reckoning,

I would like to offer a different perspective from the title of your article, if I may.

Instead of debating, or even defending the "right" price for oil, isn't it time that we, American, wake up to cease our addiction to cheap oil?

If indeed we had learned our lessons from the early '70s Arab oil embargo crisis, and started to build energy efficient cars like the Japanese did, we would have been in much better shape today. We spent about something like a little less than $1T each year importing oil. Imagine if we had succeeded in conservation, and invested in converting to renewable energy, the money saved would have gone a long way in paying down our national debt, and in cleaning up the environment.

The truth is we don't want to, unless we are forced to, on top of other political and economic reasons that the readers only know too well, and which I do not want to elucidate here, after listening to the Bankers on Capital Hill this morning.

In my view it has to do with our culture too. i could recall in the roaring '60s gas was so cheap selling for 33 cents a gallon. The Japanese being a island country with almost no oil reserve and production at the time, everyone knew from childhood the high cost of gasoline and the need to conserve. As a result they have been way ahead in building more energy efficient cars.