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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (8335)	3/20/2004 11:13:47 AM
From: blue red	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

Sorry to be so late in responding. First I missed your post, then I was off line for a few days, but I do want to answer you. It was not my intention to suggest that the price of natural gas has been impervious to market forces since deregulation. Of course, without regulation it varies depending on a number of factors, of which the price of oil is among the most important. My memory of what happened with gas prices in the late ‘80s and ‘90s is foggy, so thanks for that information. You should be careful about accepting the claims of interested parties without investigating independent sources, though. The petroleum industry, your source, is by definition self-interested. So I look on its self-justifications with skepticism, but I don’t dispute that prices went down in the ‘80s, especially the later ‘80s. And since I don’t want to do research of my own, I’m the more inclined to accept -- for our purposes -- the industry’s numbers, if not the industry’s account of history. Gas prices seven years after passage of the NGPA don’t seem quite to the point. Are we in disagreement? I mentioned the industry’s claims in the 1970s that natural gas was disappearing forever, and that only new exploration could stave off its imminent exhaustion – exploration that only deregulation could stimulate, the industry argued. A drastic gas shortage backed up its claims. The shortage so completely convinced Congress and the Administration that the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act was passed in 1978, forbidding utilities to generate with gas ever again, so that precious natural gas could be reserved for residential users. That was the situation on passage on the NGPA. Two weeks later, I saw the the first report of an impending gas glut in the Washington Post. I remember it vividly – in fact I ran around my office waving it at people. The spigots opened before a single new well was more than a gleam in someone’s eye, and the price went up (I remember it going up sharply, but won’t bother to research it. Whatever you say is okay - but remember, the industry didn't demand deregulation for nothing.) It was obvious that the industry’s claims that gas was an exhausted resource had been false. Within a couple of years, an embarrassed Congress had to repeal the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act, oil supply now being the problem, not gas. I was answering a post that said this: “The oil business doesn't share its secrets with the public, consumers or even the US government....They are supposed to provide the government with accurate oil data but this is VOLUNTARY.” My account confirms that, but you can figure it out yourself. The federal government has no means to check the veracity of energy industry claims about fuel resources. To do that, it would have to go out and drill for itself. There used to be talk of setting up a Federal Fuels Corporation for that exact purpose. I repeat: the oil business tells us what it wants us to know. What it reports is voluntary. The passage of the NGPA, and even more startlingly, of the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act – whose premise was a wholesale falsehood - are dramatic cases in point. It's nice to talk to someone so well-informed.