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Sept. 28, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:31
September 28, 2005, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Time Text
And greetings, conversationalist Tom Sullivan sitting in for Rushlinbaugh.
He's off just for the day.
Don't worry.
He'll be back to guide the program tomorrow.
But for today, I am in here to I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm in here to keep the golden EIB microphone warm.
That's it.
We've got the phone number is 800-282-2882.
I sounded like what's his name from that vice presidential candidate back with Perot.
What am I doing here?
What am I?
Yeah.
The late Admiral Stockdale.
Yeah, he just passed away.
Yeah.
What am I doing here?
I don't know.
Somebody tell me.
All right.
So we've got, I just watched a little bit about this Tom DeLay business here.
And it's all about Texas politics and Texas campaign laws and corporate donations to Texans for a Republican majority and some of the money they say in the Texas grand jury went to support candidates and you can't do that in Texas.
So anyway, Tom DeLay says he will temporarily step aside in his leadership post in the House.
So yeah, they are.
And they've got Frist next in their sight.
So I mean, it's all, I mean, oh, yeah, speaking of Frist, you know, Senator Frist is there to say, well, what did you do when you sold your stock?
You know, you sold it at this high price and you made a lot of money on it.
So there must have been a Martha Stewart moment going on.
And, oh, yeah, wink, wink, you had some sort of blind trust, but you told them to sell, which you can do under the rules.
And you even went through the Senate Ethics Committee beforehand.
You got permission.
You did all the sort of preliminary work months in advance.
But somehow, you somehow got one of the highest prices of the year, even though the price is down just a little bit from where he sold.
So they're making him stirring up all this.
But the meantime, I don't mean to share with you this dirty little secret, but John Corzine, who isn't he running, Senator Corzine, isn't he running for governor of New Jersey now?
He has, well, I don't know how this works because he has a blind trust and has Goldman Sachs.
He used to run Goldman Sachs and a bunch of Goldman Sachs stock in there.
And all of a sudden, Corzine is going around, well, I'm going to fix it.
I'm going to clean all this blind trust thing up with my Goldman Sachs stock.
Nobody's going after him.
It's all very interesting.
This is a tactic.
It's an obvious tactic in the political handbook of the Democratic Party is to go after the leadership of the opposition by using hook or crook, whatever you could possibly do.
Anyway, so we'll follow this along as it unfolds.
But that word coming down from Texas just a few minutes ago about Tom DeLay stepping aside temporarily in his post in the House.
Refineries, we don't have, oh, we don't have refineries.
Great piece again, Wall Street Journal, refinery incapacity is printed today.
But yesterday, for my local show, I was digging around, rooting around, yesterday before, this William Jefferson, the congressman from New Orleans.
I was rooting around because he's in there and he was one of the Democrats that was, believe it or not, this guy who's got the FBI rating his house and his car and his business and his home.
And there's something.
Their stinkometer goes off pretty high when it comes to William Jefferson.
Anyway, but he is, yeah, he's taking all this stuff out of that.
Rush went over all this stuff with you.
So you know the story about William Jefferson, that he had the audacity to stand there yesterday and lecture Michael Brown.
In my going through the background of William Jefferson, I saw where he was always seemed like hand in hand with Dennis Kucinich.
Good old Dennis Kucinich, who has never seen a liberal flag that isn't liberal enough for him.
I mean, this guy is really way out there.
So I started, all of a sudden, I started, I saw all these headlines, and I wound up on Kucinich's website.
And on his website, he proudly lists all these press releases that his office puts out.
And boy, they work hard for Dennis Kucinich because he puts out a lot of press releases.
And I started reading just the head note of the press releases from Kucinich.
And it ties in with this story today about the fact that we have a lack of refineries in this country.
I'm being charitable.
It's more than a lack.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
I'll get into the numbers here in just a minute about how nothing has been done in this country for 29 years.
Let's see, Bush was how old they, because Bush had to be involved with this.
But in any case, there's no refinery built for 29 years in this country.
Despite the fact that Bush and all his oil buddies would like to, we haven't had any new refineries built.
Well, maybe there's a little reason.
And this is why it's so disingenuous for Congress to investigate all of this, because here's Dennis Kucinich, who is one of many congressmen who share the same feelings.
Let me just read to you the headlines from just four of his press releases: Kucinich, no to new oil refineries.
Dennis Kucinich speaking from the floor of the House.
Kucinich, no to oil drilling in Alaska, speaking from the floor of the House.
The reason that he did not want drilling in Alaska was because the working families do not want it in America.
I did not know that.
I kind of do want it, but I guess Dennis Kucinich says American working families do not want it, which I guess means, therefore, if you want it, you must not be a working family.
Dennis Kucinich, no to oil drilling in the Great Lakes.
Dennis Kucinich speaking from the floor of the House.
The reason there is a different reason.
It's not the families that don't want that.
It's because of the fact that they want clean water coming out of the Great Lakes.
Now, I'm no water expert on the Great Lakes, and I know that you find folks in Cleveland.
You've got the Great Lakes right there.
I've heard stories about it.
Have they cleaned it up?
Is it cleaning up?
I'm not sure.
One time, couldn't you walk across Lake Erie at one time?
Wasn't that possible?
In any case, that was the concern is the water, drinking water.
I did not know that Cleveland got their drinking water directly from the lake.
I thought it went through some sort of process before it got into the taps in your homes there in Ohio.
So that's the excuse for no drilling in the Great Lakes.
The working families are okay with it, but the clean water people are not.
And then Kucinich submitting the Gas Price Spike Act of 2005.
Oil companies continue to rake the American consumer over the coals.
The fastest way to bring relief is to bring in a windfall profits tax.
That will give you relief faster than anything else.
So we've got four of them here.
You wonder why we don't have refineries.
No to drilling, no to drilling, no to drilling, and tax the oil companies for their drilling.
And the question you have to ask Dennis Kucinich: where do you want a refinery bill?
Where would one be?
Where would one work for you?
He even says, Where's his nobody wants a refinery in their backyard?
Well, then, where are we?
Do you link any of this, Dennis, with the price of what we've got from the hit from the hurricanes?
That we have a choke point, that we have, what, more than 30% at the peak of the two storms of our capacity to refine oil were shut down because they're all located in the same area.
Oh, and then you can't build any more refineries down in the Houston area because of the fact that the people that will go work there will suffer from the air that comes from the refineries, even though the refineries have spent tens of billions of dollars on clean air modifications to their facilities.
So you can't win.
He doesn't want any more refineries anywhere.
And yet he doesn't want us to import it from you know where.
And he doesn't want, I don't know how he figures out how people are going to be able to get from point A to point B if you don't have any more refineries.
So the Wall Street Journal today says, we wondered when President Bush was going to don a cardigan as he was talking about conservation.
Conservation is good.
And when we get to the gouging is good part, I'll explain to you why that leads to conservation.
But the journal did say today, they said, Mr. Bush got around to the real energy problem, which is the government policy has limited energy production so that a single big storm can deliver a supply shock that sends prices through the roof.
Are you listening, Dennis?
Rita alone shut down 27% of our nation's capacity to refine crude oil into gasoline and heating oil and other products.
Katrina had shut down 10%.
So 27 plus 10, 37% got shut down during that period.
Now they're ramping back up as we speak.
Most of them.
Some of them are damaged and will take a month or two before they're back up.
But listen to this.
Here are the numbers from the journal.
In 1981, there were 325 refineries in this country.
325.
They could produce 18 million barrels a day.
They could process 18 million barrels a day.
Today, there's not 325 refineries.
There's 148 refineries.
And instead of 18 million barrels, they can do 17 million barrels.
So they're doing pretty good because they're almost the same as before with a lot less refineries.
But the problem is the demand for gasoline in this country alone, this doesn't involve demand from China, India, any of the other expanding places.
This is just us.
Our demand for gasoline has increased more than 20%.
Now, you wonder why haven't they invested more?
Well, because you don't get much of a return.
At least in the past, you don't get much of a return, but you'll get more now.
And maybe now you can start building refineries.
But there's a company down in Arizona again, the Arizona Clean Fuels Company out of Yuma.
They've been trying to build a refinery, but they've been working through the permitting process for nearly seven years and still no refinery.
Short break.
I want to get into this refinery business and gouging and the price of gas when we come back.
The phone number to join the program, 800-282-2882.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Program.
Welcome back.
Tom Sullivan in your radio.
Rush is normally here.
He'll be back tomorrow.
But meantime, I am guiding through the golden EIB microphone all the issues regarding your gas tank.
And it doesn't look good.
I mean, it's going to be expensive for a while.
And the reason why it's expensive for a while, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this gets real, real simple.
We are using more, and the refinery is not a new one in 29 years.
And what do you, and so you think the supply, you think this call for conversation for conservation is going to actually lead to a drop in demand long term?
I don't think so.
You've either either get technology to give us some sort of alternative fuel, which I know the Bush administration has increased the spending in that area for research and development in that area by many times what was previously spent on it.
And that's been going on for a number of years.
It isn't something in the wake of the hurricanes.
Or we just continue to get the stuff from over there and be at their mercy.
Dave in Pittsburgh, PA.
Hello, Dave.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
Tom Sullivan, big fan.
Thank you for taking my call, sir.
You bet.
Thank you.
You're welcome, sir.
I was listening to your comments about Mr. Kucinich.
You know what amazes me?
I'm on the road every day.
And instead of letting these energy companies invest their own money and infrastructure to create cheaper natural energy for us via natural gas or gasoline, so basically, I guess when gas gets so high that I can't afford to drive and do my job every day, is he going to give me a gasoline stipend?
And also natural gas for my home heating bills in my house go to $500 and $600 a month.
Am I going to get something from the government to help me cover my gas?
Well, speaking as a spokesman for Dennis Kucinich, yes, you will get, here's what he's going to do for you.
He's going to tax the oil companies on those windfall profits, which was, by the way, that was done before back in the 70s.
And guess what it led to?
Sitting in lines.
It led to a shortage.
It did not lead to anything.
But he's going to tax them.
And then from there, he's going to figure out some way to take that money and put it into the U.S. Treasury.
And oh, yeah, it still doesn't get to you, does it?
Well, Tom, you know what?
I was being facetious on that.
Little did I know that, of course, a liberal would have something to say about letting the government give us more money than letting the companies use their own money to provide energy for us.
Well, where's the solution here?
He's against it.
And I could see if he had the same reason, if there was some reason that he felt passionate about, but he makes them up depending upon what the latest drilling proposal might be.
And yeah, you're right.
I mean, it's just one of those things where you go, have you looked around, Dennis, and what are the people of Ohio?
Oh, my gosh, the people of Cleveland, what are you doing?
I mean, when you go to the pump, think, thank you, Dennis.
Thank you, Dennis.
I mean, that's how bad it is.
It's directly related to people like him that are leading the fight against these refineries.
I was telling you that we used to have 325 refineries 20 years ago, 24 years ago, 25 years ago.
Now there's 148.
Our demand is increased by 20%.
Conservation will bring it down, what?
A couple percent?
Let's be generous and say 5%.
So we're still 15% more than before, and this demand is going to increase.
The average return on investment in the refining industry, 5.5%.
Capital will go to where money can be made.
And if you cannot, If you cannot make more than 5% in the refining business, you're going to put your money into something else.
And one of the reasons for the low return on investment was because of the historically low gas prices that we've had.
And so there wasn't the kind of return that you could get.
Now, I'm working towards this gouging story.
If you give them the opportunity to make more money, they will make more investment in the industry, in the process.
They would love to build more refineries so they could sell more gasoline.
But they won't do it if the return on investment is less than half what the SP industrials make of somewhere around almost 13 percent.
So if you give them the chance to make some sort of return on their investment, they will build more refineries and they will get more supply and they will drill for more oil and they will therefore, and again, this isn't any harder than Economics 101, demand versus supply.
Demand is growing, supply is shrinking.
Prices have to go up.
So I'm not going to say demand is going to go down, but we need if we can increase supply, therefore the equation then switches to the point where if gasoline prices go up, they'll go up slower or possibly flatten out or maybe even come down if you get enough supply going.
But the only way you're going to get enough supply is to give them an incentive to go.
We're back to that word again.
This program is brought to you today by the word incentive.
But if you give them an incentive to go and invest in more drilling and more refinery and more capacity, then you and I will have the ability to buy gasoline not so expensive in the future.
Now, it's not like they haven't spent money.
Refiners have spent $47 billion in just the last 12 years to meet the demands of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response Act, the Compensation and Liability Act.
And there's 14 more new environmental, major environmental programs that are online to kick in between next year and 2012.
14 more.
They've already spent $47 billion.
And so you wonder, why would anybody, why would anybody want to invest in a refinery?
That's where we need to make some changes.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
Welcome back, Tom Sullivan with you.
Just following along with the news out of Washington today that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has been one count of one indictment from a Texas grand jury.
It has to do with campaign contributions in Texas, corporate contributions to a committee that somehow they say goes over to some candidates, and because of that, that's illegal in Texas.
And Tom DeLay has released a statement saying that there's no basis in facts or the law.
It's just another example of Ronnie Earle misusing his office for partisan vendettas.
Ronnie Earle is the attorney general there that has, or the district attorney that is a Democrat, and says it's a purely political investigation.
Well, this, so DeLay has stepped aside as the majority leader, and Speaker Hastert has tapped David Dreyer from California to be the temporary majority leader in the House.
I don't know what this does from a political strategy point of view, but it takes delay out of the chair during the next year, and the elections are just, what, a month and a year away, the midterm elections.
Alex, in Martinez, California, the home of Designer Gasoline Refineries.
Hi, Alex.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Yeah, Tom.
I'm quoting here from the Lundberg letter.
In the early 90s, the profit margin of refineries were about 3%.
Nowadays, in 2005, they are 9%.
Okay?
Yep.
87 refineries were shut down in 1991, 1992, because of the low profitability.
Yeah.
That's not the state facts.
But the return of investment nowadays is 9%.
And 9% still.
And this is from Lundberg because 9% still doesn't meet the average return from the S ⁇ P 500 industrials.
Well, 9%.
It's a good return of investment.
All right?
It's a what?
I'm sorry, you broke up.
It's a good return on investment.
9%.
Yeah, but you've got to compare it to where else money can go.
And the average on the S ⁇ P 500 is 12.7%.
So, I mean, it's good, but it's not as good as someplace else.
And money flows like a magnet to the best return.
But anyway, go on.
Well, nine's fine, but it's better elsewhere.
Not, well, I wouldn't think so.
Regardless, that's so.
I know this is what I do for a living.
I'm an investment person.
I run an investment company.
That's what I do day in and day out.
It's 12.7% is the average return on the S ⁇ P 500 industrials.
Well, maybe over the last 10 years.
That has not taken care of the last four years because the last four years have been way down.
You note that yourself.
No, that's not true.
Where are you getting your numbers?
Well, that's.
You're talking out of a hole in your head.
I'm telling you, Alex, I mean, it's one thing for you to call up and quote from the Lundberg letter, and I believe their numbers, and that's all very interesting, but it still goes to the fact that when you invest in something, first of all, even if you could, even if you could, let's say, all right, I'll accept 9%, even though I can get 12, 13% on average elsewhere.
I'll take my money and invest it in something that doesn't make as much as elsewhere.
But the process to get a refinery built is to the point where no refineries are being built.
I mean, you cannot argue with 29 years.
Why have we not had one stinking refinery built in 29 years?
Well, they were shut down, and that's just that simple.
They were not profitable, period.
Well, there was a period back in the 80s where that was very much true, where we were looking at oil that got down into the low teens.
In fact, if I want to say it got down to $9 or $10 a barrel, and now we're at $65 a barrel.
So now it's profitable, and now instead of shutting in the production, they now have the money to go out and actually dig more wells.
And theoretically, I mean, the idea is they're, you know, greed is good to use that line.
They'll go out and try and try and find some more so they can sell it at some high price to you and me.
I agree.
But conditions have changed considerably in the Middle East.
But where I know that has contributed a lot to higher oil prices as well.
In the meantime, well, I mean, you can point the finger all over the place through the whole supply chain, but in the meantime, we're sitting there going, how do we get new technology?
I heard Ford talking about, the chairman of Ford was talking the other day about the fact that they want to ramp up some more of these hybrid vehicles, but they're talking about a 10-year timeframe.
Nothing's going to take some sort of solution to this fast.
Not even close.
Alex, thanks for the call.
Wanda in Tombstone, Arizona.
Hello, Wanda.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thank you for taking my call, Tom.
I wanted to know what kind of businesses would want to go into Louisiana and that southern Gulf Coast.
If you look at a map, anything below I-10 and I-12 is all lakes and lowland and rivers.
The whole state of Mississippi and Louisiana is crisscrossed with rivers and lakes.
And it's also an area that's constantly hit with hurricanes.
Yeah, and we're in this, as Max Mayfield from the National Hurricane Center says, we're in another cycle of more hurricanes coming.
It's a good question.
In fact, going back to Kathleen Blanco in her testimony before Congress this morning looking for more money for them, she made this statement that I thought was, it raised my eyebrows.
She said, and what we need is we need to get enough funds to be able to rebuild New Orleans so that it can be protected from the ravages of hurricanes.
And I'm thinking, lady, I know that what you're saying, but Mother Nature is, you know, here in California where I'm talking to you from, we spent billions on retrofitting our freeways and highways for earthquakes, and yet they still say over a certain number, they're going to come tumbling down.
And it's the same thing in New Orleans, is that over a certain number, whatever the wind speed is, you're not going to have a man-made project that's big enough or strong enough to be able to withstand the forces of nature.
So we can try.
Actually, I grew up in Seattle, and Seattle is like a number, I don't know, there's a handful of cities like this.
Seattle, back in its early days, burned to the ground.
It was kind of like a Chicago fire thing, but it burned to the ground.
And the harbor was down right on the waterfront.
You can go to Seattle and take a tour of the underground city.
You go down there, and there's old banks and everything else from the 1800s because they built the city on top of the old city.
So I'm sitting there looking at New Orleans and going, does anybody in New Orleans want to take a look at Seattle and say, oh, maybe we can build this thing on top of what was there?
I don't know.
There's some sort of idea, but you're not going to.
Yeah, the question is, will people go there?
The other issue about New Orleans that you've got to always remember, for certain businesses, that is another one of the big choke points of how many things that you and I get at the store that came through the mouth of the Mississippi on a ship.
So transportation and shipping and distribution, that whole area is absolutely, absolutely ripe for it.
Helen in Baton Rouge.
Hello, Helen.
How are you doing?
Hi, how are you?
I'm fine.
Good.
I wanted to call about the comment that Michael Brown made about Louisiana being dysfunctional.
Yeah.
And I want to say that, yes, I'm from Louisiana.
And yes, on many levels, the state is dysfunctional.
And we accept that, not like we like it, but we're aware of it.
And we're dysfunctional in the regard that we have been able to convert our natural resources into wealth, but haven't really done a good job of converting that wealth into an infrastructure, roads, public schools, et cetera.
But on some levels, our state is very functional on some things that are harder to measure.
And you can see it in the way that our cities are functioning after this disaster.
We have a very strong community.
Lots of people on small businesses here.
85% of the people who live in this state were born here.
And they don't stay here just because they cannot evacuate.
They can't afford to evacuate the state.
They're here because of something very strong.
I mean, we're the number two state in the country for people who live here who are actually born here.
Go ahead.
I was going to say that's actually fairly typical.
I remember a study that was done about these small towns that have lumber mills as their only source of employment.
And when the lumber mills shut down, 90% of the people stayed even though there was no further employment.
So people do stay.
Most of us have roots, and you stay in your community.
Right.
And we have a very strong sense of community.
And you can sense it in Baton Rouge, where I am, and in Laskyet, where most of the people I know have families and friends living with them who had to evacuate from either New Orleans or Lake Charles.
Our traffic is gridlocked, but at the same time, you don't hear people honking horns.
I know.
It's a highly I have spent some time in your state and in Baton Rouge.
I've been in many, many times, and it's a lovely, lovely city.
I love Baton Rouge.
I think it's very stately.
But I'll tell you, the part that's bothering me about all of this is that the people of this country, as you can tell from the donations that have been going to all these various charities, the people of this country are reaching out to you and saying, let us help you in any way we possibly can.
Then the problems come up with the politicians, and Louisiana politics is famous for its Louisiana politics.
And we're going, but wait a minute, we don't want to give the money to somebody that's going to be corrupt and take the money and use it for their own benefit.
We want to help you, the people of Louisiana, the people of Mississippi, the people of Texas.
We want to help you.
Our dilemma is how do we do that without being fleeced in the process?
That's the dilemma that I think people are facing, but we wish you well.
Must take a break.
Phone number 800-282-2882.
Tom Sullivan sitting in for Rush.
We're back.
Rush is back tomorrow, Tom Sullivan, for the duration of the program today.
So the problem is this.
You know, Dennis Kucinich just says, no, we're not going to build any new refineries.
But the problem is that the demand for petroleum products, according to Dow Jones, is expected to rise by 1.6 annually for the next 25 years.
That's as far as they're willing to project because they hopefully think that some other technology will come along.
So if our demand for petroleum products goes up by 1.6, and by the way, petroleum products, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's not just the stuff you put in your car.
Take a look around at the, see the carpet you're walking on, see the shirt you might have on, pair of pants you're wearing, the plastic around your house or car.
All of this is made from petroleum.
So petroleum demand is going up, yet our refineries are already operating at 95% of capacity.
So if it's going to continue to rise, the demand, where are we going to get it from?
We're going to have to import it.
And that is going to be costly.
It's going to be very costly.
Tom in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Hello, Tom.
How you doing?
I'm doing fine, sir.
I just wanted your opinion on when's enough enough.
ExxonMobil, they're showing $122 billion profit.
They can build a lot of refineries with $122 billion profit?
Yeah.
Or revenues?
Nah, profit.
Wow.
That's pretty good.
Well, that's just one corporation.
Yeah.
So what are the others doing?
I'll go check those numbers, but it's a lot of money.
So you say, when's enough enough?
The answer is real simple.
When is it enough for you to buy their product?
Well, they've got us over a barrel there.
Why?
Why?
Well, we have to buy their gas.
No, you don't.
Well, what else are we going to do?
Oh, there's plenty of alternatives.
Steam engines?
Buses?
Buses.
Take a bus to work.
How about carpooling?
How about bicycling?
Well, and...
I'm serious.
I'm very serious.
There's a point.
You say, how much is enough?
Enough is when you have reached a point.
There's a perfect example of this that happened to the cereal industry about three years ago.
Cereal industry, they weren't in cahoots.
They were just watching each other.
They decided, ha, we're going to charge more for your breakfast cereal.
And they jacked up the price and they jacked up the price and they jacked up the price.
And guess what happened to cereal?
Sales dropped like a rock.
Guess what happened to the price of cereal?
It came back down again.
The marketplace is the best place.
You're leading me right into, and I don't want to do it before we go back into the top of the hour, but I'll start the next hour, I promise, on this in praise of gouging piece from the Wall Street Journal.
This is totally about driving the price to the point where demand will be reduced.
And that's what happened to cereal, and it can happen to any other product or commodity out there.
And that is what you do.
It's a simple process that you determine.
You determine what it is.
You don't have to buy their product.
Yes, it's in a lot of things.
Like I said, it's in carpet, it's in clothing, it's in plastics, it's in a lot of places.
But in the meantime, there are things that you can do, and I'm not exaggerating.
You might change your lifestyle, but you can change the way that you're living to where you reduce the amount of gasoline that you buy.
Am I suggesting that you're not going to buy any more?
No.
But you can certainly reduce it.
And I think it's not that crazy.
There's places all over the world that get about in transportation totally different than we do.
And yet we are, and you're in South Dakota.
I mean, it's just, I don't know, there's got to be other ways of carpooling and things like that, like the president was talking about, doing less driving, doing anything.
Conservation will make a big dent in demand, and that will make a big dent in price.
We'll be back.
Phone number 800-282-2882.
Tom Sullivan sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Yeah, we have choices in this country.
Nobody makes us buy anything, and we can have a lot of influence, folks.
We have a lot of influence.
And this $3 number, I think, has been a magic number for a lot of people.
They've said, that's it.
I'm making a change.
And that's why demand has been down.
Demand has dropped off the last couple of weeks.
Lundberg survey did last two weeks gasoline price is down 20 cents.
Why?
Don in Poplar Bluff, Missouri.
Hello, Don.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh Road.
Good morning.
Good afternoon.
How you doing?
Good.
Hey, listen, the thing that I keep hearing is, you know, we're stepping back, we're stepping back in production.
We haven't got enough refineries online.
Hey, the simple fact of the matter is we are running out of petroleum.
Now, last, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, in a Springfield, Missouri newspaper, it must have been some kind of wire article or something.
It was talking about the petroleum peak production date as being Thanksgiving this year.
And then some other scientists were saying that they didn't believe that that was actually true.
But it brings up the fact that, you know, we have really got to get serious with alternative fuels in this country.
Now, I drive my car and I like all of that stuff.
And I want to drill wherever we can to get it.
But do you believe that we have a finite amount of oil, or do you believe that it's just going to go on forever?
Well, we're running into capacity of processing it and producing it, but there's more out there.
It's just a matter of letting the relaxation of the rules for people to go get it.
It's there.
But right now, yeah, there's a big demand and a low supply.
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