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JonSCKs
Posted 11/29/2018 03:10 (#7135078 - in reply to #7135074)
Subject: $81 Billion per Year spent on US Military defending Crude Oil life lines.


We now have a dollar value for one of oil’s biggest subsidies

Defending the oil supply costs a lot of money.

( https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/9/21/17885832/oil-subsidies-military-protection-supplies-safe )

One of the pretenses of right-wing energy policy is that conservatives support a “level playing field,” upon which energy sources can compete without subsidies. Let the market decide!

As I have written many times, this is a juvenile notion. Markets are powerful tools for directing private capital and innovation, useful in the right circumstances. But the idea that there ever has been, or ever can be, an open, unbiased, “free” market for energy sources is a fantasy that should stay in the college library with the Ayn Rand novels. It is analytically inert; it does nothing to illuminate whether current markets are working or help us decide how best to use markets to serve our greater goals.

...
This week brought an excellent example, in the form of a new paper from Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), a clean-energy advocacy group composed of retired military and business leaders. It attempts to put a number on one of the great, neglected implicit subsidies for oil: the costs to the US military of defending oil supplies, everything from guarding shipping lanes to maintaining troop commitments in key oil-producing nations.

The number, it turns out, is high: $81 billion a year at the low end, which is almost certainly conservative.

But is that a subsidy for oil? It is certainly one way oil dependence has shaped the country, its history, and its institutions — one of countless ways — but does putting a dollar figure on it and calling it a “market distortion” clarify anything or convince anyone?

We will ponder those questions in a moment, but first, a quick look at the study.

The US military spends a minimum of $81 billion a year protecting oil supplies

Given that almost any military procurement or deployment has multiple, overlapping objectives, it is obviously difficult to pick out exactly which ones are devoted to protecting oil supplies. Consequently, the methodology for a study like this is going to be full of assumptions and judgment calls. But SAFE did its best to stay reasonably conservative.

Its research surveyed the literature on the costs of defending oil supplies, eliminated some of the extreme estimates on the high and low ends, settled on six core studies, and then updated the numbers in those studies based on current DOD costs. The idea was to get at least a rough sense of how much the US military currently spends guarding oil.

That’s how SAFE developed the $81-billion-a-year estimate, which represents 16 percent of DOD’s base annual budget. “Spread out over the 19.8 million barrels of oil consumed daily in the U.S. in 2017,” SAFE writes, “the implicit subsidy for all petroleum consumers is approximately $11.25 per barrel of crude oil, or $0.28 per gallon of transportation fuel.

That’s a lot! But it’s almost certainly too low.



mission accomplished aircraft carrier

And I supported President Bush's War.. but I don't EVER want to do THAT again!!

Heck let's keep our kids here at home.. drilling for Oil.. Fracking.. or Working in Agriculture and YES Ethanol plants.. vs serving our Military in some God forsaken Sand blown upside down Country in the Middle East so the likes of Big Oil can sell us Petroleum.

That was Stupid.



Edited by JonSCKs 11/29/2018 03:12
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