The subtext is: these companies are doing well, and that's a bad thing. How do you think that effects their desire to bring down costs for consumers?

And also: yeah, their profits are up, because due to the actions of the administration people are uncertain about their ability to buy this stuff in the future, and the futures cost goes up.

Watch the end of this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tOQ5AaFJdU

The question is: do you think this will accelerate us towards a a green energy future.

Her answer: yes, and that's a good thing for the following reasons.

BTW, a green energy future is one where these oil companies are out of business. The energy secretary is saying that she wants these companies to accelerate their own demise at a decreased profit, and how there eventual disappearance is a good thing.

Yeah, gas prices are up. No kidding.

it was a mistake to focus on attacking o&g when alternatives still aint ready yet.

Companies with heavy capital investment will see huge gains in % profit as their debt obligations are inflated away.

For better or worse, we don't live in anything resembling a command economy.

This is not a value judgment as to whether this is right or wrong.

Essentially correct. Presidents have very little control over this.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/24/biden-administration-pausing...

We could drill our away out of this problem, but we are not, because the the biden administration is being held hostage by the progressive left. And before you start calling me a republican, im not one, but this is just a really stupid idea because it's decisions like this that will cause republicans to be elected in 2022 and 2024 - the american public isnt going to take higher gas prices for the team to fight climate change at this point, they are going to vote people into office that will lower them. biden doesnt realize this because he is surrounded by people that think a like and are too rich to be unaffected by inflation, or he doesnt care -- either way, it s a bad position

> Now, you could be excused for asking yourself: “Wait a second, I thought the U.S. had a bunch of oil in the Permian Basin in Texas and the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. Why the heck are we importing oil?” Turns out the answer is part chemistry and part economics.

> ...

> That’s because they take longer to process and need specialized refining equipment. This cheap, lower-quality crude comes from Canada, Venezuela and Russia, among other spots. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was the product U.S. refiners were buying.

> “A lot of refineries, especially in the Gulf Coast, made a very expensive bet to invest in this equipment that would allow them to save money on input costs by processing, you know, lower-quality crude,” said Richard Sweeney, an assistant professor of economics at Boston College.

---

We can't drill our way out of this because we can't refine the oil that we produce.

Here's another article from 2019 - https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/the-great-oil-p...

> Refiners who invested billions to turn a profit from processing cheap low-quality crude are paying unheard of premiums to find the heavy-sour grades they need. The mismatch is better news for such OPEC producers as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, who don’t produce much light-sweet, but pump plenty of the dirtier stuff.

Saying this doesn't make it true.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-452931879750

> The U.S. was producing 11.185 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2021, compared with an average of 11.283 million barrels per day in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The latest data shows that for the week of March 4, 2022, the U.S. is producing 11.6 million barrels per day.

> While there was a dip in oil production in February 2021 due to winter storms in Texas, said Mark Finley, a fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University in Houston, the U.S. remains the world’s biggest producer of crude oil.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-science-enviro...

> Approvals for companies to drill for oil and gas on U.S. public lands are on pace this year to reach their highest level since George W. Bush was president, underscoring President Joe Biden’s reluctance to more forcefully curb petroleum production in the face of industry and Republican resistance.

As a deliberate political choice by the Saudis.

https://theintercept.com/2022/02/15/saudi-arabia-gas-price-o...

Also if the president has no effect on gas prices why was ours groveling at the feet of the Saudi Prince?

Because they're the people who can have an effect?

If Biden could tweak gas prices, he wouldn't have to do that.

I personally don't think mandating all actors to altruistically abstain from transacting at market price would be a sound policy, but that seems to be what liberals want.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...

> The biggest spender, Johnson & Johnson, shelled out $17.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2013, compared with $8.2 billion for R&D. In the top 10, only Roche spent more on R&D than on sales and marketing.

They are similar but different.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-vaccin...

[0] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=49344#

I was able to find some incomplete data that suggests the US is pretty good on the metric of wait time, compared to many European countries and Canada:

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index....

My short-version argument would be—and I'm a little annoyed at having to explain this, because I've been explaining it to people on the Internet for 20 damn years, it's so not-hard to find this info that it's kinda difficult not to have been exposed to it, and it seems like it should be common knowledge at this point and like some folks are going way out of their way not to understand it—that the "good effect" is precisely that the US spends 50-100% more than any of these countries, per capita, and does not smoke the rest on practically every metric, instead doing a little better in some areas, a little worse in others, middle-of-the pack on others still. It sure as hell looks like we're paying a huge premium for similar outcomes, which also explains why there aren't a lot of people in other countries begging their governments to adopt a system like ours (a fact one has to explain when cherry-picking metrics to make the US look good—OK, so why aren't others rushing to copy us? At least some of them should be, if we actually do have an unambiguously better system).

The "good effect" is that other health care systems spend far less, and also don't bankrupt people over medical bills, while achieving roughly comparable results.

If I came to you and told you I had a process to produce a Tesla knock-off that produced a car a little better in some ways, a little worse in others, but pretty damn comparable, at 50-70% of what it costs Tesla to produce a car, and then showed you dozens of factories I'd already built that were demonstrably doing exactly that, you wouldn't ask me how I was defining "good effect" when I used that to describe the results of the One Weird Trick of my process. It's obvious.

Were you not aware of the vast differences in costs & accessibility between OECD healthcare systems? By which I mostly mean between the US and everyone else.

I'm a median to upper-middle American, and I get great value from my healthcare. It's not obvious to me that a system that raises the experience for mean, or even the bottom end, of the distribution would be a good thing for me in many respects: emergency wait time, access to top percentile specialists, out of pocket costs, just to name a few. It also seems to me that you neglect to factor in that people of means, the world over, come to the US to access care from world leading treatments in many conditions. So they might not want American care in their country, but plenty surely want it for their own bodies.

Put simply: your "good effect" often smuggles in assumptions about which part of the curve to treat, and implicitly undervalues degradation of the status quo for others. You, as is the habit of liberals, would like to have a debate wherein your moral values about who deserves what and who should be deprived, is taken for granted. I'm sorry, it's not immediately obvious to me that a system where 10,000 people wait 6-12 months for lifesaving operations is better than one where 1,000 people can get the operation in a month and the other 9,000 might have to go into debt to do the same.

Ah—I usually assume the Rawlsian "Veil of Ignorance" POV when it comes public policy issues, personally, as I think is fairly common. Sure, if that's your perspective, literally nothing matters except how a policy affects you, personally, right now, so my analysis may not hold—but that's not an especially useful perspective from which to consider public policy when discussing it with strangers, and I'm not really sure why you'd even engage on this in public if the only thing you care about is whether a policy is good for you, right this second (circumstances are subject to change, after all)

At least you're up-front about it, rather than hiding it. I don't mind that when it's made explicit—I just also, again, don't get why you'd engage, and wonder whether you might have guessed in advance the sort of more-typical POV I was taking, so really could have understood what I meant by "good effect" without my needing to explain it. What were you trying to accomplish here?

So why would I engage? Because you seem to be advocating policies that would directly (and potentially negatively) affect my health outcomes, and your justification is "but you're just a statistic".

> The net profit margin of S&P 500 companies, which include energy giants such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil, in the first quarter has been running at 12.3% based on estimates and earnings reported so far, according to FactSet. That’s down from a peak of 13.1% in the second quarter of last year, but above the pre-COVID-19 level of about 11%.

As with food, they've realized the public will pay higher margins than they previously thought they could get away with.

Ding Ding Ding!

The relevant question is why isn't there competition to drive the market price down.

If it appears that there is a monopoly or oligopoly extracting value from it's market position, the solution is diversification, not profit controls.

Profit controls just drive prices higher as companies strive to inflate their COGs