Warren Buffett talks oil
Forget windfall taxesWarren Buffet, an open advocate for Barrack Obama, is on CNBC as I write this post. Thus far, he has stated that today's oil prices are driven by supply and demand, not speculation. He said for everyone speculating that oil prices will go higher, another is speculating that they will go lower. Additionally, he called windfall profit taxes on oil companies a very bad idea. He claimed if you tax oil companies for windfall profits, then you should tax corn, copper and steel producers, for example, for windfall profits as well.
On a final, unrelated note, Buffett claimed the tax code needs to be reworked and that the super rich need to be taxed far more and everyone else, far less.
Labels: Foreign Oil Dependency, gas prices
posted by Dahcredyns at
9:08 AM
14 Comments:
I agree that the Corn mafia should be taxed. Corn is in everything we eat (HCFS is definitely killing us), and it will possibly find its way into what we drive too. When do we get to put the breaks on the big corn machine?
i'm not sure the corn mafia will be slowed any time soon, unfortunately. while there is growing bipartisan dissent on corn, there is still bipartisan support for corn, especially with the prospects of cellulosic ethanol becoming brighter.
i think biofuels offer potential, but I'd love to see something like hemp completely displace corn when it comes to auto fuel. too bad its illegal to grow a cellulosic material, like hemp, which requires no feritlizers, pesticides, and often, no irrigation, because it looks like marijuana.
Growing anything to put in the tank is a bad idea. Why leech the soil of its nutrients and waste our fresh water to pollute more?
Warren Buffet is right and he'd disagree with you on biofuels.
from what i've read hemp was used in the past, when it was legal, in crop rotation because it can help refertilize the ground while removing some contaminants and other pests.
likewise, i largely buy only hemp clothes, or at least hemp/cotton mixes. every bit of hemp that i've bought has been grown without pesticides, fertilizers and NO irrigation.
more important, hemp grows naturally, like a weed, in a wide variety of climates and some strains reach maturity in just a couple of months so you wouln't have to destroy forests or use top agricultural land, which is why states like North Dakota have lobbied the government to enable hemp cultivation in the US.
ultimately, if biofuels are going to be a part of US energy policy, which has already been written into law, then we should at least use the best crops for the purpose.
Dahc,
Your reasoning on hemp is appealing, but I have three main concerns with it.
1) the net energy gain is still very low for bio-fuels because of the amount of fuel consumed in producing and refining it
2) many crops CAN be grown without pesticides and irrigation, but once they become large-scale for profitability, that usually changes
3) it still avoids the reality of energy consumption (much like methadone being a poor solution for heroin addiction)
kp-
those are good points. i'm not really advocating for biofuels, just that if biofuels are part of the mix, i think there are better feedstocks.
still, i think cellulosic ethanol should be explored, but i don't believe that cellulosic ethanol is an excuse to keep increasing corn production for auto fuel.
Here's something Buffet recently said on ethanol:
Buffet spoke a bit about sustainable energy, and said he not think that ethanol was the panacea to the nation’s energy plans.
“My gut reaction just from listening to everything is that it is not. That doesn’t mean that other bio fuels might not be of interest, but I have not been impressed with the case for ethanol,” Buffett said. He added that he was not a supporter of tax-free gas this summer.
“I don’t think it makes sense to take off the gas tax for a certain period during the summer. We probably should have been taxing gas more over the years… The idea that you take a gas tax away for three months doesn’t make much sense to me.”
http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/finance/warren-buffett-consider---billion-deal/
I especially like his take on the gas tax.
It would be great to have links to the interesting stories you write about. Or am I just missing the links somehow?
Thanks!
just to be clear, I meant links to the interesting articles you write about...
Some of the stories are from live TV and it takes a few hours for CNBC to index these into viewable videos. Sometimes I go back and add links to the segments, but not always, as I'm usually caught up in something else by the time they are live. You can go to CNBC.com and look for the TV segments, which are indexed pretty clearly so you can watch what I was watching.
Anytime, I mention CNBC, I'm usually writing it as CNBC is reporting it.
Say what you will about Bill Clinton (and I am not a raving fan of Billy or Hillary), the cynicism and buddy-building infesting the current gang of thieves did not drive his administration--nor were they ever under consideration . Any incumbent will make some unfortunate decisions, but we hired her or him to make our decisions, both the easy and hard ones.
These currently-in-charge malfeasants, nonfeasants and misfeasants know exactly what they are doing to rape our nation. If they have one regret, it is that they have so little time left to do it up right. Even at that, they probably have a self-enriching contingency plan for every possible circumstance facing them when they "leave" office. Warren is dead on, but the gang doesn't care because they don't need either his approval or a license to steal.
will,
i don't necessarily disagree, but i see little difference between the Republicans and Democrats - at least as Parties.
Over 90 percent of this country's wealth is owned by less than 10 percent of the population. The top 1 percent own a significant percent of that 90 percent.
That statistic can largely scale from America, to the world. It's organizational dynamics based upon our animalistic instincts.
Democrats can talk a better game, create a few more socially-addictive, but ineffective, programs than save-your-own-ass-and-make-money-along-the-way Republicans, but, in the end, both have been bent over by the lobbyists and ultra-rich people that fund their campaigns.
after kp challenged me on this post, i've been in a hemp mood. so i've done a little hemp research. i've googled hemp as a biofuel a number of ways and i came across this blog post tied to UK's guardian that is recent and interesting.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/2008/01/why_is_hemp_off_the_biofuel_me.html
From these comments it is clear that Warren Buffett has money invested in the oil business....
David,
I don't know about that. Buffett isn't a trader, he's a long term value investor.
Obviously, traders are speculating, its the nature of futures markets. Will Israel attack Iran? How much will oil consumption increase in China in the next few years. Will a hurricane temporarily knock out Gulf of Mexico production. Those are the issues traders are speculating upon and how those condidtions will affect the price of oil.
I saw a guy on CNBC this morning talking about US demand deterioration and how that won't reduce gas prices much because for every driver in the US that reduces demand, there are 10 drivers in China, etc. ready to more than make up that demand.
They are building roads in India and China as fast as possible and there are billions of Chinese and Indian consumers chomping at the bit to buy their first car.
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