Romney and oil

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Mitt Romney says he wants to ramp up drilling and domestic oil production to wean America off foreign oil and lower prices ("Romney energy plan: Let states control drilling on federal land," Tribune, Aug. 24).

Hard to see how this is going to work, given market realities. Currently, domestically produced oil is priced and sold on the global market and is the property of the drillers, not the U.S. people.

U.S. oil production is one-tenth of the world market, so even a 50 percent increase in production (5 percent of the global total) won't give us power to set global prices, and increasing global demand will continue to push up prices.

So unless we commandeer national production for only American use, nothing will change. The United States will remain an also-ran in oil production — "our" oil will be swallowed by exploding global demand, and we will have only marginal influence on global prices

Romney knows these market realties, so he is (a) comfortable with the falsehood, counting on our ignorance, or (b) he is a closet socialist with a plan to withdraw from the global energy market and nationalize our oil production.

John Griswold

Salt Lake City