Editing 79-08-A2 (section)

= Oil =

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=== Transcript ===
During the Arab oil boycott in 1973-74 the lines at the oil stations were long
and tempers were short. We've had a rerun of that situation here in California
and maybe before the summer is over it will happen in other states as well.

Summer is a time of heavy driving, but it's also a time when refineries are
building up a reservoir of heating oil for the winter that follows. At the moment
they are behind schedule in that department. If rumors were crude oil, we'd have no
problems.

Everyone seems to be looking for someone to blame. But where to begin. Well,
there is the federal allocation system. The Arabs and Iran have all reduced the
amount of oil they are pumping so our government has reduced each state's allotment
to a percentage of what they were getting last year.

In doing that they overlooked something. Some states have fewer people and hence
fewer cars than they had last year. And some states, like California for instance,
have hundreds of thousands of new citizens and tens of thousands of additional
automobiles. That's why business seems normal in other states while motorists spend
four hours in line out here waiting to buy gas.

Then there is a refinery shortage due to environmental regulations. There is
the case reported by UPI a short time back; Jack Evans applied for permission to
build a refinery in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1969. It is now 1979 -- 10 years and
seven million dollars later. The money went for environmental impact statements
and legal fees. He still doesn't have permission to build the refinery.

Then there is the increasing demand for unleaded gas as more and more cars
are equipped with smog control devices -- federally mandated. It takes more oil
to produce unleaded gas. And the unleaded gas doesn't give as many miles per
gallon. And incidentally, unleaded refinery capacity has not been allowed to grow
to meet demand. Ask Jack Evans.

It's easy to look at the big oil companies and blame them, but can we be sure
we'd have the right target? I know their profit picture has been improving; still
when you buy a gallon of gas the federal government gets 10 times as much from your
dollar as does the oil company and the OPEC countries get 17 times as much.

Now the environmental Protection Agency has dreamed up some new regulations.
They will take a lot of oil industry money that might better be spent exploring for
new oil. Drilling mud, oil production brines and crude oil residue are to be
classified by E.P.A. as "hazardous waste". Total cost of that decision would come
to about $6 billion more than our entire bill for imported oil -- somewhere around
$45 billion a year.

One thing does seem very clear -- if we could produce more domestic oil and
thus reduce our dependency on Arab oil we might find that Arab oil suddenly had
a lower price. We'd also find the lines (of cars) had disappeared from around
our gas stations. 

This is Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.
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=== Details ===
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<TR><TD WIDTH="150">Batch Number</TD><TD WIDTH="150">{{PAGENAME}}</TD></TR>
<TD>Production Date</TD><TD>05/29/[[Radio1979|1979]]</TD></TR>
<TD>Book/Page</TD><TD>[[Radio_Commentary_Books#Reagan.27s_Path_to_Victory|RPtV-445]]</TD></TR>
<TD>Audio</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TD>Youtube?</TD><TD>No</TD></TR>
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===Added Notes===

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