I know there& #39;s a lot of other stuff going on, but surprised not to see more commentary about how weird it is for the U.S. president to be trying to organize an oil cartel 1/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-10/mexico-reaches-oil-output-cuts-agreement-with-opec-and-trump?srnd=premium&sref=qzusa8bC">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...
Among other things, we are still a slight net importer of petroleum products, so higher oil prices, other things equal, hurt US real income 2/ https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS22204.pdf">https://fas.org/sgp/crs/m...
What is true is that energy accounts for a surprisingly large share of business investment, so talking up oil prices is in a weird way a kind of Keynesian stimulus. But I thought Republicans don& #39;t believe in that? 3/
Also, fracking appears to be a huge, debt-fueled bubble, and attempts to avoid a reckoning are probably doomed to failure 4/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/opinion/coronavirus-texas-fracking-layoffs.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/1...
Of course, it might be relevant to look at political contributions by the oil and gas industry 5/ https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/totals.php?cycle=2020&ind=E01">https://www.opensecrets.org/industrie...
My sense is that there& #39;s also a sort of ideological thing: conservatives love to talk about the wonders of fracking, and still think of renewables as hippie stuff even though they& #39;re now a huge sector 6/
Anyway, amid everything else it& #39;s hard to focus. But Trumpian favoritism on fossil fuels is quite something 7/