The Oil Light Just Came On

                 The Oil Light Just Came On

     Most people are happy the price of oil is down even if they don’t understand why.  A couple nights ago as I watched the evening news they were not sure why oil prices were going down.  As I watched the news the glare from an overhead light annoyed me.  Then suddenly a light came on and I thought maybe I had figured it out.  Remember all the energy savings that were supposed to happen by changing to the stupid squiggly light bulbs.  Well maybe as you can no longer buy the old kind of bulbs maybe the energy savings is actually happening.  Humor me and read on. You may accidently learn something that may save you some money. 

     While I personally hate the squiggly bulbs, mainly because they have forced me to change light covers on many of my lights, because of their stupid shape.  I have to admit they may have accomplished what they were meant to accomplish.  The only way I know this is because I am so cheap.  Basically I do crafts and have a lot of paint and stains which are very expensive and will be damaged by freezing.  In winter I am only in my shop a couple hours a day, a couple days out of the week.  Heating the whole shop would be an exorbitant waste of money and energy. Practical as I am I dreamed up a solution. I found an old freezer drilled a hole in the side and ran a wire inside the freezer and rigged up a light fixture.  I put all the stains in the freezer, a 100 Watt light bulb and a thermometer. I quickly found 100 Watts gave off to much heat. A 60 Watt bulb would keep the inside of the freezer at 50 degrees even at -10 degrees.  On warm days the temperature would get up to about 100 degrees which was acceptable. As the only thing running in my shop in the winter was that bulb I learned a 60 Watt bulb costs about $6 or $7 a month to run.  The 100 Watt bulb cost about $10 to $12 a month to run.  I have already established that the squiggly bulbs do not give off as much heat, which means they would save you money on air conditioning, but that is not what this is about.  It is about saving my stains and paint.  I have not yet figured out what size or how many bulbs I will have to use to save my paint, but I am sure it can be done.

     Getting back on track the news announced last night that the oil prices are down because the Arabs are flooding the market with cheap oil.  I am not a rocket scientist but I am sure they got used to having all that money when oil was over a $100 a barrel.  My conclusion is that to maintain their income they decided to sell twice as much. If they were making $60 a barrel profit, or about 60% of the total price.  Then at $50 a barrel they need to sell twice as much to maintain that income.  Doing that would force other producers who do not have the capacity to produce more to lose money.  That is why Russia is suddenly in a financial crisis. 

     There is one thing the Arabs have not figured out. Cutting supplies would raise prices and preserve their oil.  They are acting like they have an infinite amount of oil.  In reality there is only a finite amount of oil and sooner or later the world is going to run out.  What are they going to do when their wells start sucking sand? They are going to be up the proverbial creek without a paddle and without the water to paddle it they had one.

     I am happy about all this, because I see that saving energy may help us get even with those who sponsored the terrorists who performed the 9/11 attacks and are still sponsoring all the groups who perform the acts of terrorism in the Middle East.  The only question to me is how long will it take?  The terrorists sooner or later will bite the hand that feeds them.  Not soon enough, but it is going to happen. Just as the Afghans bit the hand of those that helped defeat Russia.  What goes around comes around and sooner or later Saudi Arabia will get their just reward.

     So America, put up those wind towers, those solar panels and screw in the those squiggly light bulbs and sooner or later we may see the Middle East implode as they all kill themselves off.  What a great day that will be.