The Good News About the Drone Strikes

The bad news: half of Saudi Arabia's refining capacity was wiped out by a drone strike. (Just how bad the news might be depends in part on details about the drones and I have not looked at, if they are known or available at all.) The good news: Fracking in the US has made what would have once been a major international crisis, requiring a large and immediate military response into a bump in the road:

Oil Shale (Image from the U.S. Department of Energy, via Wikipedia, public domain.)

A bump in oil prices, instead of creating a global fuel crisis that descends into economic depression, is more likely to prompt energy companies to produce more oil in Texas. A sustained rise in oil markets by a few dollars a barrel could mean it's suddenly profitable to drill more wells in certain fields or re-frack wells that are petering out. Most producers have these plans ready -- they hire smart people to do hard math on the best way to make money at various oil price levels. Producers would just need to get the rigs and fracking equipment rolling. (And in some cases, get more investment money flowing.)

Remember this the next time you hear some politician talking about restricting or banning this life-giving and life-saving new technology.

-- CAV