This Saturday the Navy will commission the aircraft carrier CVN-77, to be named the USS George H.W. Bush. They seem in a hurry to burnish the reputation of the elder Bush while his son is still in office.
In essence the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, rather than being our oil safety valve, has become a welfare program for the oil industry and one of the nation's most outrageous boondoggles.
Are we destined to soon be crushed by the dual hammer of Peak Oil and Global Warming, crippling our civilization forever?
As Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir boasted, "Just when some countries gave us sanctions, God gave us oil." It's expensive to wage genocide.
The Saudis are increasingly turning to Russia and China as their new oil and gas partners, dumping longstanding relationships with once-favored American oil companies.
Deepak Chopra went on CNN Wednesday night to give his take on the Mumbai attacks and how to prevent similar attacks in the future, but producers cut Chopra off when he started to get too controversial.
Clearly something is afoot in the attempt to quash any and all discussion of the "Abiotic Oil Theory."
Are oil interests now Iraq's fourth stakeholder group, and wasn't that always the objective? Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan certainly thinks so.
Love her or hate her, you have to admit that John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin for the Republican ticket this year was without any doubt the boldest political tactic of the year.
Supply and demand is one factor in determining price, but another factor used to be called "competition." Again, I'm not an economist, but I'm pretty sure that was supposed to drive prices down.
As the American dollar declines and bombs drop on Gaza, the likeliness of regional countries becoming drawn into the conflict are mounting.
The Obama camp's explanation as to why the windfall profits tax has been dropped is inconsistent with the facts and the actual series of events.
This is easily the best energy plan ever put forward by a nominee of either party. By comparison, the plan of John "Nothing but Nukes" McCain plan is a joke.
By now you have no doubt read a dozen reviews of 2008 and projections for 2009, all pure guesses for the latter, unless someone was carefully predicti...
After suffering serious losses during the 2006 summer war with Israel, Hezbollah reportedly increased its weapons arsenal three-fold, though they should have disarmed.
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The boom and bust cycles of the oil industry are no different from the cycles in the rest of the economy. What we really need to do is smooth out the recession/expansion swings in the economy. We can help this along by adopting a few rules.
1. When the economy is in recession and we need a tax cut to give it a boost, don't give the tax cuts to those in the upper income bracket where it won't be spent to boost production but will only be used to consolidate the hold those in the upper brackets have on ownership of property in this country.
2. Make the tax cuts temporary, lasting only until the economy has been boosted, not spread out over a ten year period.
3. Don't funnel a further $1.3 trillion in tax cuts to those in upper income brackets after the economy is already expanding.
4. Don't start wars that drain $3 trillion from our economy.
5. Don't deregulate banks.
and finally,
6. Just in case you have a president who insists on breaking all of the above rules, appoint a Fed Chairman who will keep interest rates too low for too long so inflation is created and rates eventually have to be ratcheted up, bringing the economy to a halt and causing the offending president to leave office in disgrace.
What you say about oil is an unnecessary exercise. Oil is the problem period. Renewable energy is the solution. I have just turned everything you just wrote into garbage.
Renewables are PART of the solution. Renewables cannot replace cheap oil at the levels at which we use it.
The rest of the solution is learning to live by lowering energy consumption. Oil is an amazing commodity, providing so much energy per barrel that it is impossible to duplicate on any large level.
Any recovery is going to be kil-led in the cradle by the simple fact that oil production has peaked. We are on the downhill side of production. The drop in demand has softened the catastrophe that is coming, and postponed it for awhile. But it is coming, and there is no solution to it, other than learning to live without cheap oil.
Oil discovery peaked in the 1960s; all the big fields have been discovered. There is no way out through drilling.
The party is, indeed, over. Most Americans are too drunk on cheap oil to have noticed.
Why peak oil is supposed to be a catastrophe is beyond me. US consumers just reduced their oil demand by almost 10% and nothing bad happened. Most people can easily double their mileage by switching from their current car to a hybrid. Many could triple or quadruple it by sharing a ride.
The problem here is not that we need this much oil (or even any oil at all). The problem is that we have gotten used to having it for cheap and now we thing the sky is falling because that has changed. We will adjust with no ill effects. Just lean back and enjoy the ride.
:-)
I doubt most people can afford to switch to hybrids: they're new and expensive . There aren't enough hybrids anyway, nor are there likely to be in the near future. Even Toyota is cutting back production.
The peak oil problem is this: once you reach the peak of production (which we did, likely in 2006), half the oil is GONE. The other half is hard to reach and more expensive to extract. Tie this to INCREASING demand and you have a cluster f++k). Reducing demand will postpone the crisis for a while -- and the more reductions the better -- but when things pick up (if they ever pick up), then demand will rise and with it the price of oil will go through the roof. There will always be some oil, it will be prohibitively expensive for most people.
There are many ways to reduce consumption, of course, and they should be used, but the problem goes way beyond cars. Cheap oil is in just about everything you touch during the day. Agribusiness cannot exist without cheap oil. That is, cheap food cannot be grown (fertilizers and pesticides are, for the most part, petroleum products), cannot be harvested by farm equipment, and cannot be shipped to market. Big pharma cannot exist without cheap oil. Walmart cannot exist without cheap oil (so maybe there is a silver lining). Etc. etc.
I hope you are right about adjusting with no ill effects, but I know you are wrong.
Please tell me if the price of oil is really based on supply and demand then why did oil drop like a hot knife through butter once the banking fiasco began which happened within a weeks time. Your're telling me people stoped driving and flying that week????
Why don't we be a bit more honest here and admit that the price of oil has more to do with speculation then supply and demand.
The price of oil has everything to do with supply and demand. Gross speculation serves to agitate only. The price of oil was drastically changed during the last 6 months by a mutual convergence of factors. The banking crisis and subsequent credit crunch were not least of these. I'm not sure the weeks the market as a whole dropped precipitously are an honest period for either argument pro/con reference supply/demand v. speculation.
It woud seem that if the recent swings in the price of oil were truly a supply and demand dynamic, then it would be a pretty direct correlation: 50 percent increase in demand would lead to a 50 percent increase in price. So far I've seen no credible evidence that that has occurred. Has anyone?
Wrong! Supply curves slopes are not necessarily unity or linear.
Much of this talk about the need for high oil prices seems untrue because as recently as 2001 $30/barrel was considered too high. Prices were driven up by 9/11, the Iraq war, Iran tensions, pipeline bombings and other things related to the unrest in the middle east.
Then prices were driven up further by investors (speculators) taking crazy long positions as they thought the price of oil only goes up and up. I don't see it as true short supply, like the author says:
"most "easy oil" reservoirs have now been exhausted, which means that virtually all remaining global reserves are going to be of the "tough oil" variety"
Some people consider the price of everything too high at all times. That doesn't mean it is. One barrel of oil replaces the (back-breaking) physical labor of a single man for a whole year. If you think that $30 or even $200 is too much to pay for that, your middle name might as well be "Scrooge".
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