The Oil Drum: Europe

Bush, Harper, Fukada, Brown, Merkel, Sarkozy and Berlusconi. The leaders of the G7 (+Russia) will meet this week in Japan. Their collective failure to reduce demand for oil, natural gas and coal within their respective economies is one of the main reasons energy prices are spiraling upwards out of control.

Here's your president talking about contemporary energy matters (original video link).

and we can't embed CNN's video player, so you'll have to go over there and watch Kunstler's well-done piece on Glenn Beck if you haven't seen it already:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2008/05/14/beck.life.oil.cnn?iref=videosearch

And, yes, under the fold, if you can believe it, yes, that's your president doing his best Dr. Evil (from Austin Powers) impression. No, I am not kidding.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/peak/oil/prweb635891.htm

We would appreciate your spreading this around to interested parties. Thanks much!

Last night, on ABC's Nightline, Terry Moran interviewed President Bush in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during his trip to the Middle East. When discussing what President Bush might say to the King of Saudi Arabia to lower oil prices, George Bush said:

If they don't have a lot of additional oil to put on the market, it is hard to ask somebody to do something they may not be able to do.

If Saudi Arabia doesn't have a much additional oil to put on the market, the veracity of what Saudi Arabia has been saying about extra capacity is brought into question. More importantly, it starts raising questions about Saudi Arabia's true long-term oil production capability. Can Saudi Arabia really ramp up oil production in the future? Are the high reserves posted by Saudi Arabia and other Middle-Eastern countries really indicative of high future production capability?

The interview with George W. Bush can be seen at this link. The above quote is about 1:55 into the interview.

This is a link to a Press Release we did with respect to this story. Feel free to link to it in your Blogs.

Check out John Robb's latest, The Changing Face of War: Into the 5th Generation (5GW)...

...and from Alternet:

Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as "the prize."

Discuss.

There was an interesting juxtaposition today in that, when the President was asked about energy, the exchange went (from the transcript).

Q Thanks. Mr. President, what do you say to people who are losing patience with gas prices at $3 a gallon? And how much of a political price do you think you're paying for that right now?

THE PRESIDENT: I've been talking about gas prices ever since they got high, starting with this -- look, I understand gas prices are like a hidden tax. Not a hidden tax, it's a tax -- it's taking money out of people's pockets. I know that. All the more reason for us to diversify away from crude oil. That's not going to happen overnight. We passed law that encouraged consumption through different purchasing habits, like hybrid vehicles

-- you buy a hybrid, you get a tax credit. We've encouraged the spread of ethanol as an alternative to crude oil. We have asked for Congress to pass regulatory relief so we can build more refineries to increase the supply of gasoline, hopefully taking the pressure off of price.

And so the strategy is to recognize that dependency upon crude oil is -- in a global market affects us economically here at home, and therefore, we need to diversify away as quickly as possible.

The response seems to feed to the Saudi position that they have plenty of oil, if only we users would provide the refineries that could use it.

At the same time Darwinian and Totoneila draw attention to the strange case of the Shrinking Refinery. Apparently the BP Refinery at Texas City, which pre-hurricanes had a capacity of 460,000 bd, will no longer produce at more than 300,000 bd.

I found a very interesting poll by Pew yesterday, (hat tip: Payton Chung over at Gristmill) that I thought I should bring you.

Pew was doing a piece on the impacts of An Inconvenient Truth on the global warming attitudes--a major focus of the poll, but there's some things to chew on in there regarding energy policy attitudes as well. I discuss some of the findings and implications under the fold.

Barack Obama today accused President Bush of a "stubborn refusal" to attack the causes of climate change, and said tougher fuel standards, stricter curbs on oil imports and more investment in cleaner energy are essential to avert global catastrophe.

WaPo article can be found here. (This continues a theme of his we've discussed a few times here at TOD).

James Wolcott of Vanity Fair fame has a provocative piece today that begins by looking at the Richard Rainwater piece in Fortune (which, initially had a kind mention of TOD) and ends up discussing Rich Heinberg's case for impeaching the president because of dereliction of duty with regard to "ignoring the very real threat posed by Peak Oil."  The integration of the two lines of logic is an interesting polemic.

I've been meaning to write a post about Bush's choice of words for a week now, but of course everyone has beaten me to it. Today, Dave Roberts of Gristmill has an insightful take on the issue:

When Bush talks about "addiction," the subtext is always his own carefully constructed personal narrative: The youthful alcohol problems and the redeeming power of Jesus and the love of a good woman. In Bush's campaign story, he was spiritually redeemed; he shook off addiction by improving his character. The subtext of America being "addicted" is that the American people are somehow fallen and weak.

But America does not rely on oil by virtue of any moral failing. It is not a weakness. It's simple prudence: For quite a long time now, oil has been an incredibly cheap, incredibly concentrated source of energy.