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Clinton Lays Out Energy Plan
Senator Wants to Halve Consumption of Foreign Oil by 2025
Dan Balz, Washington Post
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said yesterday that the United States should cut its consumption of foreign oil in half by 2025, and outlined a national strategy of tax incentives, an oil-profits tax and more funds for research aimed at spurring conservation and development of alternative sources of energy.
The prospective 2008 presidential candidate warned of dire consequences if the nation fails to curb its energy consumption habits, asserting that inaction in the face of rising oil prices and terrorist threats puts both national security and the country’s economic competitiveness at risk.
…Clinton said she plans to introduce legislation to create a strategic energy fund, largely paid for by an excess profits tax on big oil companies, who she noted earned a combined $113 billion in profits last year.
She estimated that the profits tax and a repeal of other tax breaks for the oil industry could pump $50 billion into the energy fund over two years and pay for an array of tax incentives and for $9 billion in new research initiatives for wind, solar and other alternative energy resources. Oil companies could escape the tax if they reinvested profits into similar programs.
To speed the shift from foreign oil, Clinton proposed incentives for hybrid cars, improving household energy efficiency, accelerating development of ethanol made from plant wastes and installing ethanol pumps at gas stations.
(24 May 2006)
Russia ‘fails to meet gas need’
BBC
Russia will be unable to meet future Western demand for its gas unless it ups investment and reforms its energy market, a global body has warned.
The comments came from Claude Mandil, head of the International Energy Agency, the energy watchdog for the world’s leading industralised nations. He said Russia needed an independent energy regulator to control the sector.
Russia cut gas supplies to the Ukraine in January, which had a knock-on effect on supplies to Western Europe. Western commentators said the move – carried out by Russia’s state-run gas company Gazprom – showed that Moscow was using its natural resources as a political tool.
They accused the Kremlin of cutting gas supplies to punish the Ukrainian government for moving towards the West. Russia denied the accusations, saying it was merely a dispute with Kiev over how much Ukraine should be paying for its gas.
(23 May 2006)
The Great Iraq Oil Grab
Joshua Holland, AlterNet
The official reasons the U.S. invaded Iraq don’t hold water. So, as the man said, follow the money … straight to the oil fields.
There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Pentagon planners wanted to name the invasion of Iraq, “Operation Iraqi Liberation.” Only when someone realized that the acronym — O.I.L. — might raise some uncomfortable questions, was “Operation Iraqi Freedom” born.
Supporters of the Iraq war airily dismiss chants of “no blood for oil” as a manifestation of the antiwar crowd’s naïveté. They point out that Iraq’s government still controls its oil and argue that we could have simply bought it on the open market.
Both of those claims are true on their face, but bringing Iraq’s vast oil wealth under the control of foreign multinationals — with U.S. firms the best positioned to develop it — was always central to U.S. plans for Iraq. That Iraq’s oil will continue to be “owned” by the “Iraqi people” is what differentiates classical 19th-century colonialism practiced by British officers in pith helmets from the neocolonialism the United States perfected in the second half of the 20th century.
(22 May 2006)
