Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Where’s That Energy Bill?
Editorial, New York Times
Two months ago, Washington was filled with hope that Congress would produce an energy bill that would begin to address the two great challenges of oil dependency and climate change. Each chamber had approved respectable if incomplete measures that could be combined in one outstanding bill. Then the bills disappeared into the back rooms as Democratic leaders tried to negotiate a final product.
These talks have now reached a dangerous point. With both houses feeling pressure to do something — anything — to deal with high oil prices, there’s a real danger that one or more essential provisions could be dropped just for the sake of producing a bill.
That’s not what the country needs. And it doesn’t have to happen if the leadership, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, hold the line and insist on legislation equal to the country’s profound energy problems. Here are the main points of contention:
Fuel efficiency … Renewable electricity… Taxing Big Oil …
(14 November 2007)
Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
Two dates — two numbers. Read them and weep for what could have, and should have, been. On Sept. 11, 2001, the OPEC basket oil price was $25.50 a barrel. On Nov. 13, 2007, the OPEC basket price was around $90 a barrel.
In the wake of 9/11, some of us pleaded for a “patriot tax” on gasoline of $1 or more a gallon to diminish the transfers of wealth we were making to the very countries who were indirectly financing the ideologies of intolerance that were killing Americans and in order to spur innovation in energy efficiency by U.S. manufacturers.
…We simply cannot go on being as dumb as we wanna be. If you hate the war in Iraq, then you want a gasoline tax so you can argue that we can pull out of there without remaining dependent on an even more unstable region. If you want to see us negotiate with Iran, not bomb it, you want a gasoline tax that will give us some real leverage by helping to reduce the income of the ayatollahs.
If you’re a conservative and you believed that the Iraq war was necessary to drive reform in the Middle East, but the war has failed to do that and we need “Plan B” for the same objective, you want a gasoline tax that will reduce the flow of wealth to petrolist leaders who will never change if all they have to do is drill well holes rather than educate and empower their people.
If you want to see America thrive by becoming the most energy productive economy in the world — a title that now belongs to Japan, which doesn’t have a drop of oil in its soil — you want a gasoline tax, which will only spur U.S. innovation in energy efficiency.
(14 November 2007)
These Are Perilous Days for the US
Hamish McRae, The Independent/UK
I don’t think Americans get it. I don’t think they realise quite how serious the collapse of the dollar is for the global economy, nor the long-term consequences of this decline for the position of the US in the world. Sure, they grumble about prices in London and find it odd that US lawyers want to be transferred to the UK because they can earn more money here. But at a fundamental level, to judge by the conversations I have had in recent weeks, I don’t think the US financial community appreciates quite what peril it is in.
There have been periods of dollar weakness before. The most notable marked the end of the fixed exchange rate system in the early 1970s. There have been periods of excessive dollar strength too, one of which led to the Plaza Accord in 1985 – so called because the agreement by the US and other major economies that the dollar needed to be capped was reached in the Plaza Hotel in New York.
…But there seems to be at least half a dozen reasons why what is happening now to the dollar is very serious indeed. Most obviously, the present fall is going further than previous declines.
…The problems for the US, though, will be more serious, for it needs to import, amongst other commodities, half its oil. The high dollar oil price is already increasing inflation elsewhere – here in the UK for example – but the burden on the US is relatively worse.
(14 November 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
Military’s Oil Needs Not Deterred by Price Spike
Jeff Brady, National Public Radio (NPR)
All the U.S. tanks, planes and ships guzzle 340,000 barrels of oil a day, making the American military the single-largest purchaser and consumer of oil in the world.
If the Defense Department were a country, it would rank about 38th in the world for oil consumption, right behind the Philippines.
…So, how will the rising price of fuel affect military operations?
Michael O’Hanlon, a former Defense Department budget analyst who is now with the Brookings Institution, explains that “despite spending billions a year on its oil, (the military) is nonetheless … the user that’s at least risk … of having its fuel supply cut off or having economics really crimp its ability to fill up the gas tank.”
After all, O’Hanlon said, in a time of war the Department of Defense can’t really say, “Let’s not fly that mission this week because gas prices are too high.”
So the military doesn’t need to worry, he said. “It is, in the short term, a management challenge and there are many Pentagon comptroller types who are staying up late into the evening figuring out how to make this work.”
When Congress considers the next appropriation for the military fuel costs likely will not be high on the agenda.
The bigger challenge for the military, O’Hanlon said, is what the price hikes represent — a narrowing of the gap between supply and demand that could cause problems for the military down the road. What happens when such an oil hungry institution can’t get oil? That’s why the Defense Department is conducting all kinds of research on alternate forms of energy and more efficient machines.
So is a hybrid tank on the horizon? It’s already in the works.
(14 November 2007)
See this “artifcat from the future” by Jamais Cascio: Greenwater EcoMercs.
