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American Energy Policy, Asleep at the Spigot
Nelson D. Schwartz, New York Times
… while he has warned about tightening energy supplies for years and looks prescient for buying Unocal, even Mr. O’Reilly [Chevron chief exec] says that he still can’t get his head around current oil prices, which closed above $145 a barrel on Thursday, a record.
“We can see how you can get to $100,” he says. “At $140, I just don’t know how to explain it. We’re surprised.”
For the rest of the country, the feeling is more like shock. As gasoline prices climb beyond $4 a gallon, Americans are rethinking what they drive and how and where they live. Entire industries are reeling – airlines and automakers most prominent among them – and gas prices have emerged as an important issue in the presidential campaign.
Ninety percent of Americans, meanwhile, expect the pain at the pump to pose a financial hardship in the next six months, according to a recent Associated Press-Yahoo News poll. Stocks now trade inversely to crude prices, and the Dow Jones industrials are in bear-market territory.
… Over the last 25 years, opportunities to head off the current crisis were ignored, missed or deliberately blocked, according to analysts, politicians and veterans of the oil and automobile industries. What’s more, for all the surprise at just how high oil prices have climbed, and fears for the future, this is one crisis we were warned about. Ever since the oil shortages of the 1970s, one report after another has cautioned against America’s oil addiction.
Even as politicians heatedly debate opening new regions to drilling, corralling energy speculators, or starting an Apollo-like effort to find renewable energy supplies, analysts say the real source of the problem is closer to home. In fact, it’s parked in our driveways.
(6 July 2008)
Contributor Jersey Geoff writes:
Truly a depressing piece- well researched and not pulling any punches- we are now entering the “world of hurt” phase and some folks are waking up to it.
BA:
The article does not mention peak oil, though there is a veiled reference buried in the middle of the article: “… [Other energy analysts] believe that what the world is confronting is a momentous shift in energy supply and demand.”
America’s love affair fades as the car becomes burden of suburbia
Paul Harris, The Observer
The nation of road movies, freeway freedom and dreams of endless horizons is waking up to the reality of soaring fuel prices. Paul Harris in Riverside, California, reports that people are leaving their gas guzzlers in the garage
—
It is known as the Inland Empire: a vast stretch of land tucked in the high desert valleys east of Los Angeles. Once home to fruit trees and Indians, it is now a concrete sprawl of jammed freeways, endless suburbs and shopping malls.
But here, in the heartland of the four-wheel drive, a revolution is under way. What was once unthinkable is becoming a shocking reality: America’s all-consuming love affair with the car is fading.
Surging petrol prices have worked where environmental arguments have failed. Many Americans have long been told to cut back on car use. Now, facing $4-a-gallon fuel, they have no choice.
(6 July 2008)
Long article.
US oil firms seek drilling access, but exports soar
Tom Doggett, Reuters
While the U.S. oil industry want access to more federal lands to help reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, American-based companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries.
… The surge in exports appears to contradict the pleas from the U.S. oil industry and the Bush administration for Congress to open more offshore waters and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.
(3 July 2008)
