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Clinton: OPEC ‘can no longer be a cartel’
Ben Smith, Politico
Clinton’s attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.
“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.
Clinton has cast herself as a warrior for working people against the oil industry and malicious “speculators,” and made that — along with her push for a gas tax holiday — central to her closing message in Indiana.
It’s a potent message, like the attack on “Wall Street money brokers,” with deep roots in American politics. It’ It’s also very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC.
(5 May 2008)
Tired of paying through the nose, Americans try praying at the pump
Karin Zeitvogel, AFP via Yahoo!News
At a Shell gas station in Washington, Rocky Twyman and an unusual group of activists were mad as hell about soaring fuel prices. …
“Someone’s making a lot of money and it’s really, really wrong,” added Twyman, who founded the Prayer at the Pump movement last week to seek help from a higher power to bring down fuel prices, because the powers in Washington haven’t.
The half-dozen activists — Twyman, a former Miss Washington DC, the owner of a small construction company and two volunteers at a local soup kitchen — joined hands, bowed their heads and intoned a heartfelt prayer.
“Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices,” Twyman said to a chorus of “amens”.
(5 May 2008)
Contributor Hank Xerox writes:
This could be an unconventional way to fight Peak Oil. Let’s pry that this approach saves us all from the pending oil crash.
Jason and the Carbonauts
David Roberts, Gristmill
Obama energy adviser Jason Grumet talks climate, coal, and transportation policy
Posted by David Roberts
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As executive director of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group of 20 energy experts created in 2002, Jason Grumet has come in for some flack from environmentalists. NCEP’s influential 2004 energy report called for several measures anathema to greens, including a “safety valve” that would set an upper limit on the price of carbon and CO2 permit giveaways to coal utilities and other big polluters.
But Grumet’s experience finessing the contentious differences between opposing camps in the energy world clearly attracted Mr. Unity himself, Barack Obama. Grumet has been advising the Obama campaign on climate and energy matters, and representing it in public venues — see here and here. Suffice to say, what he’s peddling now is considerably stronger than NCEP’s effort. I spoke with him by phone in late April.
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… DR: There’s been a lot of focus on making cars go farther on a gallon of fuel, and little focus on trying to reduce driving miles through public transit and urban design. Urban issues are a huge piece of the climate puzzle, but get almost no attention in these national campaigns. Has Sen. Obama given thought to these issues?
JG: Well, let’s just say that’s the first time anyone’s suggested that Sen. Obama is not in tune with urban America.
We’ll start broad and narrow in. To what extent can this problem be solved with Sharper Image techno fixes, and to what extent does there also need to be a response that affects people’s behavior? It is inescapable that it’s going to require a combination of both things. No one in my political life has found the voice to summon that kind of self-awareness, in terms of our personal consumption, in a political context — people jokingly deride Jimmy Carter for trying to do it during the 1970s energy crisis. There is a widely held view that the federal government is poorly positioned to bring about that kind of behavioral change.
I personally think Americans are ready and yearning to be called upon to be part of broader collective solutions. The current administration has not given people credit for our ability to see a shared goal and strive for it together. That only happens if you have a president who can, in a compelling way, communicate what the purpose of that effort is. So at the 300,000-foot level, I do believe Sen. Obama has the interest and the ability to motivate the country to appreciate that solving the problem is going to require more than just fancy new gadgets.
Taking a step closer to the ground, the senator’s very clear that the federal government sets a broad economic background through a basic price signal, but that there is going to be a critical role for states and local communities to address things like transport and zoning, which have always been much more appropriately the role of local government.
As we think about how the federal government can motivate that, a couple of issues have been part of our conversation. One is that Sen. Obama believes transportation policy, energy policy, and ag policy are all critical parts of this discussion.
(6 May 2008)
Long interview. Good job by Gristmill journalist David Roberts. -BA
