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Oil’s slippery slope
Gideon Rachman, Financial Times via Business Spectator
With the oil price heading upwards and President George Bush heading for Saudi Arabia, as part of a Middle Eastern tour, it is time to accept the truth. The pursuit of oil is fundamental to US foreign policy.
The importance of oil to American foreign policy is both obvious and curiously difficult to acknowledge in public. In the run-up to the Iraq war it was left to the left to make the argument that this was a “war for oil”. Establishment people – those in the know – rolled their eyes at this “conspiracy theory”.
Yet in recent months, both Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Senator John McCain have come close to saying that Iraq was indeed about oil.
(13 May 2008)
McCain: Clean energy a ‘national security issue’
Ed Hornick, CNN
… McCain said Tuesday that coming up with new forms of clean energy is “a national security issue when we’re dependent on more than $400 billion a year in imported oil from countries that don’t like us very much … some of that money is helping terrorist organizations.”
The Arizona senator also said the heightened awareness of global environmental concerns could help push new forms of energy to the forefront of the nation’s political agenda.
“Environment, national security and economy are all coming together, perhaps … to spark … an incredible impetus for us to sit down together, Republican and Democrat, environmentalists, business and bankers and retailers … all together and address this problem.”
McCain’s commitment to fight global warming also puts him at odds with some Republicans in Congress and with the Bush administration, which has not made climate change a priority.
(13 May 2008)
Democratic candidates play up “clean coal”
Chris Baltimore, Reuters
Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are talking more about “clean coal” and less about global warming as they woo voters in West Virginia and Kentucky — two states that sit at the heart of the nation’s coal economy.
In a bid to draw voters ahead of Democratic primaries in West Virginia on Tuesday and Kentucky on May 20, both candidates are playing up the ascendant role of commercially untested and so far economically nonviable ways of converting America’s plentiful coal supplies into electricity without spewing massive quantities of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
(12 May 2008)
U.S. Energy Policy: A Review of “Apollo’s Fire”
John Rawlins, Whatcom Watch
Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy
by Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks
Island Press; 2007
… First, we owe Inslee and Hendricks standing applause for undertaking the effort to collect data and write this book. For organization, background, writing and inspiration I’d give them an A+. For motivation and detailed recommendations, they still have some work to do.
The motives for calling for a major energy overhaul are: (1) Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) (i.e., human-induced worldwide climate change); and (2) the fragile dependency of the U.S. on foreign countries for 60 percent of the oil we use (with the implication that some of those governments are unstable, undesirable, etc.).
Whatcom Watch readers will likely understand that, long before AGW begins to take a serious toll on most U.S. residents, peaking of fossil fuels is very likely to undermine our entire built infrastructure and result in some level of economic collapse. Inslee and Hendricks do not even mention this much more imminent threat. That is not necessarily a fatal flaw because many of the responses to fossil fuel peaking are exactly what they propose in this book to deal with AGW mitigation.
Inslee and Hendricks overlook the urgent need to deal with the declining North American natural gas supply. And the time scale for effecting change in energy policy needs to be much shorter than the authors assume. In addition, they apparently remain unaware that U.S. coal and world uranium supply rates may also peak during the next several decades.
One of the most serious problems in recent (since 1970’s) U.S. history has been the failure to sustain a long-range sensible energy policy. Each party seems to have its favorite energy sources, and each party likes to support energy research and development in very different ways. The result has been that the U.S. really has had no effective energy policy for at least three decades, because it changes every four to eight years as a new administration comes to town.
John Rawlins has a B.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. He retired in 1995 from the Westinghouse Hanford Co. at the Hanford site in Eastern Washington. Currently, he teaches physics and astronomy at Whatcom Community College.
(X May 2008)
John Rawlins is an Energy Bulletin contributor.
