The way things are headed

US oil habit hard to kick, experts say

President Bush may be anxious for the US to end its "addiction" to imported crude oil, especially from the Middle East, but analysts say kicking the habit cold turkey will not be easy. Bush vowed in his State of the Union address on Tuesday to achieve a 75% reduction in US oil imports from the Mideast by 2025 through a renewed commitment to renewable energy and new technologies. The Mideast currently provides less than 20% of US crude imports, but reducing that figure any further will be a challenge because the bulk of the world's oil reserves are located in the region and other suppliers - with the notable exception of Canada, the US's biggest source of imported crude - have their own problems. "It's the holy grail of US policy, trying to cut down their dependence on the Middle East," said Leo Drollas, deputy director of the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London, "but it's one thing to say that and another doing anything about it."

What's different about Bush's State of the Union approach is that he's proposing that Americans turn to alternative technologies, including hybrid engines and ethanol to power cars, and clean coal, wind and solar energy for electricity output. In so doing, the former Texas oilman dropped any reference to increasing domestic US oil production, particularly from the environmentally sensitive Arctic Wildlife Refuge. "It's a very significant departure for him because where he comes from, the solution has always been 'Let's drill more. Let's develop domestic production and the Gulf of Mexico,' " said Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington think tank. Luft said that reducing oil consumption is the only way to go if Washington wants to reduce the geo-political influence of Mideastern governments because currently, if the US cuts its imports of oil from Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, that oil simply finds its way to Europe or China.

In related news, oil prices dropped sharply yesterday after a US government report showed a surprise increase in the nation's gasoline stockpiles last week, triggering profit taking by big money speculators. The steep drop came after the US Energy Information Administration reported a build in US gasoline supplies of 4.2 million barrels last week, nearly quadruple expectations. The build in gasoline supplies erased a year-on-year stockpile deficit that had attracted heavy buying betting on an inventory crunch. US crude stocks rose 1.9 million barrels, adding to a stockpile already 11% above last year's levels.
(Globe and Mail, National Post 060202)

Wow! Once again, President Bush proclaimed that the U.S. is heading towards a severe energy shortage problem if the nation does not reduce its dependency on foreign oil (read: Addiction to oil in his words). You gotta wonder how sincere he is about funding research into alternative energy after asking congress for another ~$100 billion in 2006 for the War in Iraq (and this just out - the requested budget for U.S. defense for 2007 is almost a HALF TRILLION DOLLARS. Holy fuck.

Now that Canada's new PM, Harpoon is adamant about scuttling the Kyoto Accord in Canada, are any of these monkeys saying anything they genuinely believe?

Feb 10 addition as quoted from John, Clusterfuck Nation

Hey folks over here in tin foil hat territory...wolf has been called so many times on so many things, I think most Murikans have just said 'fuck it' and are ignoring it. The junkie metaphor is appropriate for Bush and the nation...when you want that fix, nothing else is important.
Buddhists call it the indulged self absorption of the God realm.
And according to Buddhism that level of self absorption is so great, the being is trapped and can't see outside themselves.
In that scenario, they exhaust all their merit and are plunged from the god realm back down to the hell realm.
Gods in this system have it nice, but are not liberated, and thus are still subject to the laws of cause and effect (karma).
Been reading "Collapse" by Jared Diamond.
We are the Easter Islanders, building the big statues, eating hog every day, half the forests gone.
Things are still pretty grooving in the god realm...in a calm before the storm kinda way.
It might just be a day to stop and be nice with the neighbor kinda day.
I really don't think that going down is a question any more. It's more a matter of how gracefully or not we can do it.

Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports
February 1st, 2006 11:02 pm
By Kevin G. Hall / Knight Ridder Link

WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.
But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that's where the greatest oil supplies are.

The president's State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that "America is addicted to oil" and his call to "break this addiction."

Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."
He pledged to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."

Not exactly, though, it turns out.

"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.
Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands." The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.

Presidential adviser Dan Bartlett made a similar point in a briefing before the speech. "I think one of the biggest concerns the American people have is oil coming from the Middle East. It is a very volatile region," he said.

Through the first 11 months of 2005, the United States imported nearly 2.2 million barrels per day of oil from the Middle East nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. That's less than 20 percent of the total U.S. daily imports of 10.062 million barrels.

Imports account for about 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption.

Alan Hubbard, the director of the president's National Economic Council, projects that America will import 6 million barrels of oil per day from the Middle East in 2025 without major technological changes in energy consumption.

The Bush administration believes that new technologies could reduce the total daily U.S. oil demand by about 5.26 million barrels through alternatives such as plug-in hybrids with rechargeable batteries, hydrogen-powered cars and new ethanol products.
That means the new technologies could reduce America's oil appetite by the equivalent of what we're expected to import from the Middle East by 2025, Hubbard said.

But we'll still be importing plenty of oil, according to the Energy Department's latest projection.

"In 2025, net petroleum imports, including both crude oil and refined products, are expected to account for 60 percent of demand ... up from 58 percent in 2004," according to the Energy Information Administration's 2006 Annual Energy Outlook.
Some experts think Bush needs to do more to achieve his stated goal.

"We can achieve energy independence from the Middle East, but not with what the president is proposing," said Craig Wolfe, the president of Americans for Energy Independence in Studio City, Calif. "We need to slow the growth in consumption. Our organization believes we need to do something about conservation" and higher auto fuel-efficiency standards.

Lies, lies, and more lies. Oh, why do politicians lie so much? That's rhetorical question. Half-truths, half-truths, half-truths. How is anyone supposed to truly know what's going on? Neither our leaders or our media are telling us anything close to the truth.

Opec issues warning on Bush oil pledge
By Carola Hoyos in Vienna and Christopher Swann in Washington
Published: February 1 2006 22:04 | Last updated: February 2 2006 11:57

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries on Wednesday warned that President George W. Bush’s proposal to reduce US dependence on Middle Eastern oil could badly jeopardise needed investment in Gulf oil production and refining capacity.

Opec delegates and officials said the group planned to make this point in its as yet unpublished commentary in the cartel’s January bulletin next week.

Meanwhile US crude oil prices staged a rebound on Thursday with March West Texas Intermediate rising 25 cents to $66.81 a barrel as tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme continued to pre-occupy dealers

Speaking after Mr Bush’s Tuesday night State of the Union address, Edmund Daukoru, Nigeria’s energy minister and president of Opec, said: “We do believe that energy issues cannot be handled in a unilateral way; we all have to work together towards global energy security.”

Privately, Opec officials were more direct in warnings about Mr Bush’s declared intention to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by 75 per cent by 2025. But they emphasised Opec would avoid a confrontational tone in its commentary.

An Opec delegate said: “Comments like that are unrealistic. Everyone knows the world will continue to depend on Middle East imports.” The organisation would raise concerns about such statements damping investment at meetings with the European Union and other organisations “more aligned with Opec’s view”.

Opec’s concern was shared widely across the industry. John Felmy, chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the US oil and gas industry, said: “If one of your big customers tells you they do not want to buy from you in the future, then of course this will impact how much you invest.”

The International Energy Agency, the industrialised countries’ energy watchdog, forecast the Middle East will have to invest heavily to ensure the world’s energy thirst is satisfied.

On Wednesday Martin Bartenstein, economics minister of Austria, which holds the EU presidency, said the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves, would become more rather than less important.

He told the FT: “As the person responsible for EU energy policies, I would not see myself in a position of talking about such a significant decrease in demand from a certain region. We know that the oil import dependency of the EU will ever increase, not decrease.”

He added: “Everyone . . . will have to deal with oil and gas, especially from the Middle East.” Worries over the stability of Iran on Wednesday drove the oil price up 83 cents to $68.75 a barrel in midday trading in New York.

Opec delegates and Mr Bartenstein place responsibility for oil price volatility mainly on consuming countries that have failed adequately to invest in refineries and pipelines needed to get oil to their consumers.

Mr Felmy said shifting oil imports from the Middle East could be costly for America. “As long as America has a diversified range of oil suppliers it has a lot of security of supply. If you reduce this diversification it could be costly.” About 20 per cent of oil sold to the US comes from the Middle East, with Canada and Mexico supplying more than 30 per cent of imports.

Any decrease in the US dependence on oil from the Middle East could only really be achieved by a decrease in its dependence on all foreign oil – either by conservation, alternative energy or domestically produced oil and gas, analysts said.

I guess this means that the entire world is dependent on ME oil now and forever, no matter what. The sources of oil are not the sources of the problem. It's the culture of consumerism/consumption that pervades our thinking. With the rest of the industrializing world getting on board with this mindset, things are apt only to get worse.

Fists fly during energy crisis debate

Wednesday, February 1, 2006; Posted: 11:30 a.m. EST (16:30 GMT)

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) -- Rival lawmakers in the Georgian capital's city council brawled during a debate over the energy crisis suffered by the country in recent days.

Some lawmakers say plenty of ill-will was left over in the council following a December 2 brawl during a debate over the city budget.

The fight Tuesday between members of the National Movement ruling party and opposition lawmakers erupted as the opposition criticized President Mikhail Saakashvili's government for how the crisis was handled.

Much of the country was without gas and electricity for days after explosions on a Russia gas pipeline and after winter weather downed high-power electric lines.

Saakashvili has accused Russia of waging an energy blockade against it in retaliation for its government's pro-Western policies and has promised to diversify the country's energy imports.

Feb 10, 2005 update quote from upthecreek, Clusterfuck Nation:

I agree with most of the current postings. To me, "alternative energy" is somewhat of a misnomer. There are no "alternative energies" to sustain what we have. It is not a matter of "switching" to something else. It is adopting a completely different lifestyle.

Switching to hybrids is a chimera. Individual car ownership will cease. As gas goes through the roof, I predict, we'll see people setting up "jitney" services like you see in the third world. We'll have to do something with these SUVs! Quickly even that will fail.

Soon we won't be able to live far from where we work, shop, and play. "Travel" will become a thing of the past. Next will come lighting as a luxury for special occasions and heat only when it is REALLY cold.

We'll only eat food that is in season and grown locally. Consumerism will die. Fossil energy use will be for emergency uses - hospital, fire, etc. - if that.

In other words, we'll go back to how people have lived throughout most of human history.

However, to me peak oil is not what scares me. The above transition will happen, whether we voluntarily embrace it or not. It could be made more comfortable if we did embrace it but the results will be the same in the end.

My fear is that our continued use of oil, insane population growth and ecosystem destruction will leave us with a planet that cannot sustain human life especially if we burn through the next trillion barrels of oil before we stop.

If global warming is not brought under control, population reduced and ecosysatems allowed to recover, it will not matter whether we have a transition plan. There will be nothing left to transition to.

A consensus is growing that we need to reduce carbon output by 50% immediately we may not be able to reverse the effects. My guess is that is a hopeful scenario. Talking about replacing anything is insane. We need to reduce, scale back and do without - now. We need to stop having babies, or we can watch them die. We need to eat as low as we can on the food chain and let ecosystems recover. We need to stop buying things...period.

These are not feel good options, they are survival or death.