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back to peak oil: reality check

Some interesting developments on the “peak oil” stuff that I wrote of a few months back.

James Howard Kunstler writes about the short-sightedness of the Bush energy policy in his latest blog entry by turning his focus on the energy needs of India. India currently imports 70 percent of its oil, and due to increasing needs, will likely import 85 percent of its oil within the next 15 to 20 years. And India’s government is floating all kinds of cockamamie schemes to keep the oil and natural gas flowing:

  • Trying to increase cooperation with China, over whom India has an ongoing war of wills over Tibet.
  • Running a natural gas pipeline from Iran, via Pakistan. Note that India and Pakistan have been precariously close to launching all-out nuclear war against each other for the past 40 years, and that Pakistan’s government isn’t really in any semblance of order.

Kunstler ties this all back by citing the U.S.’s reliance on China for cheaply-manufactured goods, as well as China’s increasing reliance on oil and their rather chilly relations with the U.S. government. Combined with the fact that the U.S. economy is declining ever more steadily under BushCo’s watch, and there’s a recipe for disaster. Kusntler closes his posting with this bit:

Here in the States, the price of a barrel of oil is back over $55 and we are only one week into the summer vacation driving season. President Bush is running a scam on the public by pretending to push Congress to act on an energy bill that offers nothing to realistically address the nation’s oil addiction and, especially, its car dependency. He doesn’t dare, I suppose, because he must know that the American economy is about little more than car dependency. But just watch: as the price for a barrel of oil heads north past $60, Bush’s abject leadership failure will become self-evident and the public mood will appear to shift overnight. The oval office will become a very lonely place indeed by this coming fall, and its occupant will have three long and terrible years left to suffer there.

The other fun (and sobering) bit is from a blog called The Oil Drum, which features a very telling graph showing the current oil remaining in the Abqaiq oil field in Saudi Arabia. The graph shows how little oil actually remains in this extremely large oil field. Apparently most other major oil fields in the Persian Gulf area are similarly depleted. So oil’s peak has come and gone – now we need to get creative and work on moving on and growing up.

Sorry, George: oil won’t be the answer for much longer.

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