Let's talk about off-shore drilling for a minute

When McCain flip-flopped on off-shore oil drilling last week, my mom called me. "Wet Start just lost even his republican support in California," she said before I had 'hello' out of my mouth. "He wants more off-shore drilling, and California is still pissed over the Santa Barbara spill that happened forty years ago. San Diego is going to Bob Barr." She was engaging in a bit of hyperbole of course - but now you know that I come by my passion for politics honestly.

In January 1969, a gas blowout occurred beneath a Union Oil drilling platform located about six miles off shore from Santa Barbara. Over the next eleven days, 200,000 gallons of crude oil would bubble to the surface, and the slick would eventually cover 800 square miles of ocean and affect 35 miles of coastline. Shore birds such as plovers and willets fled the area, but diving birds became oil-soaked and many died.

Nearly 3700 birds were estimated to have perished because of contact with oil. Aerial surveys a year later found only 200 grebes in an area that had
previously drawn 4000 to 7000.

Marine mammals were poisoned. For weeks the tides brought in the corpses of seals and dolphins, and gray whales who traversed the channel as part of their regular migratory route to their calving grounds in the warm waters off the Baja peninsula avoided the area.

The spill was such an ecological disaster that the very first Earth Day grew out of it a year later.


My Mom wasn't the only one who remembered the Santa Barbara spill.

To the West, drilling rigs also operate off the Pacific shoreline near Santa Barbara, Calif., but to many residents, they are vile reminders of a 1969 blowout on an offshore rig that spewed a giant oil slick into the Pacific. The ecological disaster contributed to the creation of Earth Day the following year.

"It still has an impact on our consciousness," says Linda Krop, an environmental attorney in Santa Barbara. "You don't see oil on the beach any more but it's very high in people's awareness and their concern about any more development."

The experiences in California and the Gulf Coast states offer contrasting case studies as $4-a-gallon gasoline accelerates calls for vastly expanded offshore drilling to boost U.S. oil and gas supplies. Offshore drilling is currently permitted off four Gulf Coast states, Alaska and a sliver of California but is banned elsewhere in the United States.

President Bush and presumed Republican presidential nominee John McCain reopened the national debate over offshore drilling last week by calling on Congress to lift the ban that prohibits new oil and gas production off most of the East and West coasts and a section of the Gulf Coast below Florida.

The proposals generated a fierce push-back from many Democrats and environmental groups, who accused Bush and McCain of being in the pockets of Big Oil.

McCain's rival, Sen. Barack Obama, noted Friday in Jacksonville that McCain had once favored the ban and charged McCain with violating the "bipartisan consensus" that had protected Florida's coastline for decades.

"The politics may have changed, but the facts haven't," Obama said. "Offshore drilling would not lower gas prices today, it would not lower gas prices next year and it would not lower gas prices five years from now.''

It certainly puts politicians on the horns of a dilemma - especially those who have been playing the game for a while now, and who chose to ignore the pleading of people like me, beseeching them to deal with the problem of peak oil before it dealt with us.

Simply put - we can't drill our way out of the trouble we are in. It would take a decade for the remaining hard-to-get-at oil fields to bring products to market. I am of the opinion that we would be better off enacting conservation measures in the near term and working on alternative energy sources in the long term, because you don't get out of trouble by applying more of the same thinking that got you into trouble to begin with.

We have the technology to mass produce Hydrogen fuel cells and battery capacity is coming along nicely after several years of being stuck at the Lithium ion stage. All over the west, wind turbines are replacing oil rigs, and those rigs stand silent and rusting over stripper wells across the land.

I listen to politicians yammer on and on about stop-gap measures that would have little or no impact on the price Americans pay at the pump and I shake my head in disbelief.

Until someone takes the bold step of acknowledging that Peak Oil not only exists, but Hubbert was an optimist and we are on the downhill side of the bell curve of production, all of their pissing and moaning amounts to just that...pissing and moaning and it's all for naught.

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June 14 news roundup and analysis

Obama the neolib?

At TPM Café, Jim Sleeper does an EXCELLENT job of explaining how Obama really is a neoliberal in many ways. Many at TPM didn’t like the idea.

Saudis claim will pump more oil

Color me among the skeptics. And, I’m not alone.

DOE has 10-cent hybrid bone, for U.S. companies only

As Wired notes, just $30 million in Department of Energy money for plug-in hybrids is a pittance. Second, as I note on my blog post, could this type of grant be a WTO violation?

Nutbar love for Barr?

Ron Paul seems to be getting more comfy with Libertarian prez candidate Bob Barr. I already blogged recently, Obama can win without taking Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida. Barr could well put Virginian, Nevada and maybe Arizona into play.

Passive Pelosi, Denny the Impeacher and Miss Cindy

With Speaker Pelosi getting pretty passive on the idea of impeachment, is she trying to protect 2002 prowar Democrats from Bush subpoenas before House Judiciary on Iraq war impeachment articles? Or protecting herself from similar testimony on warrantless spying articles?

And, with that, I remind you that Cindy Sheehan is still running for Pelosi’s seat.

Reminder two: There’s a petition to remove Pelosi from the Speakership.

A Godless campaign?

Timothy Egan gets a gold star among MSM pundits for this simple suggestion.

$2 a pop for pop

No more free sodas on U.S. Airways — it’s $2 a pop for pop now.

Further comment and analysis on all these at my blog.

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Friday news analysis roundup and more

Gazprom’s head says oil could hit $250/barrel. How likely is it?

So why is House Democratic leadership as passive as Jonathan Turley charges on Dennis Kucinich’s Bush impeachment push. My take: Perhaps Pelosi is worried pro-war voting Dems could be called by Bush lawyers as witnesses.

What’s up with Exxon selling its gas stations? Unfortunately, it probably won’t put an end to Big Oil price fixing conspiracy theories, although it should.

Hillary lost because of the speech she didn’t give and Nick Kristof wants Obama to give it.

Semis can be 10 percent more fuel efficient.

What’s up with William Shatner?. My normal Friday SCATblogging is SHATblogging this week.

Read more about my take on all of these issues at SocraticGadfly.

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Free-time fun - protesting Exxon

I meant to post this last week after it was on my blog, but I got busy getting ready for a mini-vacation to San Francisco. Besides, you may see me on PBS this fall!

I wasn’t there last year, but two years ago, I joined the protest in front of ExxonMobil’s annual shareholder meeting. The suburban Dallas-based eXXXon meets in downtown Dallas at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.

It was different this year, being back here!

Close-up of me:



This year, as opposed to two years ago, Dallas police etc.let us on the same side of the street as the Meyerson.

The big item on the shareholder agenda this year is the proposal to split eXXXon’s CEO and chairman of the board positions, to require them to be held by two different people. Current CEO and Chairman Rex Tillerson strongly opposes the move.

I had a chance to get interviewed about this, and more general comments on Peak Oil and global warming, for PBS’s Frontline. The episode, whether my comments make the cut or not, is supposed to air in October.

Me as part of the protest group:



The “division of powers” proposal, which most other Big Oil companies have already, got 42 percent a year ago, and with the backing of some 200 members of the Rockefeller family, maybe it will get over the top this time.

Assuming Tillerson would keep the CEO spot, a new chairman might do little more than give lip service to both global warming and Peak Oil.

But, lip service is better than no service.


Other protestors:



About 40 people were there at various times when I was there, including members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Southern Christian Leadership President Charles Steele Jr. was among people who spoke.

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Texas - more polluting than California and Pennsylvania combined

Not on smog, soot or ozone, but on what our Preznit-elect said in 2000 was a pollutant: carbon dioxide. If it were its own nation, the idea of which many native Texans like to brag about and many other Americans sometimes fervently wish were actually the case, it would be the world’s eighth-largest global warming polluter. It’s actually slipped from its No. 7 spot of five years ago, but only because of Canada’s massive atmospheric destruction to extract oil sands.

Here’s a breakdown of why:

Considering its role in the U.S. economy, it's no surprise Texas ranks as it does. As the nation's leading producer of energy, and with more cattle and oil refineries than any other state, it is essentially America's power plant, gas pump and beef basket. Yes, all those cows play a part. While many environmentalists focus on the methane (another greenhouse gas) produced by cows, the raising of cattle also contributes to CO2 emissions (the burning of fuel to transport cattle and meat, etc.). A study released last summer by Japanese scientists showed that production of just 1 kilogram of beef results in more CO2 emissions than going for a three-hour drive while leaving all the lights on at home.

Simple answer: eat less beef. Another reason is, if you have to eat meat, it only takes 4-5 pounds of plant food to put a pound of weight on a chicken or hog. It takes 8 pounds of feed with a cow.

But the problem isn’t just with farting cows in the country. Read on below the fold:

Here’s the real problem today, though and it’s in urban Texas:

But it's not just industry and agriculture that give Texas such an outsize carbon footprint. Texans epitomize America's penchant for overconsumption, so much so that they've even coined their own phrase for superlarge portions: Texas-sized. The state's 23.5 million residents use nearly 3,000 more kilowatt-hours of electricity every year than the average American and a higher percentage of them drive large, gas-guzzling vehicles. Of the 20 million registered vehicles in Texas, one in four is a pickup truck. Of the 245 million vehicles registered in the United States, only 16 percent are pickups, according to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. Last year light trucks made up 61 percent of all new vehicles (both personal and commercial) sold in Texas, compared to just over half of total vehicle sales in the country.

Nearly a third of Texas's carbon emissions come from transportation. With so much wide-open space, Texas hasn’t needed the kind of urban planning that promotes density. Rather, it is a state of far-flung towns and cities, connected by highways and with practically no mass transit. Air quality has suffered as a result; by some estimates more than half of all Texans live in areas where the air is unsafe to breathe, as defined by the EPA's Clean Air Act.

And, here’s the attitude that seeps from Gov. Helmethair (Rick Perry) on down:

Even in the reddest of Red States, one would think that such a health hazard would cause Texas to get serious about air pollution. But it is one of only 15 states without a climate action plan in place or even under consideration. This at a time when some of the most aggressive state plans have taken shape under Republican governors, according to national climate protection groups. In 2006, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger muscled through the most ambitious carbon cap-and-trade plan of any state in the country, aimed at reducing statewide CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Last summer Florida’s GOP Gov. Charlie Crist signed executive orders to slash the state's greenhouse-gas emissions to 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2050. In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Pawlenty last year signed a law requiring state utilities to generate a quarter of their power from renewable sources by 2025, and in Connecticut, Gov. Jodi Rell’s Energy Vision initiative calls for 20 percent of all energy used and sold in the state to come from clean or renewable sources by 2020.

Result?

Last year the Texas Association of Manufacturers and Houston-based Exxon Mobil successfully lobbied against a bill that would have provided incentives to homeowners and businesses to install solar panels. The Republican-held state legislature even voted down a bill that would have allowed cities to increase their sales tax in order to fund the construction of light rail systems, for fear of appearing to be seen as raising taxes. When a Democratic state senator from Austin proposed a bill that would have merely set up a task force to study climate change, it was defeated thanks to fierce opposition from the business community, including the Texas Oil and Gas Association and Texas Automobile Dealers Association.

Contrary to Perry’s feeble joke attempt that the biggest source of global warming is Al Gore’s mouth, it’s his own flapping trap that’s the problem.

Help may be on the horizon, though. The Peak Oil horizon. Oil prices staying over $100 a barrel will force more more Dallasite, Houstonian, and even Austinite Red State/neck driver, all of whom are such titty-babies they slow their pickups and SUVs down to half a mile per hour for speed bumps, to junk their gas guzzlers which will never see the likes of an unpaved road, and buy cars instead.

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Another reason why Peak Oil should scare you

What if all the new oil we’re discovering right now doesn’t do much better than 1-1 on energy return for energy invested? In other words, what if, within 20 years, or less, all the oil still in the ground around the world in still-undrilled sites would take more energy to pump out of the ground than it’s worth?

The linked piece is long, about 5,000 words, but, short of James Kunstler apocalyptic, something like this should scare you.

The deafening silence of all presidential candidates of both major parties about Peak Oil isn’t staggering (because it doesn’t surprise me), but it is disgusting.

I’ll shortly be doing a more in-depth post about major issues missing from this year’s presidential campaign.

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Oil hits $100/bbl; you can book a recession

Oil prices crashed through the huge symbolic barrier of $100/bbl today. As a result, the Dow fell below $13,000.

Several notes.

1. With this psychological barrier broken, oil stands a good chance of going up, especially going up a lot this summer.

2. This summer is when mortgage resets on adjustable-rate mortgages are set to peak.

3. Ergo, you can just write the word “recession” in on your summer 2008 calendar. Will political candidates be prepared?

4. Beyond that, the price ceiling breakthrough will open the door for Iran, Venezuela and other anti-American countries at the edge of OPEC to renew their calls for dual denomination of oil prices. The Saudis will continue to resist, worried about how much further the dollar, and all their American investments, will fall. Don’t be surprised if some of these members seriously look at going rogue and trying dual pricing on their own.

5. OK, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, more than ever, has to put up or shut up on claims it can crank out 12-13 million barrels of oil a day. Guess what? They’re going to have to shut up, or else spin. They can’t produce that much.

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T. Boone Pickens talks Peak Oil on prime-time national TV

ABC football announcer Brent Musberger had Pickens up in the press box at the start of the third quarter of Saturday night’s Kansas-Oklahoma State game.

The billionaire Pickens, an OSU alum, went straight to the point when Musberger asked him about Peak Oil.

“We’ve got 85 million barrels of (global) supply and 88 million barrels of demand,” Pickens said.

I hope at least a few of the football crowd was listening attentively.

As I noted in a post earlier this week, adapted from my weekly newspaper column, Pickens called $100/bbl oil by the end of this year a few months ago. Representatives of Big Oil companies and shills like Daniel Yergin scoffed.

Well, they’re not scoffing now. And, what could well be more serious, at least in economic terms, than global warming, is starting to get mainstream public airplay.

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Josh Marshall muffs first chance to explain Peak Oil

Early Thursday, the TPM editor wondered aloud how much the Bush/Cheney saber-rattling on Iran was driving the rapid ramp-up in oil prices.

I told him it, even if combined with Turkey’s saber-rattling on the Kurds, probably was no more than $10/bbl, and even that much effect was due to world supply tightness. I then noted I had written my most recent newspaper column about Peak Oil, T. Boone Pickens’ prediction of $100/bbl oil and related issues.

I implored Josh to take the opportunity to familiarize his readers who aren’t up to date with it on Peak Oil, including through referencing a website such as The Oil Drum. I bluntly juxtaposed Peak Oil to global warming by saying the U.S. could grind to a halt before the world burns to a crisp, to link two metaphors.

Well, Josh took a whack at it this evening, but kind of whiffed. I cite this sentence as proof:

Over time spiraling prices will lead to more investment and eventually more supply.

No, no, no, Josh.

King Hubbert factored in rising prices driving more marginal production techniques in more marginal production areas as part of his Peak Oil prediction methodology.

And, the statement above, to me, just doesn’t get the basic bell curve fact of Peak Oil, either.

I e-mailed Josh again, re the quoted statement of his: No. We will then, globally, be on the downslope of the bell curve and past the peak. Many analysts not named Daniel Yergin believe we are at that point RIGHT NOW.

I hope Josh, in the posts he promises for Friday, does a better job. We need major bloggers to discuss this more in hopes of getting politicians to honestly discuss it AT ALL.

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$100/barrel oil? Maybe it isn’t so laughable after all

From my newspaper op-ed column for this week:

Just a few months ago, oil baron and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens was talking about the possibility of oil prices hitting $100 a barrel by the end of this year.

At the time, to the degree his comment got any notice or reaction at all, it tended to be laughter, even derision, especially from “establishment” energy types like the major oil companies, Daniel Yergin and his Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and so forth.

Well, I’ll bet that, after a $20/bbl rise in oil prices in less than two months, nobody’s laughing now.

In terms of inflation, oil prices are now up to where they were in 1979, during the second oil embargo, the Iranian-originated embargo after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. Gasoline prices at the pump are approaching their late-summer 2005 post-hurricane peak.
But, we haven’t had the same hurricane destructiveness of Gulf of Mexico production as caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita two years ago. And, nobody’s embargoing oil production, unlike 1979-80.

So, what’s causing the problem?

Answer below the fold.


Part of it is recent world geopolitical instability. Oil producers wonder if Dick Cheney’s sabers rattling about Iran, or Turkey’s similar stance about the Kurdish portion of Iraq, are real.

However, those worries reflect a deeper problem. World oil supply is straining so hard to keep pace with demand that even small disruptions in output somewhere are feared to have potentially major consequences.

Some people may wonder, “Where’s Saudi Arabia in all this?”

Well, the Saudis have made noise the last couple of years about being ready to pick up any slack in the system, any time, but what if that’s just hot air?

What if Saudi production is at its peak and can’t go up any more?

Years ago, that idea, like Pickens’ prediction, would have been laughed at. Some people still laugh at it.

But, the idea of Peak Oil, like $100/bbl oil, just may not be laughable after all.

The basic concept is that oil, like coal, gold and other extracted minerals, is not a readily renewable resource. Ergo, world production will someday pump out half of the oil that is extractable. This will be less than 50 percent of total oil in the world; drops in wellhead and oilfield pressure, and other geological considerations, mean that 100 percent of the oil is never recovered from any field.

The idea first arose in relation to U.S. oil production in the 1950s. Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert started wondering when U.S. oil production would peak. In a 1956 paper, he said that period would be sometime between the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In the early 1970s, it became clear that U.S. production peaked in 1970, and Hubbert was hailed as an oilfield prophet.

The next idea was obvious: extend the specific analytical tools and techniques he applied to U.S. production to world production.

Hubbert did, and came up with the late 1990s. However, that clearly didn’t happen.
Unfortunately, people like the aforementioned Yergin used that fact to pooh-pooh Hubbert’s prediction in particular and the idea of a looming oil peak in general as ridiculous.

In hindsight, it instead appears that the 1973-74 and 1979-80 oil embargos, combined with separate 1979-80 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries price hikes, increased U.S. conservation so much as to reset the peak.
Peak Oil naysayers claim that technological improvements in conventional oilfield drilling, such as horizontal drilling, and production of nonconventional oil such as that in Canada’s oil sands, will push the peak back even further. However, Hubbert had factored in technological, exploration site and production improvements as part of his analytical tools.

Is a worldwide peak near?

I’d say it can’t be too far off. OPEC member Indonesia is now, despite the name of OPEC, an oil importer, for example. Another example: The United Kingdom has seen its North Sea reserves decline so rapidly that it is, again, an oil importer, and because of its amount of use, went from hitting its production export to becoming a net importer in just six years. Mexico, due to increasing demand and an apparent peak in its production, is seeing its exports decline by 10 percent a year and could be a net importer in not too many more years.

Dallas petroleum geologist Jeff Brown, with his Export-Land Model, has done extensive research modeling on the double whammy of major oil producers having exploding internal demand even as their production peaks.

And, Peak Oil is different from global warming.

First, with exceptions for faster temperature change in polar reasons, the effects of global warming will equalize around the world.

Not so with Peak Oil. Different countries have different oil dependencies and we are No. 1.

In other words, a country like Afghanistan or Zimbabwe, with little automotive traffic and little jet travel, has little distance to “fall” from its peak oil usage. We, on the other hand, are near, if not at, the edge of an oil consumption Grand Canyon — a precipice that could be more catastrophic than global warming fallout.

For more on Peak Oil, visit the group blog The Oil Drum at www.theoildrum.com.

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Closing in on a hundred dollars a barrel

Wow. We are going to see hundred-dollar per barrel oil. Maybe today, maybe next week, maybe it will take longer. But I would bet a hundred bucks that we will definitely see it by year end. The dollar is simply too weak to manipulate the markets to prevent it. I'm no econ wizard (I don't even balance my own checkbook, I have a banker I went to high school with do that for me) but Bernanke at the Fed is unnerving. Hell, it scares me spitless. The best analogy I can conjure - It's like a counterfeiter has authentic plates & linen paper, and access to a quality press...But I digress, as is my wont...

Light sweet crude traded at $96.24/bbl. on Thursday, the highest price oil has ever realized.

[keep reading]

I've said it before, and I will say it again...we are witnessing a realignment of world economic and political power, it is realigning along an energy axis, and future historians are going to write about the time in which we live as the "Emergence of the Resource Wars."

If we don't get a handle on this stuff, and do so double-time, the future is bleak. If you like the oil wars, you are gonna love the pending water wars.

There is a new reality in town. The countries producing energy are sitting in what is commonly known as "the catbirds seat." But the US? Not so much. The oil-rich countries, like Russia and Iran, are not going to be cowed by Yankee bluster any more. They have oil, and the emerging Asian economies have an insatiable appetite for the sticky black stuff, and the odorless clear stuff - and the ability to pay for it. The desperation of the Bush Administration as the reality about Iran sets in is growing palpable.

The Bush administration is desperate to stop the long-planned India-Pakistan-I ran (IPI) Pipeline, which will deliver Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) to the subcontinent. The U.S. would much prefer that India satisfy their energy needs with nuclear energy via a deal with the United States that has been stalled. Never mind that Indo-Persian relations are over 2000 years old, that Persian was the language of literature and government on the subcontinent until the 1800's. (But these jokers have no use for history, sociology nor anthropology.)

The United States seems bent on clinging to obsolete modes of thinking. It simply makes no sense to invest all of our blood and treasure into securing what's left of a sdwindling resource. Which, by the way, is so chemically unique and versatile, that I am nonplussed that it is simply burned for fuel! Of course, I understand why...it's greed. If you make electric cars that don't burn petrol, every soccer mom in America wouldn't be forking over a hundred bucks a week to Big Oil. It's drug-dealer economics - get 'em addicted and they keep coming back, until they are either dead or desperate enough to go through the pain and agony of cold-turkey withdrawal.

If we were serious about taking concrete steps to counter the coming energy crisis, we wouldn't be fighting a war for oil (and Hubbert, by the way, was an optimist) we would be undertaking a Manhattan Project for energy independence.

Some things are too important to be left to private industry, and responsible energy policy is one of them. Private industry is profit driven. Period. If there is no maximized profit motive, there is no reason to pursue a particular path. It is in the interest of big energy that we remain beholden and dependent upon their products. Thats econ 101.

We should have been working on these problems for the last 30 years, but instead the decision was made to fiddle while Rome burned, the problems could be punted to the next generation. And those of us who were agitating for responsible energy policy were dismissed as cranks, spoil-sports, worry-warts, and Nervous Nellies.

Well, we got the last laugh - except there is no humor in this situation. It's time to deal with reality, because reality is not going to have any qualms about dealing with us.

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German energy group: Peak Oil hit last year

The German-based Energy Watch Group says world production to fall in half by 2030 with a 7 percent per year decline.

“The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the world economy,” said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG's founder and the German MP behind the country's successful support system for renewable energy.

The report’s author, Joerg Schindler, said its most alarming finding was the steep decline in oil production after its peak, which he says is now behind us.

The results are in contrast to projections from the International Energy Agency, which says there is little reason to worry about oil supplies at the moment.

Well, the IEA has its head buried up its energy ass almost as far as Daniel Yergin does. It’s no surprise that it claims “all is well.”

Read the story; more and more mainstream energy analysts will be posting similar analyses and we’re going to see a lot of push-back.

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Subprime crisis moves right into prime-market loans

Countrywide Financial has prime-level mortgages at least 30 days late increase more than 250 percent:

Shares of Countrywide Financial Corp. tumbled today after the nation's biggest mortgage lender signaled that rising defaults and delinquencies are spreading beyond the troubled sub-prime market to higher-quality "prime" loans.

The Calabasas-based company reported a 33 percent drop in its second-quarter profit and slashed its outlook for the rest of the year, citing an “increasingly challenging” housing market. ...

Countrywide said payments were at least 30 days late at the end of second quarter on 4.56 percent of prime home-equity loans serviced by the company, up from 1.77 percent a year earlier.

Payments were late on 23.71 percent of sub-prime mortgage loans, up from 15.33 percent at the end of the same period in 2006, the company said.

What does this have to do with “watching those we choose”?

Bill Clinton said, 15 years ago: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

I give you 1-3 odds we’re in a recession in 12 months. It will be the economy, again, as well as Iraq, on the presidential and congressional campaign trails.

I increase those odds to 1-2 by Jan. 20, 2009, especially if Bloomberg’s is right about $100/bbl oil. Whoever is elected president will have to deal with this.

Update: DuPont was among slumping stocks today, with profit projections tumbling due to a decline in housing starts, home remodeling and related business affecting demand for countertops.

Cross-posted at Socratic Gadfly. (Both the subprime crisis/housing bubble and Peak Oil are blogged extensively at my blog.)

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Cheney energy task force: Why didn’t an enviro group just spill the beans?

OK, we now officially know who sat in on Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in spring 2001. It had everybody from the American Petroleum Institute to Defenders of Wildlife.

Here's what I don't get.

There were representatives from legitimate enviro groups that sat in on task force meetings.

I know the meetings were on different dates, but did Cheney never mention a thing about energy companies during meetings with environmental groups? Why didn't somebody just spill the beans and leak this? Even a minor leak?

What, the vice president who’s addicted to secrecy is going to sue you over leaking information, leading to even more of it coming out in court?

Or, if Cheney remained absolutely close-mouthed, why did environmental groups decide to participate in the process at all?

Frankly, it does raise the cynicism hackles a bit, making me wonder if some groups like to keep the confrontational pot boiling because it makes for better fundraising. By participating in the process, they got some talking points; by harping on the secrecy theme without doing something different about it, they got much bigger talking points.

Cross-posted at Socratic Gadfly

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