Keith, good post. I'm not sure if I've already sent this but at the beginning of this month I grabbed an article from WP addressing the same theme, that OIL is not the reason behind the Bush drive to invade Iraq. I've snipped a portion here in case anyone else is interested.
A CRUDE VIEW OF THE CRISIS IN IRAQ By Daniel Yergin @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21166-2002Dec6.html Sunday, December 8, 2002 If oil is the question, Iraq is not the answer. Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, is author of "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power," which won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. He is co-author of "Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy" (Touchstone). Essentially, Yergin argues that it will too much time for development of new fields, too much repair to the old fields, too much work to transportation means and hell to pay sorting through the competing contracts in place vs those that want to be signed ASAP for OIL to be the primary reason Pres. Bush is hell-bent for Baghdad. My knowledge of the oil brokering and developing end of oil may be better than most couch potatoes, but not professional grade. However, I know that research and sales look much further out than do fashion trends and the auto industry, so I'm not sure that claiming Iraq is not another case of Resource Wars, though Yergin makes an articulate case in this article. Maybe the powers-that-be have decided here in the Fourth Quarter 2002 it's time to make a public case that the oil cartels and their bankers, their construction friends, their parts suppliers and their insurers are NOT salivating at the prospect of work that could guarantee jobs and bonuses for the next 20 years. If this were not just too FOREIGN and complicated an issue to stay focused for many Americans, today's current events includes a piece about upcoming car models from Detroit, something that seems to interest a large portion of the populace, that emphasizes the Wall Street mindset that dominates Energy policy and business politics in the US, if not the West entirely. Revolutionizing or, at least redirecting, the transportation industry at so many levels requires government commitment, not just market-driven entrepreneurs with a vision. We're not talking about new energy-efficient light bulbs and the tungsten market in China here. No one will move seriously beyond R&D until they know that the government is serious. This Bush government isn't Just for fun, can you imagine what a difference it would make if a Pres. Gore were pushing the UN for a resolution to invade Iraq? Without the drippy baggage of Big Oil on Mr. Earth in the Balance who worked on disarmament programs, the global public debate about war in the Middle East would be significantly different. - Karen A FIRST STEP TO CUTTING RELIANCE ON OIL By Tom Redburn, NYT, 12.15.02 @ http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/business/yourmoney/15VIEW.html?8bhp Which events of recent days are likely to have the most significant long-term impact on American business and the economy? To my mind, it was not the Bush administration's new team of economic policy makers, who dominated the headlines last week. Nor the efforts to clean up Wall Street. And not the buildup of troops to fight a war in Iraq, either. No, my money is on the barely noticed introduction by Honda and Toyota of a handful of experimental fuel cell vehicles to be tested by the State of California. The possibility of running cars on fuel cells has been heavily promoted in business circles in recent years, and for good reason. Imagine a global economy no longer dependent on oil and the internal combustion engine. Fuel cells, because they produce energy from pure hydrogen rather than from petroleum, emit only water and heat as waste, potentially generating power without burning fossil fuels. By making it possible to shift from petroleum to other primary energy sources, fuel cells could ease the threat of global warming without taking away the freedom and mobility that Americans and Europeans take for granted - and the rest of the world is determined to get for itself. China and India, with more than one-third of the world's population, could sustain rapid growth for decades without choking the sky with pollutants and climate-damaging carbon dioxide. But this vision of a truly sustainable economic future is far from inevitable. The technological challenges to building a commercially successful fuel cell vehicle are overwhelming. And who would supply them? Recasting the entire petroleum-based infrastructure to produce and deliver hydrogen safely to hundreds of millions of such vehicles presents a classic chicken-and-egg problem of immense proportions. Every major automaker and oil company has a hydrogen or fuel cell research effort under way; supporters say they recognize that fossil fuels can't last forever. Environmentalists carp that industry is simply trying to preserve the status quo and avoid more immediate steps to improve the fuel efficiency of conventional automobiles. In a generally positive article on the efforts of General Motors to reinvent the automobile, Wired magazine noted that Rick Wagoner, G.M.'s chief executive, likes to call the fuel cell car "the holy grail," but that the description "may be a truer assessment than he intends. " After all, as David Redstone, editor of Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Investor, a newsletter, told the magazine: "The holy grail is something you spend your entire life looking for. The whole point is that you never find it." No one knows for sure whether a hydrogen economy is a possible dream. "The oil companies and automakers are not doing this because they want to kill it," said Steven Taub, an expert on alternative fuels at Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Cambridge, Mass. "But they are not doing this because they know it's the future, either. They're doing it because they don't know whether or not it's the future." It's worth the risk to find out. Bolstered by modest support from the government and a new commitment from the Bush administration, American automakers and other companies are already investing in fuel cell research. But an effort to put tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of vehicles on the road within a decade, which many analysts regard as feasible, would require a substantial commitment from Washington to help jump-start the market and support the investment in a supply infrastructure. THIS shouldn't mean giving up on less ambitious efforts, as both the White House and the auto industry have done in abandoning the research program to build a very fuel-efficient car using existing technology. If nothing else, as an insurance policy to avoid being usurped again by Japanese automakers, Detroit should also be investing more in fuel-efficient hybrid electric-gasoline vehicles like the Toyota Prius. True, big federal programs like the Interstate System of highways, the development of the Internet and the creation of the semiconductor chip (which grew out of the space program) have gone out of fashion. But even in an era in which markets have rightly assumed a much greater role in allocating resources, government commitment is needed to set ambitious goals in crucial areas. And when the nation is preparing to spend at least $100 billion to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein and much more to maintain stability in the Persian Gulf, nothing is more crucial than investing a fraction of that sum to help liberate the world economy from its addiction to Middle East oil. Snipped in half: Keith wrote: Your posting enclosing David R. Francis's excellent article on the "lumpiness" of the distribution of key resources has sent me off at a tangent -- but only a slight one. Unlike Harry and one or two more, I believe that George W. Bush is of about average intelligence and thus way below the abilities that one might reasonably expect of an American President. (Incidentally, I deplore the ad hominem attacks on Bush by listing his linguistic mistakes -- so frequently seen on the Net. Now he's got over the stress of the interviews early in his tenure, he's shown himself quite a fluent talker -- within the range of his own vocabulary.) Indeed, I'm increasingly coming to the view that Bush's decisions over Iraq so far are so crazy that more must be involved than any sort of rational decision-making by Bush alone on behalf of the American people. With his exceedingly limited knowledge of foreign matters, he's just not capable of any sort of strategy, crazy or otherwise. What has triggered me off is hearing yet another apparently objective observer say in convincing tones that the Iraq crisis is not about oil. The latest one was a Tory MP on BBC TV Question Time a couple of days ago. He said that he'd been an oil trader before he became an MP and, because of his past experience, he'd like to assure the studio audience and all viewers that "Iraq was not about oil". He (I've forgotten his name) went on to say that it doesn't matter who owns Iraqi (or Saudi Arabian) oil because the market will distribute it efficiently and cheaply. Well . . . let's not argue about the quasi-free market of oil for now . . . what was significant is that he didn't go on to say that the market (for cheap oil, cheap gas, cheap energy) won't last for more than a decade or two longer. He didn't go on to say that, although the supply of oil and gas is not a crucial problem at the moment, it is soon going to be. Do we think for one minute that the US State Department has not *intensively* studied the costs and supply of oil, gas and other (much more expensive) alternative fossil fuels? Of course it has. The whole top establishment layer of America, England and other developed countries must know that the future of oil supplies will be the *only* game in town in 10/20/30 years. Bush and those who are behind him (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush Snr, Carlyle Group [including the bin Laden family], various oil companies, and probably Kissinger's bunch of corporate clients) are as aware of this as anybody else in that top information-privileged layer. They must also be aware that China's economy has the potential of being at least two or three times larger then America's in 30 years' time - and that China's demands for cheap Middle East oil will be much greater than America's within about 10-15 years if present growth rates are maintained. Therefore, unless America and China are going to fall out in a big way, it's imperative that Iraqi oil (about one third to one half Saudi's reserves) must come into full play as soon as possible (oil fields take 10 to 20 years to fully develop). America doesn't want to fall out with China, of course, because (a) it would be exceedingly messy, and (b) China is such a huge market for American corporations (and, also, its prosperity will pay for many ordinary Americans' pensions in the future). But there'll be tension, of course. However, if America can get preferential rights to Iraqi oil in much the same way that it has had to Saudi Arabian oil for the past 50 years, then American corporations will feel a little better. And, if a consortium consisting of the group behind George W Bush gets preferential rights to Iraqi oil then all the better because they know that they'll probably have to share more and more of Saudi oil with China. (And Tony Blair must be deeply involved in this, too. The mysterious Carlyle Group behind Bush bought an important [R&D] chunk of UK's Defence Department recently -- very quietly and very mysteriously.) Outgoing Mail Scanned by NAV 2002
