Wednesday, June 21, 2006
The good oil
The China Daily says that Stephen Hawking has huge influence in the People's Republic.
So his expressed penchant for Chinese women as well as his concern that the warming earth is looking at a future as barren as Venus may receive due attention there.
As to the latter, one must sincerely hope so.
Any sudden great leaps forward, in recent years, along the global road to Venus-like barrenness must be attributed at least in part to concomitant increases in crude oil consumption within China and India, the earth's two most populous countries and two of the boom kids on the economic block of the noughties.
China and India were pretty much given a free pass at Kyoto. The focus there was on the United States. Some said that state of affairs smacked of power politics, as has the recent jump in crude oil prices.
Crude producers like Venezuela and Iran have accentuated anti-Americanness on the political stage and yet, in the western media, a bony finger has been pointed long and hard at American and West European oil companies as the real culprits at back of the petroleum price squeeze.
No matter. The fact remains that crude oil supplies must be finite, though the nearness of finiteness appears often to be exaggerated. The facts also remain that via the bloated coffers of Iranians, Saudis and Venezuelans goes terrorist sponsorhip, and that all in the street know that.
Said street is often a smoggy one, more so in China perhaps, and so all can easily dream of cleaner energy initiatives and applaud as same are unleashed.
Hence a great deal of political capital is there to be made in the ground sowed by Pete du Pont in the WSJ today, being the same ground boldly highlighted by the US President in his last State of the Union address, and the same ground that left-reviled "Japan Inc" has adventurously and successfully staked a green banner upon.
Senator Hillary Clinton, late of New York and early in the Bush succession running, is described by du Pont as favouring "reducing our dependence on foreign oil by at least 50% by 2025", while opposing all realistic means by which said goal can be achieved.
Drilling in Alaska is one of those realistic and politically incorrect means, and du Pont describes a would-be future first gentleman's contribution to that state of affairs thus:
In 1995 Mr. Clinton vetoed a budget bill that would have allowed oil exploration and drilling in part of the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Prudhoe Bay fields, just to the west of ANWR, have delivered 15 billion barrels of oil through the Alaska pipeline to the U.S. market without damage to Alaskan land, caribou or other wildlife. ANWR contains 10 billion barrels of oil, so Mr. Clinton's veto today is costing America about a million barrels of oil each day. Yet Congress has repeatedly defeated efforts to open ANWR to exploration.
As the Heritage Foundation points out, the U.S. "is the only nation in the world that has placed a significant amount of its potential domestic energy supplies off-limits."
Mrs and Mr Clinton also, of course, oppose the building of politically incorrect nuclear power plants, the last of the 104 such plants in the US having been built 3 decades ago. Du Pont says these 104 plants:
"decrease by 700 million tons the CO2 released into our atmosphere each year"
and that, due to an initiative of President Bush perhaps to be vetoed by (a) future President(s) Clinton, 25 new nuclear plants are under consideration.
In a similar vein, Mrs Clinton opposes the drilling of bountiful natural gas supplies accessible to the United States, and favours increase in the federally subsidized supply of ethanol, even though huge amounts of crude oil - enough to defeat the purpose of producing it - are required to move the ethanol from soy bean to gas tank.
