It´s the Oil Price, Stupit – Moon of Alabama

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August 4, 2004

It´s the Oil Price, Stupit

Oil expected to hit $50 US
Calgary Sun

Consumer Spending Drop Largest in 3 Years
Forbes

Year over year US inflation rate (CPI-U) 2004: Jan 1.9%, Feb 1.7%, Mar 1.7%, Apr 2.3%, May 3.1%, Jun 3.3%

“Going into the 1992 campaign, then-President George H. W. Bush had poll ratings of 90 percent in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But he lost the election to a former Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, who built his campaign around this mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid.” In a Gallup Poll conducted only a month before the election, Americans by 3 to 1 said they trusted Bush more than Clinton on international affairs. But on which candidate they preferred to manage the economy, they gave Clinton a huge advantage.

St.Petersburg Times, April 2003

Shouldn´t Kerwards hammer these points?

Posted by b on August 4, 2004 at 10:37 UTC | Permalink

Comments

You know how the Progessive’s online McCarthyism watch?
In one of the articles this appears:

The reaction from the Bush supporters was immediate, says Egolf.

“They called us scumbags and faggots,” he says. “One guy came up to us and said, ‘I don’t care how many people we have to kill as long as my gasoline prices are lower.’ “

Remember all those dire warnings about how the world will heat up with hostility as resources dwindle?
Well guess what?
The Indians and Chinese also want two cars in every garage. They are sick of pedaling those dumb bikes.
And really…shouldn’t they have as much right to hang a tailpipe or two in atmosphere as much as anyone else?
So here we are, on the backass side of the cusp towards armed conflict for ever-diminishing resources.
One party talks a lot about energy independence.
Another party talks a lot about 9/11 terrorists crossing through Iran.
Gee…do you suppose Iran has oil fields?
You say this elections is about Tweedledee and Tweedledum?
I say it is between Gallant (right) and Goofus (might).
Gallant wants to look for oil alternatives using the tools of science and tax breaks.
Goofus will use his superior weaponry to attempt to sate his unending thirst for oil.
That is why I often write: This is the most important election in the history of our world.
Things are accelerating exponentially.
Four more years of Goofus botching the world up with his scowl and his weapons… will prove horribly decisive. In fact, democracy won’t matter any more. The course will be decided. The world will be nothing but a conflict of Goofuses until its bitter end.
It is Gallant now, or it is Gallant not at all.

Posted by: koreyel | Aug 4 2004 14:43 utc | 1

I’m with you on that Koreyel.

Posted by: sukabi | Aug 4 2004 17:48 utc | 2

new billmon post!

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 4 2004 17:51 utc | 3

Oh pullease. When it comes to OIL dependence, it’s more like goofus 1 or goofus 2.
“One party talks a lot about energy independence.” Yeah, lots of Talk, but no action.
What did Bill Clinton ever do to reduce our dependence on Oil? Why did Gore save the alternative energy targeted tax cuts for his presidential campaign [the proposals were inadequate by the way]instead of doing it during the 8 years of CLinton Gore? And if you answer ‘Republican Congress’, then why didn’t the Democrats do something about it during all the years they had control of Congress?
The only oil problem the voters are complaining about is the price of gas. The democrats don’t want to be blamed for high gas prices either. They’d ‘do whatever it takes’ in order to keep the addicted voters happy.
And do you think Kerry is going to be the one to tell us we can’t have our more frequent air travel, our 3 cars in the garage of our air conditioned McMansions?
Kerry will have to face the music just like Bush. The world’s oil supply is dwindling, the world demand for oil is rising and if we want to continue our standard of living, WE MUST HAVE CONTROL OF IT.
THe lipservice you get from the democrats is just that.
Unfortunately it is going to take total depletion before the oil companies and the politicians, both left and right, turn away from war for oil. Only then will they try something different.
I agree with your main point that the Bushies are covering up the blood for oil strategy by calling it blood for democracy or blood for freedom. Which of course it isn’t, but even if they called it what it is, the democrats including Kerry don’t object to the blood for oil strategy. They voted for it.
In the meantime if you really want to influence the oil-and-politics game, drop your consumption. Put your money where your mouth is. Use public transportation, take fewer long distance vacations, move your family into a townhome instead of a big detached house, buy solar panels, keep the thermostat at levels that reduce energy consumption, grow a vegetable garden instead of a lawn, recycle, invest in renewable energy companies…. But don’t put your faith in politicians to fix our oil dependency problem any time soon. You’ll be disappointed. Again.

Posted by: gylangirl | Aug 4 2004 18:18 utc | 4

Meanwhile we need a stable pipeline and a port to guzzle that black gold

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 4 2004 19:10 utc | 5

Oil going to at least 80$/b or more is the only way to make us (developed countries), and the US in particular, change our attitude to energy.
– Only really higher prices will lead to behavior changes (worrying about MPG, thinking about public transportation, saving electricity on light, AC, etc…).
– Only really higher prices will make substitutes worthwhile to consider (renewable energy, especially wind, changes in industrial production and infrastructure policy, investment-intensive energy savings).
The good thing about oil prices is that they apply to everybody around the world, so you cannot complain about it being unfair. Energy-intensive users (drivers) and industries will complain, but it is precisely these that need to change, and higher prices imposed from the outside is the only way to do it.
Remember that US oil consumption reached the 1979 level in 1998 again, after dropping significantly, so it works.
In the US, you have the additional “benefit” that taxes being so low, (i) it will be felt even more than elsewhere and (ii) higher prices cannot be compensated for by lowering these taxes, as Europe could conceivably do (but should not).
High oil prices are good news in the long run.

Posted by: Jérôme | Aug 4 2004 21:13 utc | 6

@Jerome:
Where the hell you been?
I thought my insider reports on oil shale, etc. were “in the mail”.
God, I’m glad I didn’t hold my breath.

Posted by: FLASHHARRY | Aug 4 2004 21:21 utc | 7

Harry – Hey, I did post once on Yukos!!
Actually, I was on holiday, in a very remote area of central France, with only very slow internet access available
Have been trying to complete a long text “control of oil”. My intention is to share it with you guys here ASAP… but after 3 weeks off, the e-mail in-tray back at work is quite massive, as you can imagine, and now that everybody else is on holiday (it’s August now, after all), I’m the only one around to do whatever’s to be done (ExxonMobil wants a few billion $$ for its Qatari projects). To be continued.
I have read you guys faithfully.

Posted by: Jérôme | Aug 4 2004 21:48 utc | 8

@Jerome:
Thought you might have been up in the vastness of Alberta with John Hays Hammond, sampling, surveying, etc.–and the bears ate you.
Look forward over here–at your leisure–to thoughts on wind power.

Posted by: FLASHHARRY | Aug 4 2004 22:16 utc | 9

Welcome back Jérôme:
High oil prices are good news in the long run.
I couldn’t agree more. And the quicker the higher the better.
There is a quote in my brain. Can’t remember the source but can remember the quote:
Mankind will behave rationally only after he has exhausted all other possibilities.
The trick here is to get some rationality before the oil gets exhausted.
Oil is a miracle fluid.
One gallon can carry a person on the back of a scooter 100 miles. Or it can carry one obese American in an SUV tank 10 miles to and fro to a grocery store for a loaf a bread.
Forsooth and for shame.
The SUV is essentially a crude sin against the chemical energy so painfully stored over eons in the form of hydrocarbons.
You know this. And I know this. But the dumb ass market place does not.
Ergo–higher prices are our only chance of surviving as a coherent species on the road to global goverment.
Otherwise it is going to be… islands of irrationality in seas of chaos with the Dick Cheneys of the world thumping their flabby breasts like would-be Tarzans.
And the problem with that is…these Dicks don’t rely on natural goodness to carry the day.
They use guns. They blast people away with one hand while picking their teeth with the other.

Posted by: koreyel | Aug 4 2004 22:32 utc | 10

Welcome back, Jérôme!
Anothe reason why we need outrageous oil prices NOW: The beginning of the end has come.
Obviously, the author touches to what has been my definitive conclusion for the last 15 years about mankind’s future and only way to survival – well, he stops short of actually writing what it really means, but it’s close enough:
No matter how much we carpool or how quickly we switch to compact fluorescent bulbs, we won’t be able to do enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert disaster, writes Gelbspan. “By persuading concerned citizens to cut back on their personal energy use, these groups are promoting the implicit message that climate change can be solved by individual resolve. It cannot.”
(…)
And this is really the scariest thing about “Boiling Point” — not the now-familiar doomsday scenarios of melting glaciers, rising seas and mass extinctions. More terrifying is what Gelbspan thinks must happen if we are to have any hope of curbing it: massive, global international cooperation on an unprecedented level. The prospect is frightening because of how unlikely any hope of reaching it seems right now.
(…)
Only regulatory measures this drastic, and involving such a level of international unity have a chance of stemming global warming, argues Gelbspan.

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Aug 5 2004 10:19 utc | 11

@koreyel – strong and moving post!
@clueless joe – I am not so pessimistic as you are. Maybe it is irrational, but I cannot get myself to worry about global warming and climate change. Will it bring only bad (think Siberia for instance)? Will we not be able to adapt to whatever happens?
Will the cost of such gradual adaptation to changing circumstances be necessarily more than the cost to try to prevent what we fear/guess may happen, without even knowing if it will be successful?
I genuinely do not know, but I do not like the tone and the attitude of the “doomsters” cottage industry and their apparent refusal to listen to other points of view (see how Bjorn Lomberg, “the sceptical environmentalist’ was trashed in ways more fitting at Halliburton). I know they are fighting “Big Oil” and “Big Industry”, but still…

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 5 2004 16:15 utc | 12

There won’t be “gradual adaptation”. That’s a joke. It’s way too quick to have the environment adapt without long-term damages, and it’s too quick for most societies to actually adapt either.
And yes, it WILL be bad, for basically everyone, and for a long time. Siberia will just be turned into a huge swamp, full of malaria-propagating mosquitoes, if it’s warmed enough.
What is ironical is Kerry saying he would try to renegotiate Kyoto and wouldn’t just dump it. Well, that’s foolish from him, because we have so much more information now that any “renegotiation” would mean that far stronger measures should be taken to actually have the effects the Kyoto protocol was meant to have.
OH, and as far as I’m concerned, Lomberg is just a friggin traitor. But I understand people would have a kinder opinion of him, like saying he’s a fraud, or just a tool, a useful idiot in the paw Big Business. But that’s basically the same behaviour than Big Tobacco, who actually knew since the 1950s that smoking killed people, and hired teams of “scientists” to come with studies proving there was no link, and to discredit the serious genuine and true research that showed there was a real risk; and that went on until the early 90s.
But of course I don’t think only of global warming but of all the other crap mankind, overpopulation of rabbits, err, humans, and rampaging industrialisation, has caused and is causing nowadays.
If mankind has to adapt to a wasteland closer to Mars than to our current (and past) green Earth, I’d rather see it go extinct with the rest of the planet, except for a few insects, worms and bacteria.

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Aug 5 2004 16:39 utc | 13

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