White House: Global Warming Is Good For You:
Olivier Knox, Agence France Presse’s man in the White House Press Corps, alerted me to a funny moment he wrote about today. One tenet of the White House’s policy on climate change is, apparently, “What, me worry?”
On Wednesday, spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters that US experts were trying to determine “what are going to be the health benefits and the health concerns of climate change, of which there are many.”
Asked to detail what the benefits would be, Perino replied: “Look, this is an issue where I’m sure lots of people would love to ridicule me when I say this.”
“But it is true that many people die from cold-related deaths every winter. And there are studies that say that climate change in certain areas of the world would help those individuals,” she added. “I’m not an expert.”
Holy crap. This one is so boneheaded, so willfully, destructively, and inanely wrong that I don’t ven know where to start.
This past May, in an unheralded and almost unnoticed move, the Energy Department signaled a fundamental, near epochal shift in US and indeed world history: we are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency. The department stopped talking about “oil” in its projections of future petroleum availability and began speaking of “liquids.” The global output of “liquids,” the department indicated, would rise from 84 million barrels of oil equivalent (mboe) per day in 2005 to a projected 117.7 mboe in 2030–barely enough to satisfy anticipated world demand of 117.6 mboe. Aside from suggesting the degree to which oil companies have ceased being mere suppliers of petroleum and are now purveyors of a wide variety of liquid products–including synthetic fuels derived from natural gas, corn, coal and other substances–this change hints at something more fundamental: we have entered a new era of intensified energy competition and growing reliance on the use of force to protect overseas sources of petroleum.
A longish, highly recommended piece with a more mainstream-audience approach than many things I link to. But please note that I’m not as convinced we’re locked into a militaristic future for our energy policy as Klare is in this article and his books.
Michael T. Klare is one of the handful of authors I put on my “read every word they write” list. Others on said list include James Hansen, Matt Simmons, Dave Cohen, Fred Pearce, and George Monbiot.
Oil rises back above $89 on OPEC report:
Oil futures jumped back above $89 a barrel Thursday on news that OPEC production increases aren’t coming as fast as expected and that the cartel won’t announce new output quotas when it meets next month.
Prices were already higher on growing concerns about conflict in the Middle East and declining supplies of crude in the U.S. when Oil Movements, a company that tracks oil tanker traffic, reported that crude shipments from Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries members will grow more slowly than anticipated through early November, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
Meanwhile, OPEC Secretary General Abdalla el-Badri told The Wall Street Journal Asia that the cartel is not in discussions to boost production by 500,000 barrels. El-Badri’s comments counter rumors that Saudi Arabia is pushing for a production increase. In September, OPEC bowed to Saudi pressure and announced a production increase of 500,000 barrels a day, effective Nov. 1.
That story was from yesterday. Overnight, oil hit a new intra day high of $92.22, and is at $91.17 as I type this.
Everyone is focused on the Bush’s announcement of sanctions against Iran and the continuing discussion that his administration is intent on attacking Iran before leaving office. While that would be an unmitigated disaster on more than one front, this news of OPEC’s reluctance to raise output levels further is more interesting, even though it received very little attention.
I’ve said countless times (or so it must seem to readers of this site) that we were headed for a showdown this year with OPEC over oil supplies. I was far from alone in this prediction; if anything, I think it was so obviously in the cards that it shouldn’t really be called a prediction, more a recognition of the inevitable.
As for what it means, just hop on over to the TWIP page and check the graphs on the left side of the screen showing the spot prices for oil and gasoline. We’re at a time of the year when these price normally go into a pretty marked swoon, and instead they’re taking off.
Unless something changes pretty drastically between now and the time when prices normally ramp up in about four months, we’re in for one hell of a ride.
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October 26th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
I’m afraid I have to take issue with a couple of things you’ve said here.
The first is that there will be health benefits from global warming. Well, of course there will be. The IPCC estimates that health problems will outweigh the benefits, but it doesn’t deny that benefits will exist. And from what I have seen it appears that the problems will mostly be in equatorial Third World companies while benefits will come from temperate zone and polar countries, which tend to be richer. That is perhaps an unfortunate distribution but it does mean that from a certain narrow perspective, someone who is elected to defend the interests of the United States of America (rather than the interests of the whole world) may be justified in looking at whether global warming is a net benefit or hazard specifically to the health of the American public. I don’t see it as boneheaded or inane at all.
I’m not sure whether you disagree that GW may be beneficial in some ways to northern countries, or dislike the Administration’s values in focusing so narrowly on the American situation while disregarding larger global impacts.
On another point, you’ve mentioned a few times that spot oil prices usually fall in, well, the fall. But actually that is not the case. Look at a ten-year oil price chart like this one:
http://static.seekingalpha.com/wp-content/seekingalpha/images/OilPrices.GIF
It’s true that in 2004 and 2005 we had a peak in summer and then a drop. But in 2003, prices climbed the last few months; in 2002, December had the highest prices of the year; in 2001, prices fell all year long, and so on. I don’t see a consistent pattern of prices falling in the last three or four months of the year, at least not in the past decade or so.
October 26th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Written as someone from a country that looks like being almost entirely negatively effected (Australia), such a narrow focus of the US administration is very unwelcome. I don’t even see that it even is in the USA’s best interest, given the degree it’s economy is tied to international trade, and it’s security is ultimately effected by how it’s policies effect other nations.