(Reminder to self: Practice rubbing sticks together to start fire.)
I wonder how all this "...plays in Peoria."?
Just a (peak oil) reminder from The Blade, Toledo Ohio
OPINION: Oil shockwaves
7/7/2005
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/12078293.htm
Jul. 7--Oil prices spike. Ethnic unrest causes the Nigerian petroleum industry to collapse. Al-Qaeda terrorists attack and cripple key oil facilities in Saudi Arabia and Valdez, Alaska. Within weeks, gasoline prices shoot past $5 a gallon.
The economy reels toward recession.
That scenario, which sounds disturbingly plausible, was played out in Washington recently in a war-game simulation by a group of former federal officials striving to learn how effectively the U.S. government could react to a series of disruptions in the world oil economy.
Their verdict? Government could do distressingly little to protect the economy because, as the Washington Post reported, "tolerances are so tight between supply and demand that even small disruptions in the delivery of oil and natural gas can cause cascades of unpleasant developments."
The exercise, based on what its organizers said were realistic, non-extreme assumptions, should indicate to every thinking American that this nation needs a real energy policy, and soon.
More to the point, the policy will have to go far beyond the drill and burn schemes contained in the Bush Administration's pending energy legislation.
Fuel-economy standards for motor vehicles must be toughened substantially to help the country free itself from an increasing dependence on petroleum products, whether from North America or imported from overseas.
The United States needs to wean itself from oil that we now consider crucial to our industrial economy. In cases such as fuel-economy improvement, the technology to do so -- like hybrid power plants for cars -- already exists. Government leaders must find the political courage to mandate these changes and not be content to soft-peddle the dangers of failing to act.
Drawing down the federal strategic oil reserve would be only a temporary stop-gap measure, as the crisis simulators learned; there is little oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and solutions such as hydrogen fuel-cells to power automobiles without petroleum are too far off to be of any help soon.
"The American people are going to pay a terrible price for not having had an energy strategy," predicted one of the participants, former CIA Director Robert Gates.
Other actors in this nightmare drama included another former CIA chief, R. James Woolsey; Gen. P.X. Kelley, the former Marine Corps commandant, and Carol Browner, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
This was not simply effete role-playing, however, as real-world events reinforced concerns raised by the exercise. One of those concerns was stepped-up competition from China for world oil supplies. And just as the event concluded, the Chinese government announced that it was bidding to buy Unocal, one of the top oil exploration production firms based in the United States.
As oil prices surge past $60 a barrel, with no ceiling in sight, the consequences of failing to develop an energy policy based on conservation and other immediately achievable measures far outweigh the overblown warnings of those who claim the economy would be harmed in the process.
This is the real world. It's not a simulation, and it's not a game.
=30=
"My father always strongly rejected any suggestion that conditions in the United States, at their political worst, should be labeled “fascist” or compared to Nazism. Yet the question of whether authoritarian tendencies (or chaotic tendencies as in Neumann’s Behemoth) are integrally linked to other aspects of existing Western-style democracies remains an open and troubling one today." --Peter Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism, ed. Kellner, Douglas, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1998) x.
Leigh http://www.leighm.net