Up through the ground come a-bubblin' crude ... Or through the water, in this case. And less than ol' Jed's gonna need to keep the cement pond in repair ...

Jeff "Whitewater" Gerth is back on A1 today with a report on Saudi oil production ("Forecast of Rising Oil Demand Challenges Tired Saudi Fields")—and welcome, when he offers reporting that's as thorough and well researched as this. And not at all welcome, because the implications of Gerth's report are deeply alarming, and all too real, in a way that shows up the callow apocalyptic of the Pentagon's recently hyped global climate change report.

[Saudi Arabia's] oil fields now are in decline, prompting industry and government officials to raise serious questions about whether the kingdom will be able to satisfy the world's thirst for oil in coming years.

Energy forecasts call for Saudi Arabia to almost double its output in the next decade and after. Oil executives and government officials in the United States and Saudi Arabia, however, say capacity will probably stall near current levels, potentially creating a significant gap in the global energy supply.

Outsiders have not had access to detailed production data from Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, for more than 20 years. But interviews in recent months with experts on Saudi oil fields provided a rare look inside the business and suggested looming problems.

An internal Saudi Aramco plan, the experts said, estimates total production capacity in 2011 at 10.15 million barrels a day, about the current capacity. But to meet expected world demand, the United States Department of Energy's research arm says Saudi Arabia will need to produce 13.6 million barrels a day by 2010 and 19.5 million barrels a day by 2020.

"In the past, the world has counted on Saudi Arabia," one senior Saudi oil executive said. "Now I don't see how long it can be maintained."

Gerth's article is long and detailed and deserves serious attention; it makes a strong case that Saudi oil production is near to peaking, if it hasn't peaked already. (It makes a secondary case that production from the oil field, Ghawar, that undergirds Saudi export capacity, might be at earlier risk of entering "uncontrolled decline" due to over-aggressive management.) It's a bit perplexing to me that the Times jumps this from A1 to C2: it takes a real lack of imagination to think that this is primarily a business story.

Gerth is a little too circumspect about just what his reporting means. Given the growing reliance of the global market on Saudi reserves, the figures cited above indicate nothing less than an expanding, structural gap in world oil production, one whose effects will be noticeable within a frighteningly short period. You don't have to be either an economist or a military strategist to be able to contemplate likely outcomes, and to feel sick.

It seems to me that we're balanced on the knife edge. High standards of living mean high levels of energy consumption. The world energy economy is just capable, at current rates of production, of keeping pace with existing economic growth. I've often wondered whether the global environment would be able to handle the consequences of another generation or two's accelerated growth in China and India, as those countries and their massive populations lever themselves toward higher and more energy-expensive and more CO₂-productive living standards. Now it starts to look like that question may be pre-empted by an equally harsh but more immediate equation: a world in which Persian Gulf reserves are in decline, with no real replacements in sight, is a world that simply won't be able to generate enough BTUs for all the fancy gizmos we're all used to.

A global industrial economy doesn't fit very well with a regime of permanent energy scarcity. Add competition between a vast, growing, relatively impoverished but technically competent population, and a richer, more technically advanced, but much smaller and relatively stable population that's used to hogging the lion's share of the available resources—that's a formula for a more brutal world than I care to imagine, even without the environmental-catastrophe variable added.

Go on about oil as a factor in the Iraq war, and in our colonial engagement with the Persian Gulf in general (even without reference to specifics of the BushCo history with their Saudi clients), and you're likely to get fitted for a tinfoil hat. But isn't the strategic logic as clear as day? If you expect to be fighting wars over Persian Gulf oil reserves within a couple of decades, why not improve your advantage while you've still got it? [Please note that I'm not endorsing the policy: I just can't see why it's supposed to be so outside the bounds of reasonable discussion that the policy exists and is being exercised. Start from a few simple—if highly debatable—axioms, and who wouldn't come to these conclusions?]

posted by michael  7:17:15 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

First discriminatory amendment. Like it or not, the gay marriage battle has been well and truly joined. It doesn't matter that Rove is trying to finesse the issue by having Bush endorse a Constitutional amendment, while avoiding specific endorsment of the Musgrave amendment now before Congress. [I take that back: it does matter, as an acknowledgement of political reality: AP reports unnamed "White House officials" saying that support for Musgrave "has been unraveling in the Senate," and implies that the tap-dancing in Bush's announcement results from awareness of the fact. The delay in making any announcement at all is even more telling, I think: Bush's social-conservative base has been waiting weeks now for Dear Leader to step into the ring; I take that as prima facie evidence that Rove isn't nearly as eager for this fight as the more timid Democratic fawns are afraid he is, and doesn't at all see it as an out-and-out winner for the Thugs.]

First discriminatory amendment. This isn't about what's now on A1, it's about what needs to appear on A1, and everywhere else, in the coming months. These three words state, as compactly as possible, a powerful meme, one that I think will be overwhelmingly effective in the struggle over any marriage amendment, one we need to start propagating—"we" meaning not just lefty bloggers, but Democratic operatives at every level—relentlessly. The argument is simple and, on its own terms, all but unanswerable: the history of the Constitution is the history of increased enfranchisement, increased civil rights, increased liberty; the Thugs propose to reverse that history. The more aggressive and disciplined we are in maintaining this argument as our point of attack, the more we determine that the discussion over a marriage amendment is about civil rights and not about "sanctity." We force the battle to be fought, in other words, on our ground, not Karl Rove's.

Our side wins the rights argument: the social fascists have been trying for years to portray the question of gay civil rights as an issue of "special" rights, and look how far that's gotten them. First discriminatory amendment shames the other side. Tar the Thugs with discrimination, and they lose the middle. If I were Karl Rove, I wouldn't feel confident about this battle in the least.

Update: The more I think about this, the clearer it is to me that Rove has just made a huge strategic mistake. Josh Marshall has a post at Talking Points Memo that I think gets it exactly right. The last thing Bush needed was to be in the middle of a culture war and invoke the shades of Pat "Better in the Original German" Buchanan in '92. But he's stuck with it now, because his collateral has all but vanished, and he can no longer afford to string the base along with vague promises of "concern" on the gay marriage issue.

posted by michael  3:05:53 PM  
tell me about it []