Signals. There's an air of desperate unreality in the fact that the WaPo story about Bush's unproductive man date with Saudi Prince Abdullah yesterday is focused on gas prices.

President Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah emerged from their meeting here Monday with no agreement that would lower gasoline prices in the near term, although Saudi Arabia reiterated plans to increase oil production capacity in coming years in an effort to meeting fast-growing world demand.

Bush has pressed the Saudis in recent weeks to help lower gasoline prices soon by increasing crude oil production, but Abdullah and his delegation responded here by explaining their long-term strategy to invest $50 billion over five years in a plan that would eventually increase the kingdom's oil production capacity by close to 50 percent.

In closely related news, I'm announcing a plan today to sacrifice several goats in a long-term strategy that will eventually more than double my chances of winning the lottery.

And we're supposed to be concerned about gas prices for the summer driving season? Listen carefully: beneath the noise about lack of American refinery capacity and worries over Iraqi violence, beneath the comforting hum of good and unrealizable intentions, Prince Abdullah has delivered Dull George a message. Saudi production is peaking. The Prince can't help a brotha out, because Saudi Aramco is pumping as hard as it can, and there's basically nowhere to go now but down.

Consider what physicist David Goodstein of Caltech, author of Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, had to say in a presentation last year:

In 1997, Kenneth Deffeyes, a former Shell Oil geologist who's now an emeritus professor of geosciences at Princeton, published a book he entitled Hubbert's Peak—The Impending World Oil Shortage. In it, Deffeyes said he knew that Hubbert had been right and that the peak for domestic production had been reached when he saw this sentence in 1971 in the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Texas Railroad Commission announced a 100% allowable for next month."

To demystify that sentence, the Texas Railroad Commission was the quaintly named cartel that controlled the U.S. oil industry by making strategic use of the excess capacity for pumping in Texas. When the commission said, "100% allowable for next month," it meant that there was no longer any excess capacity. They were pumping flat-out, and therefore Hubbert's Peak had been reached.

Ever since reading this, I've thought that the signal that the worldwide peak had been reached would be when we found out that Saudi Arabian production had peaked. For the last few decades, the Saudis have been using excess pumping capacity to manipulate the world oil market in exactly the same way the Texans once did.

Anybody got a flare gun?

posted by michael  3:22:22 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Quote of the day—OK, quote of yesterday, but what the hell, I've been distracted—comes from a piece by Bob Cusack in The Hill on "GOP finger-pointing." Let the circular firing squad commence:

Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) who is credited as the author of the Ryan-Sununu [Social Security privatization] bill, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Times two months ago that mocked the White House for trying to send the president out to sell personal accounts with a message that they don't really solve the problem. Ferrara wrote, "Is it any wonder then that the more George W. Bush talks about personal accounts the lower they sink in the polls?"

Ferrara told The Hill he is trying to help Republicans get on track on Social Security. He accused top Bush administration officials — including Rove and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card — of urging people to tell him to "shut the hell up."

Ferrara, who is scheduled to testify on Social Security before the Senate Finance Committee today, said Rove, Card and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Josh Bolten lack expertise on the entitlement system and mistakenly believe some Democrats are close to embracing the president's plan.

"Rove thinks he's been beatified by the last election," Ferrara added.

Possibly he can get Ratzinger to help him with that.

posted by michael  2:31:17 PM  
tell me about it []