Bush's Buddy

Awwww ain't this sweet? Dubya and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah holding hands and getting all chummy. If these guys are such good buds then why are gas prices soaring through the roof?

According to energy analysts, soaring prices at the pump have more to do with Bush's attack on Baghdad than with the laws of supply and demand. "Instability in Iraq adds a 'risk premium' that increases oil prices by fifteen dollars a barrel," says Rachel Bronson, director of Gulf Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. -Tim Dickinson

Someting called Oil Production Peak that more people should be aware of:

The argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion. The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted. The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels a day -- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen. - Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler.

Both Articles c/o Rollingstone.com