NationStates Jolt Archive

Lately, I found out that President Bush visited the oil rich country of Saudi Arabia with the specific agenda. Literally get on his American knees and beg to the Saudis to produce more oil. Now I find Bush' recent visit to the Saudis to be highly embarrassing on an international scale and foreboding. What next, is he going to beg to every nation within the OPEC to produce more oil? I could not be more embarrassed, the thought of our American president going 1,000+ miles to specifically ask or maybe threaten the Saudis to produce more oil. Better yet, the Saudis merely opted to give a meager boost.

I will honestly bet my weekly paycheck that King Faisal burst into tears from laughter. Is this the sign that relations with the Saudis and other high oil producing nations could go sour? Could there be a "Great Petroleum War" on the horizon? "America invades Angola, Nigeria, and Kuwait and seizes their petroleum extraction sites" Maybe it is time for America to pull a Brazil and transform from an energy dependent nation into an energy independent nation. (Brazil leads the world in domestic ethanol production and has significantly lowered it's need for foreign oil)


What do you think?

In 1973, the US had plans to invade Saudi Arabia and seize control of its oil fields as a way of dealing with the embargo. That being said, it never came to pass and likely never will. The 1970's ended up shattering OPEC for over twenty years, and it's likely it'll happen again this time around. The very nature of cartels is self-destructive, so it doesn't require external intervention to disrupt their activities.

That being said, if it weren't guaranteed to piss off every Muslim on Earth and cost an ungodly amount of money I would support an invasion of Saudi Arabia. That's one nation that definitely deserves a regime change...the levels of corruption and vile, repressive behavior of our so-called "ally" are an embarrassment to the United States and everything it stands for.

*shrug*

No, all that will happen is that when the oil prices become prohibitively expensive, we'll find other ways. Hybrids was the first small step.

When we've weaned ourselves from the oil teat and told them to take a flying flip through a rolling doughnut, we'll be much better off.

no i dont think its near.

bush got on his knees in order to fellate the saudi king. they are on a kissing basis after all. but they explained that they increased production last week and arent interested in increasing it again any time soon.

but i expect the next president (mr obama) to look king faisal in the eye and remind him that WE are what keeps him in power. they need to cooperate with us on oil production a bit more than they have been or we have no reason to make sure that saudia arabia is stable.

Once prices get too high and profits drop off, you can bet the oil companies have got a backup plan. You dont get into that kind of position by being stupid. They've probably got massive budgets into 'alternative energy' projects they can whip the cover off of JUST prior to shifting oil production to the back burner.
That or they're stupid, and the world will plunge into a new dark age when the US economy collapses and takes everybody else with it.

Lately, I found out that President Bush visited the oil rich country of Saudi Arabia with the specific agenda. Literally get on his American knees and beg to the Saudis to produce more oil. Now I find Bush' recent visit to the Saudis to be highly embarrassing on an international scale and foreboding. What next, is he going to beg to every nation within the OPEC to produce more oil? I could not be more embarrassed, the thought of our American president going 1,000+ miles to specifically ask or maybe threaten the Saudis to produce more oil. Better yet, the Saudis merely opted to give a meager boost.

I will honestly bet my weekly paycheck that King Faisal burst into tears from laughter. Is this the sign that relations with the Saudis and other high oil producing nations could go sour? Could there be a "Great Petroleum War" on the horizon? "America invades Angola, Nigeria, and Kuwait and seizes their petroleum extraction sites" Maybe it is time for America to pull a Brazil and transform from an energy dependent nation into an energy independent nation. (Brazil leads the world in domestic ethanol production and has significantly lowered it's need for foreign oil)


What do you think?


Ehtanol is a scam and a joke. The Carbon Monoxide emissions from an Ethanol factory plant are far more dangerous than fossil fuel emissions. The price of food is also raised as a result and its effect can already be felt (see food shortages around the world).

True alternative energy is still a long term solution but within our grasp. in the mean time we need to explore the solutions we have now, such as domestic oil drilling, building more nuclear power plants, exploring clean coal technoloy (most abundant natural resource in america) and building more oil refineries. These short term plans combined with intense research and development of alternative fuel sources such as Hydrogen fuel cells will put us on the road to energy independence faster than any one sided partisan approach Washington puts forth.

but i expect the next president (mr obama) to look king faisal in the eye and remind him that WE are what keeps him in power. they need to cooperate with us on oil production a bit more than they have been or we have no reason to make sure that saudia arabia is stable.

Don't count on it...Obama would suck up to him just as much as Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Carter or anybody else since FDR. He is no different from the rest of our politicians in supporting this unhealthy and damaging "alliance" and won't do a thing to change it.

In fact, the only thing that can ever destroy the Saudi monarchy is a decline in demand for their oil...no matter its price, as long as they are selling it they will remain in power.

However, the thought of Bush going over there and pleading for an "oil boost" is pathetic. Are we that dependent? Can we have some grace and maybe hedge our bets on alternative energy sources rather than kissing up to some despotic regime in the Middle East?


I say it calls for a drastic energy revolution within America. The White House talks "green" but has yet to do anything. We need to offer alternative energy "X-prizes" and force the public to go energy independent

Ehtanol is a scam and a joke.
Actually, no. Certain ethanols are very good; however, corn-based ethanol is a scam and a joke. The only reason we havn't tossed it out is because of the powerful corn farmer lobby.

Actually, no. Certain ethanols are very good; however, corn-based ethanol is a scam and a joke. The only reason we havn't tossed it out is because of the powerful corn farmer lobby.

corn ethanol is where all the hype is focused though. I swear, one day "big oil" will be "big energy" and all the green industries will be hosing us like the oil industry.

there is also sugar ethanol, but who wants to put sugar in their gas tanks? ;)

corn ethanol is where all the hype is focused though. I swear, one day "big oil" will be "big energy" and all the green industries will be hosing us like the oil industry.

there is also sugar ethanol, but who wants to put sugar in their gas tanks? ;)
Sorghum and algae are where the ethanol train should be headed, but the corn farmer lobby has deep pockets, and they are getting deeper as Washington moves the rest of the country to use more of that worthless shit. Corn has the lowest energy return of any ethanol tested pretty much. Corn-based ethanol, like corn-based anything else, is shit. Oh, and since it is food, it drives up food costs, hurray.

corn ethanol is where all the hype is focused though. I swear, one day "big oil" will be "big energy" and all the green industries will be hosing us like the oil industry.

Nah, the difference between the two is the differing nature of the two industries. In a few years, you'll be able to buy and install a renewable power and heating system, a plug-in hybrid, and basically generate most of your energy and transportation needs on site with little input from the grid. During the summers, you might even sell power back to the grid for a small gain.

With renewable energy, consumers can become their own suppliers; that's a fundamentally different market condition from the capital-intensive and centralized world of oil production.

Sorghum and algae are where the ethanol train should be headed, but the corn farmer lobby has deep pockets, and they are getting deeper as Washington moves the rest of the country to use more of that worthless shit. Corn has the lowest energy return of any ethanol tested pretty much. Corn-based ethanol, like corn-based anything else, is shit. Oh, and since it is food, it drives up food costs, hurray.

Last year, I was hiking in Idaho with a few friends, near Twin Falls. We had just come out of some canyons, and were walking back to the car, surrounded by some type of weed-grass. Somehow, the topic had gotten to alternative fuels. I commented that all this grass could, despite Idaho's heat and desert conditions, be turned into swithgrass for ethanol use rather cheaply.

The point is, switchgrass is cheap, grows in even desert conditions, and could be a major boost to the economies of mountain states and southwestern states, as well as any other desert areas. Since not much grows in the desert, this would not affect food prices. Thought switchgrass isn't the absolute best, it is effectively the best for weaning the US off of oil and coal. Corn farmers can export some of their crop if they've got so much, feed starving Asians, Africans, and Americans.

Zeitgeist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist%2C_the_Movie) anyone?

Nah, the difference between the two is the differing nature of the two industries. In a few years, you'll be able to buy and install a renewable power and heating system, a plug-in hybrid, and basically generate most of your energy and transportation needs on site with little input from the grid. During the summers, you might even sell power back to the grid for a small gain.

With renewable energy, consumers can become their own suppliers; that's a fundamentally different market condition from the capital-intensive and centralized world of oil production.
Sounds like a naive assumption. Where's the profit in only someone once to a consumer, and then occasionally buying stuff back from them?

My belief is that on-site generation will be rare or insubstantial in most cases. Power generation will remain centralised with very little power being sold by small time producers back on to the grid. This would mostly be due to the problems of coordinating the grid. That is at any one time power production in the grid has to be almost identical to consumption with slight discrepancies resulting in a change of frequency of the grid.

Power generation will also remain centralised due to the efficiency savings that larger companies can make on mass production. That is lower maintenance costs in the case of wind and solar, and lower production costs in the case of ethanol and hydrogen.

Well World War Three is looming.

Civil unrest, rising inflation and costs, Multiculturalism, political apathy, restriction of rights. All of that will spur on the next "Great War", a war over resources and land.

I guess it will be more of a "Pseudo Yugoslavian style" war.

The great resource war is not coming anytime soon - we haven't evens started building a bunch of independent vaults for people to live in sealed off from the rest of the world. Vault dwellers FTW! (just remember to pack an extra water chip).

OPEC makes for a great villain to blame, but that blame is misdirected. Saudi Arabia is the only country not producing at full capacity - everyone else is pumping like mad to cash in (OPEC has always been full of people cheating on their quotas, but these days they are a farce).

Scarcity is not from OPEC, but from high demand from developing nations (especially India and China), and shocks limiting production (domestic conflict in Nigeria, idiotic mismanagement in Venezuela, insurgent attacks in Iraq, etc).

I happen to think SA is doing the world a great favor by holding back - so long as they do, everyone can blame them and OPEC for not producing enough, where as if the world knew everyone was producing at full capacity and there is simply not enough production, tensions will mount and the likelihood of a resource war becomes a real possibility.

The Chinese are already highly aggressive about resources, faced with potential scarcity, that aggressive bullying of its neighbors could turn really nasty.

In one or two hundred years, that food crisis thing will be a lot more than just a crisis. But I needn't paint the doomsday scenario that some people are so clearly sickened by...

Ehtanol is a scam and a joke.
Certain ethanols are very good;
corn ethanol is where all the hype is focused though. I swear, one day "big oil" will be "big energy" and all the green industries will be hosing us like the oil industry.

there is also sugar ethanol, but who wants to put sugar in their gas tanks?

This little exchange is a very good summary of the situation with ethanol.

But honestly, why ethanol? We don't have the capacity to grow anything other than corn in the quantities needed for America, and even the nice clean sugar ethanol is not completely clean.

Electric cars are the way to go. We had them once, and they were quite popular in California, until car-makers stopped making them. But with a few hundred billion dollars' investment in research to improve the technology, and a few years' time, they could be used throughout America... as long as we changed the infrastructure of the entire country by converting every single gas station into a 'recharge' station.

Not to mention the problem with power plants... the government needs to use taxpayer dollars to both establish clean energy plants (mostly solar - wind and geothermal where applicable), break up state monopolies (such as that of BGE in my home state of Maryland) and bring a crucial part of American infrastructure under (state) government control - noone will be "hosing us" then, since the government can be held far more accountable than business for corruption and overpricing - all by taxing oil company profits...

But this is all fantasy, as long as we are not in a parallel dimension. Noone in politics, except people like Mike Gravel or Ron Paul, the two biggest radicals who bothered to run for president, would be bold enough to think of or support such radical plans, not to mention we have no really powerful green advocates in politics... That's why I think all the frontrunners are foolish, despicable puppets to the media conspiracy that controls America!

In any case, check out the link in my signature.

Electric cars are the way to go. We had them once, and they were quite popular in California, until car-makers stopped making them. But with a few hundred billion dollars' investment in research to improve the technology, and a few years' time, they could be used throughout America... as long as we changed the infrastructure of the entire country by converting every single gas station into a 'recharge' station.

Shoot, the Chevy Volt that's coming out in 2010 can recharge in your garage; you don't even need stations, just a power cord and an outlet. If you combined this with household PV systems, there would be very little additional investment needed to balance out the higher demand on the grid.

One might wonder why GM decided to kill the EV1 only to resurrect the concept seven years later...

This little exchange is a very good summary of the situation with ethanol.

But honestly, why ethanol? We don't have the capacity to grow anything other than corn in the quantities needed for America, and even the nice clean sugar ethanol is not completely clean.

Electric cars are the way to go. We had them once, and they were quite popular in California, until car-makers stopped making them. But with a few hundred billion dollars' investment in research to improve the technology, and a few years' time, they could be used throughout America... as long as we changed the infrastructure of the entire country by converting every single gas station into a 'recharge' station.

Not to mention the problem with power plants... the government needs to use taxpayer dollars to both establish clean energy plants (mostly solar - wind and geothermal where applicable), break up state monopolies (such as that of BGE in my home state of Maryland) and bring a crucial part of American infrastructure under (state) government control - noone will be "hosing us" then, since the government can be held far more accountable than business for corruption and overpricing - all by taxing oil company profits...

But this is all fantasy, as long as we are not in a parallel dimension. Noone in politics, except people like Mike Gravel or Ron Paul, the two biggest radicals who bothered to run for president, would be bold enough to think of or support such radical plans, not to mention we have no really powerful green advocates in politics... That's why I think all the frontrunners are foolish, despicable puppets to the media conspiracy that controls America!

In any case, check out the link in my signature.

Hybrids are the way to go, not electric. Hybrid ethanol-electric, of course. With ethanol from schemes like algae and switchgrass, ethanol will be able to fill a role for high speed movement, while electricity would fill more city movement.

Furthermore, we need more investment in rails and buses. Getting alternative fuels out there is only treating a symptom of the disease. With high speed trains, bus lanes and subsidies, and speedy monorails we can revolutionize the transportation system, go green, and combat global warming.

On the subject of recharging stations, recharging takes time. I'd imagine you'd simply trade in your drained battery for a charged battery, and they'd charge your drained battery while you drove away.

The root of the problem is the grid in general. Too much of it is powered by coal and oil, dirty systems. With investment in solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, fusion, hydroelectric, ethanol, and other such systems, perhaps amplified by polar energy colonies, the world will truly be able to go green. Until then, electric cars would just be run indirectly by coal plants.

Er, don't know if anyone mentioned this, but King Faisal has been dead for a while now. Abdallah is the King now. :D Yes, I am a stickler.

But honestly, why ethanol? We don't have the capacity to grow anything other than corn in the quantities needed for America, and even the nice clean sugar ethanol is not completely clean.
Patently false. We could grow enough algae on random ponds to exceed the amount of energy produced by corn that takes massive amounts of land to get anywhere with due to low energy turnover. I was reading something about what we would need to convert the airlin industry to ethanol. Something like coconut farms twice the size of France, biomass three times the size of Germany, or algae farms twice the size of Belgium. Now that all sounds improbable, but look at the size of Belgium then you realize how much return algae gets you comparatively.

Electric cars are the way to go. We had them once, and they were quite popular in California, until car-makers stopped making them. But with a few hundred billion dollars' investment in research to improve the technology, and a few years' time, they could be used throughout America... as long as we changed the infrastructure of the entire country by converting every single gas station into a 'recharge' station.
No one likes to bring up the fact that electric cars don't pull energy out of their asses. Take thousands of cars off of fossil fuels and you now have thousands of cars on the electric grid. The west coast can barely sustain California as it is (I don't just mean California, I mean the entire west coast because that is what it takes in the summer), imagine what would happen if we put all the cars on that grid?

Not to mention the problem with power plants... the government needs to use taxpayer dollars to both establish clean energy plants (mostly solar - wind and geothermal where applicable),
Wind doesn't look like it will ever turn over. Enough money thrown at solar will turn out what we want because we have already been seeing breakthroughs that increase energy output several fold, but people refuse to do it. Same with geothermal.


Ron Paul doesn't give a shit about all this. He doesn't give a shit about you. These plans would never come to fruition under him because he wants federal government to have no power and that would be the only clout big enough to pull it off.

Chevy Volt will be interesting. the electric cars in the 90s were very rough but the Volt looks like it could be used as an every day car which is practical and economical. We'll see.

But we're gonna have to build more Clean Coal Plants and Nuclear Power Plants if we're going to start driving around electric cars.

But we're gonna have to build more Clean Coal Plants and Nuclear Power Plants if we're going to start driving around electric cars.

Personally, I feel natural gas is the best baseload power source besides nuclear.

Natural gas and nuclear combined with a large renewable presence (around 30% or so at current levels of reliability) is in my opinion the best plan.

Natural gas is pretty cheap and abundant (especially if we tap those coalbed methane deposits, which are absolutely gigantic) as is and is virtually limitless once biogas becomes economically competitive with fossil gas. In addition, it doesn't have anywhere near the same number of pollution/CO2 emissions concerns, making it a lot easier to build and deploy gas plants than coal or nuclear.

Chevy Volt will be interesting. the electric cars in the 90s were very rough but the Volt looks like it could be used as an every day car which is practical and economical. We'll see.

But we're gonna have to build more Clean Coal Plants and Nuclear Power Plants if we're going to start driving around electric cars.

Solar power. Breakthroughs in thin film technology are hitting the market now and quantum dots and nanocrystal solar cells are going to make solar the way to go within a decade. *nod*