Bill Clinton Gets it

For those of you who think oil depletion and peak oil are whacky ideas, I just wanted to direct you to this link from June 2006, in which Bill Clinton (still in a pre-Hillary campaign state of grace) tried to warn people about the depletion of oil reserves. He was speaking to the 'Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' which is a serious industry body and not an automatic bunch of nuts as their title may suggest. Clinton delivered a complex, science-based lecture which stands in contrast to Al Gore's somewhat hysterical fetishisation of the global warming argument.


The text is intriguing. Clinton had clearly been receiving briefings about how oil depletion in the Ghawar field and elsewhere was becoming a major problem. He seems to put a time-period of some 35-50 years on the end of what he terms 'recoverable oil'. As we learned during his presidency, however, his pronouncements are sometimes cryptic. Recoverable oil is not enough oil to sustain the modern world.

The speech repeated an earlier warning from 2006. In March 2006, Clinton warned people about 'peak oil in two years' (ie 2008) and then suggested that this year, 2008, would be the one that oil passed over $100 a barrel, never to return below.

Perhaps Clinton had just been reading Jeremy Legget's book about oil depletion and was riffing. He also claimed, however, that Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were lying about their reserves--a proposition that two extra years of reserve figures, and the three preceding ones, seem to lend support to. I wonder if his wife shares his opinion. Clinton also took to quoting a friend of the Bush family, Matthew Simmons, who was an analyst who shared Legget's ideas about peak oil. The only link I could find to it was on this (left-wing) site.

I was curious about this because Clinton was at it again today, and this is precisely the sort of thing that he should have been doing with his post-presidency. He should have been warning as loud as he could. I have the feeling, as ever with him, that he is also beginning to do that because he is calculating that it impresses those who formerly adored him, scuffs over his wife's appalling campaign so far, and concentrates the minds on the coming summer gas tax problems that will put Obama and McCain's tax plans in a bad light. Hillary has already started calling for a tax suspension on petrol.

He was demonised by the right, by neocons, and by goreites, of course; but he did preside over the return of the budget to surplus and the scaling back of NASA-era statism in welfare, and those acts were the fruit of great statesmanship, even if in other things he was deeply deficient. Great statesmanship, low motives....

The American political winds are moving somewhere. I thought of Tennyson's Kraken today;

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

President Bush, for instance, at a time of rising oil prices has not been releasing the strategic reserve of the United States. This is composed of millions of barrels worth of oil in caves in the US. Instead, he has been building it up by 60000 barrels of oil per day. The administration has even been carving out new depots from the saltier earth. Speculation is rife that this is preparation for an attack on Iran ; but what if it were preparation for the first of the peak oil crises?

Just a thought. Here is yet another link to yet another peak oil website. Read your Marcus Aurelius; inquire into each thing, and ask what is its nature, and what is its effect?