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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Road Walker who wrote (307605)10/25/2006 8:37:11 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 1571467
 
China, despite it's size, uses about 30% of the oil the US uses. Even at a growth rate of 15%, our decrease would dwarf their increase.

I don't think our oil use would be likely to shrink rapidly enough to dwarf a 15% increase in China's oil. Even if we could decrease by 15% a year (and thus in the first year reduce oil use by over three times China's increase) I'm not sure that is enough of a difference that "dwarf" would apply, and China's increase would compound upward while a 15% decrease would represent a smaller reduction each year. Also to the extent that our decrease in oil use pushes oil prices down, it would tend to increase oil use in China, and slow the decrease in the US. And China is hardly the only country who's oil use is increasing.

A strong move towards MPG efficiency would have an immediate effect on ME earnings.

A very strong move would certainly have a major impact on ME's oil profits, but that still doesn't amount to changing the ME "back to being an impoverished desert with no oil money." And to the extent it does reduce the oil revenue it might destabilize the governments and produce more problems with terrorism rather than less. I wouldn't argue against reducing our oil use for this reason, but I don't think that impoverishing the ME is a good reason to argue for a strong push for lower oil use.

Eventually oil could be something you use to make plastics, and that's about it.

That will likely be the case. An even further out we might not need it for that purpose. But its not a transition that will happen rapidly, it won't occur in 15 years, and likely not in 50.
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