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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (73137)	7/14/2006 9:20:13 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 361217

Clinton: not briefed on peak oil by Staff The Countdown for the Peak of Oil Production has Begun – but what are the Views of the Most Important International Energy Agencies... Transcribed excerpts from A conversation with Bill Clinton - a 54-minute audio posted July 11 by Minnesota Public Radio: Former President Bill Clinton was among the influential people to grace one of the stages of the Aspen Ideas Festival last week. He spoke on July 7 with "The Atlantic Monthly's" James Fallows. [3:30] Q: ...which issues look different to you now from when you were president? Clinton: ...both the AIDS and climate change issues look somewhat different to me. [5:45] Clinton: With regard to climate change ... [the recent Bush energy bill] did give a 25% tax credit for the purchase of clean energy technologies. So I went back and read the speech I gave in 1997 advocating that. It was given at the National Geographic Building. Al Gore went there. We hyped the living daylights out of it to the press. I talked about the problems of global warming and we were running up to Kyoto then. I thought it was a pretty good speech - and it was total dud. I mean nobody covered it even. It elicited a giant yawn from the press and the American public. ... 6:50 Big oil and big coal were against cutting taxes to buy solar power and wind power and all that other stuff. It was interesting. And the reason was oil was low and the core of people who understood this was smaller. So what I've learned about that since I've got out is two things [actually he mentions three things]. One is, it's a lot worse than I thought it was when I was in. 7:40 ...the second thing [is that responding to climate change can be economically positive] ... After we negotiated the Kyoto Treaty ... it's the only thing the Senator voted unanimously on during the whole time I was President ... they voted like 85 or 90 to nothing ro reject it even before I presented it to them. Because they believed it would wreck the American economy. Compare our economy to Britain's, where they're going to meet their Kyoto targets. We have similar economic systems, similar economic rates, but wages are stagnant in America, American poverty is rising, inequality is rising. They have rising wages and declining inequality. I believe the most important reason is - I'd like to tell you it's because Tony Blair has economic policies like mine - but the truth is, I think the most important reason is they took climate change seriously. Because they did, they created hundreds of thousands of new jobs in new areas by going for a clean energy future. And I feel more strongly about that than I ever did. 9:00 The third thing I've learned ... I was reading a book the other day by a guy just bashing the living hell out of me, saying that he was certain the CIA briefed me once a week on how America was running out of oil and I did nothing serious about it. Of course he ignored what we tried to do and got our brains beat out doing. But that's not true. To the best of my knowledge I never had a security briefing which said what some of these very serious but conservative petroleum geologists say, which is they think that either now or before the decade is out that we'll reach peak oil production globally and with the rise of China and India and others coming along unless we can dramatically reduce our oil usage we will run out of recoverable oil within 35 to 50 years. And that would mean in addition to climate change we have a very short time in the life of the planet to turn this around. So I think that we all need to start ... thinking about that. As we propose practical solutions to climate change, we all need to keep this in the back of our minds. There's a good chance that these people who made a living all these years studying petroleum deposits know what they're talking about, and we may not have as much oil as we think. So we need to get in gear. But it's a blessing, it's a bird's nest on the ground. America needs a source of new jobs and we should be leading the way. Furthermore, if we don't, the Chinese and the Indians will never follow suit and we're cooked anyway. [10:50] ... in order to get broad bi-partistan support and have it bite with the American people, you need to have to put the climate change issue into the context -- first you have to inject this oil depletion issue. This needs much more serious debate. It's almost not discussed at all in the mainstream media and very few people know about it. You've got to read these books by these geologists or people who talk to them to get a grip on the facts. Secondly, we need to present it [climate change] in terms of a national security and an economic development argument as well as climate change. Obviously if we become more independent of foreign oil, not simply from the Middle East, but from Venezuela and elsewhere, we have a freer hand in pursuing our values and our other interests in foreign policy. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Spotted by Liatris at peakoil-dot-com. True to former President Clinton's statement, no other media outlet seems to have picked on his comments about peak oil. Clinton spoke out previously on peak oil and global warming last March, in a speech in London. -BA Published on 13 Jul 2006 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 13 Jul 2006. energybulletin.net

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (73137)	7/14/2006 9:26:42 AM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 361217

Tar Baby... (Echos of lurqur... ring in my minds eye...) Galloway: Administration is quietly disengaging from Iraq By: Joe Galloway Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was in Iraq this week, and he heard some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the number of American soldiers who've been killed in Iraq in recent weeks has fallen from two or three a day to an average of only one a day. The bad news is that the reason for the good news is that Iraqis are, for the time being, more interested in killing one another than they are in killing Americans. And the real news in Iraq is that the number of American troops who are fighting and dying in that place has fallen to 127,000 from a high of more than 160,000 late in 2005. Despite the Bush administration's stay the course rhetoric and Rumsfeld's refusal to discuss any withdrawal timetable on his trip, the truth is that the administration is rushing to disentangle itself from Iraq as fast as possible. Last December, high-ranking officers at U.S. Central Command told me that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq would fall to about 100,000 by late 2006. That's where we're headed, even though the latest carnage suggests that Iraqi forces aren't exactly standing up as the Americans stand down. (Some of them, in fact, are almost certainly contributing to the carnage.) So even if the civil war that's now claiming hundreds of Iraqi lives each week begins to claim thousands or scores of thousands of lives each week, the American drawdown may only accelerate. The administration's promises about Iraq have collided with partisan politics, and guess who won? With a congressional midterm election approaching, the 2008 presidential election just around the corner and Bush's approval ratings languishing in the 30s, the people who embraced this tar-baby now want to drop it as swiftly as possible. The politicians are cutting and running from their war even as they doggedly deny that the thought has ever crossed their minds. They're now as feverish to get out of Iraq as once they were feverish to get in. I'm reminded of an old Bengali proverb that foreign invaders found to be true during a thousand years of history: There are a thousand roads into Bengal, but there is no road out. The ownership of a war that's being abandoned by the politicians who launched it and fouled it up beyond repair now falls to the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, who never had orders to put enough boots on the ground to get the job done. Now they'll be called upon to do even more with even less. It's really all over but the dying and the suffering, and it's the benighted Iraqis and the American and a few remaining allied troops who are being left to do that. Nearly 2,600 Americans have died in Iraq so far, and 18,000 more have been wounded. How many more will die before the last of them board trucks and helicopters and depart this detour in the war on global terrorism? More than 800,000 American troops have rotated through Iraq in three and a half years of a war that the cheerleaders said would be a slam-dunk and a cake-walk. The direct costs of that war have drained almost $400 billion from the U.S. Treasury, and the long-term hidden and opportunity costs of a war that the Bush people said would be paid for largely by Iraqi oil earnings eventually may top a trillion dollars. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon boss Rumsfeld will leave Washington in late January 2009 with Iraq hanging around their necks like a stinking, long-dead albatross. Just as the Vietnam War haunted Lyndon B. Johnson to his dying day, so, too, will Iraq and the failures America suffered there haunt and define the Bush triumvirate. This trio, none of whom ever heard a shot fired in anger, took us to war for all the wrong reasons; took us to war without enough troops to win the peace; took us to war in the wrong place, at the wrong time against the wrong enemy. There will be blame enough to tar a Congress that refused to do its constitutional duty to ask the tough questions and conduct meaningful oversight while the war dragged on year after year. Blame enough, too, for top American military commanders who forgot, or never learned, the lessons of Vietnam or the ways of counter-insurgency warfare. Having trained and equipped their forces to fight heavy armored war against other nations, they didn't even recognize the war that Sunni insurgents were waging against them until it was too late. History will not be kind or forgiving of any of them. Nor should it be.