Energy & Geopolitics
Just under two months ago, I noted that Dick Cheney had gone to Saudi Arabia to discuss oil only a month or so after his boss, the President of the United States visited the Kingdom, groveling for more. On this second visit, Cheney did not go to discuss the bandwidth of Saudi oil pipelines. Rather, he went armed to deliver an ultimatum of sorts: pump more crude, or we start turning coal to oil.
Well, looks like the rhetoric has been ratcheted a notch. The President was in Sharm el-Sheikh delivering a (long overdue) lecture to Arab leaders in which he threatened to have the world's largest consumer of energy move away from that precious black fluid to alternative sources of energy:
The rising price of oil has brought great wealth to some in this region, but the supply of oil is limited, and nations like mine are aggressively developing alternatives to oil.
Get rid of the "brought great wealth to some in this region, but the supply of oil is limited" nonsense and you have the following:
The rising price of oil has...nations like mine are aggressively developing alternatives to oil.
This came a day or two after he delivered the following remarks:
Our problem in America gets solved when we aggressively go for domestic exploration. Our problem in America gets solved if we expand our refining capacity, promote nuclear energy, and continue our strategy for the advancement of alternative energies, as well as conservation.
Is the Administration beginning to condition the Saudis and the American people to the fact that the U.S. needs to develop alternative sources of fuel? And that the Saudis are being to scrape the bottom of the barrel? I think so.