As you may have noted (if anyone actually reads this thing) I’m not a big fan of our foreign policy. The war in Iraq is not about terrorism or Saddam, it’s about oil. This administration, even though their official policy is to cast doubt about global warming, knows we have a major energy problem. They went after Iraq because it has one of the largest oil capacities in the world and we needed to get our hands on it to avert a major economic catastrophe here in the US.

Proof? We are building the largest US Embassy in the world in Baghdad: 100 acres, capable of housing 3000 people at a cost of $600 million. It’s larger than Vatican City. We would not be building this compound if we were really planning on getting out of Iraq in the near future. While we invest nothing in alternative energy projects here in the US, we are ‘investing’ $1.5 billion (yes, billion) a week in the Iraq war. Do we really think this is anti-terrorism money? We haven’t spent anywhere near that amount on domestic security.

We’re investing dollars and lives to acquire an oil field.

In this Washington Post article, the Cass Sunstein makes a very persuasive case for why we won’t see China or the US do anything about climate change until its too late. Basically China will soon move from #2 producer of carbons (we’re #1) to #1 and they can’t slow their economic growth by taking away the fuel that’s powering it including dirty coal plants, cars with no emission standards and their huge population.
The US, on the other hand, has the highest per capita usage by a mile and our economy is totally dependent on oil to the point where we might revert to a very different kind of place if it weren’t available (think medieval villages). Disturbing stuff.

As you may have noticed I have various ads on the site. Recently ads for a Chevron site called willyoujoinus.com have been appearing on Burner Trouble. This Chevron site is allegedly a forum site to discuss energy issues. However the articles on it are ‘written’ by experts from organizations I’ve never heard of and the comments are very strange in that no one seems to ever really say anything.
Their section on global warming has one paragraph of text that says the many people think burning fossil fuels may have caused warming. Nice to see they have made a serious committment to opening up a discussion. Do I smell PR flacks at work?

That’s right, $200 Billion with a B. They plan to fulfill 10% of their energy needs with alternative sources by 2010 and 20% by 2020, a very agressive schule given the sheer size of their need.

This is a huge story for the US because it indicates that our largest competitor for fossil fuels understands that the supply is limited and they are willing to start moving away from it. Meanwhile we have no real national energy policy except that put together behind closed doors by Cheney and his oil company pals in 2001. Obviously that has worked out well (for them)…