In a Washington Post editorial, The Gas Prices We Deserve, George Will assigns blame for our present high gas prices. He blames, "Seventy-two of today's senators -- including Schumer, of course, and 38 other Democrats, including Barack Obama, and 33 Republicans, including John McCain," that voted against drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. He blames Bill Clinton for vetoing 1995 legislation to permit drilling in ANWR. He also blames anyone, "who voted to put 85 percent of America's offshore territory off-limits to drilling."

Will doesn't blame anyone for driving an SUV, or buying a McMansion way out in the suburbs, of course. In his view, our oil problems are all supply-side. Although he is a conservative, he won't ask anyone to conserve fossil fuel.

Will seems to assume that wherever we choose to drill, there will be massive quantities of oil, even citing the Jack #2 claim that led to so many, "You don't know Jack," jokes a few years ago. There are such things as overhyped prospects and dry holes. There are also fields so deep under the seabed that they might as well be on the moon.

But most interesting is his conclusion: "America says to foreign producers: We prefer not to pump our oil, so please pump more of yours, thereby lowering its value, for our benefit. Let it not be said that America has no energy policy."
Whether such a policy is intentional or not, true or not, how can you argue with conserving our resources for our descendants? Peak Oil spokesman Rep Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), who describes himself as 'conservative - but not stupid', argues against drilling in ANWR for precisely the reason that he has scads of grandchildren, and that they may need the oil more than we do now.

Oil production has been declining in Mexico since their enormous Cantarell field peaked. Production in Venezuela sputtered after they expelled foreign oil companies. To make up the decline, US refiners have turned to Persian Gulf oil, which takes far longer to deliver.

Just in time for summer driving season (if that still exists) the EIA reports show that week-by-week crude oil imports to the US Gulf Coast have dropped as follows:

May 2  6.683 mbpd
May 9  6.130 mbpd
May 16 5.173 mbpd
May 23 4.996 mbpd

Guest-posting at the Oil Drum blog, Geologist Jeffrey (westexas) Brown claims this was predicted by the Export Land Model. and anticipates pressure for the US government to make up the shortfall with our emergency stocks in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Yeah, the same SPR we stopped filling a few weeks ago.

While southern Spain has always been dry and plagued by cyclical droughts, the average surface temperature in Spain has risen 2.7 degrees compared with about 1.4 degrees globally since 1880, records show.

Rainfall here is predicted to fall 20 percent from this year to 2020, and 40 percent by 2070, according to United Nations projections.

And forests are disappearing in New Guinea:

A new satellite analysis of logging in Papua New Guinea shows that the country has been losing about 1,400 square miles of rain forest, or about 1.4 percent of its total forest cover, each year.

The third world is already absorbing the initial salvos of climate change and energy scarcity, but the wealthy are concerned, too:

One of her clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations.

But, according to Ray Kurzweil, you should hang on a bit longer ...:

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

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