Ralph Nader, soon to star in a remake of "Clueless."
...ad hominem
At a D.C. press conference earlier this month
...ad hominem, "the perverse priorities of the Bush/Cheney oiligarchy." ("Oiligarchy," get it?) These priorities, he said, "are driving the war against Iraq."
But among Nader's many lapses in thinking is that we already do "control" that oil, albeit not through force but through money. Without the world's largest oil-import market, that stuff below the sand is mere black goo.
this must be the most twisted piece of logic I have come across.
The Arab countries discovered during the 1973 embargo that if they didn't sell to us somebody else would. If only the Nixon administration had realized that, there would have been no oil crisis.
that is just silly. where was that somebody else? the infrastructure to sell oil is not set up overnight. the oil that was available as an alternative also cost more money. more money spent on oil pushes up prices and cuts the standard of living.
Nader also took the obligatory swipe at SUVs. To his credit, he did not ask "What would Jesus drive?" Nor did he claim that SUV drivers support terrorism. Instead, he cited safety studies to label the vehicles "weapons of mass destruction."
i do worry about the massive increase in small trucks on the roads, driven by people who don't understand what they are in charge of, and using more fuel than is necessary to get from point a to point b.
Nader also disparaged the hydrogen fuel-cell technology that increasingly is being touted as an eventual replacement for gasoline-powered engines and other energy-using devices.
This is quite strange, given that hydrogen power has long been the darling of the anti-fossil-fuel lobby. Indeed, it's the subject of a new book by Nader's fellow radical, Jeremy Rifkin, who claims the technology will usher in utopia. But all that changed the moment Bush threw his support behind developing the technology during his State of the Union Address.
so there is something wrong with nader having his own opinion on hydrogen. has nader ever claimed himself it would usher in a new utopia? no evidence has been give.
Now, says Nader, hydrogen "will do virtually nothing" for us until around 2020, when "some hydrogen vehicles may be viable." You'd never know that hydrogen fuel-cell trucks and cars are already on the road, or that it's widely estimated that they could make up a large part of our vehicle fleet within a decade.
and so are solar cars, but they aren't going to replace cars either in the near future. the vehicles on the roads are very much in the experimental stage, hence the use of trucks. they have plenty of room to hold the bulky equipment currently needed. hydrogen may be a big improvenment, but it has to be made, a very energy intensive operation, and the energy available from hydrogen is much lower in volume than is available from petrol. much more promising are the hybrid petrol/battery powered cars, which are actually being sold to (wealthy) consumers now.
As to measures we could take in the meantime to decrease oil imports, somehow Nader forgot to mention government bans over the last 20 years on oil activity covering more than 300 million acres of federal land onshore and more than 460 million acres offshore.
alaska, as i recall, has been opened up for oil. much of that area that is banned probably doesn't have the promise that alaska has. that is, if there was oil there, it would be drilled. or if there is oil there, no one wants it being drilled and ruining a fragile sector of the US.
Just one of these reserves, the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), is estimated to contain from 10 to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil. That alone could replace about three years of imports.
But the ultimate problem with Nader's reasoning is that, if all we wanted was cheap abundant oil, we could get it peacefully by simply lifting oil-export sanctions against Iraq and demobilizing. Petroleum prices would plummet instantly, with the stock market rocketing at almost the same speed due both to cheap oil and the end of war fears.
perhaps the military has it's own barrow to push. Also, the US, however, despite the absurd claim above, does not control this oil, Saddam does. And the US is buying plenty of that oil now. As for not needing it, if you look at the political stability of the other oil producing nations, the stability of oil is a bit unsure. Saudi, Venezuala, Iraq, Russia, Kuwait, etc. All countries that cannot be relied upon for any length of time to keep the supplies going.
All of this couldn't fail to spur the economy, putting Bush and the GOP on the path to continued dominance of the White House and Congress.
We don't need military force to secure all the Mideast oil we want; this green stuff guarantees our access to all we want.
Nader proffered the seemingly plausible idea that the U.S. could be seizing Iraq to divvy up its resources among some American oil companies. But he immediately contradicted himself when he pointed out that Russia, China, and France already have major contractual interests there.
why the US insists on using force when other methods would be preferable, I don't know
Are we really going to yank all those wells from beneath the noses of three of the world's most powerful nations?
Consider this, too: Doesn't U.S. "Big Oil" profit from the sanctions currently in place, since restricted Iraqi exports prop up the price for all the oil they drill elsewhere?
Instead, Bush is about to embark on a very risky move for his presidency and his party. The logical reason is the one Bush gives: Saddam poses a serious regional threat now and a serious worldwide threat in the near future. He will never stop until he gets the Bomb, along with some shiny ICBMs to toss wherever he pleases.
Would he use them to kill, or merely to intimidate, the rest of the world? Do we want to wait a few years to find out?
A post-Saddam Iraq carries with it not the promise of secure oil — we already have that. Rather, it carries the guarantee of a more secure world.
Risky indeed. Risky most of all for the Iraqi civilians. Dubya, like his father, will be the patsy. there are plenty more presidential candidates where they came from. And according to http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/02/24/1046063965588.html the US itself still has no idea about what it actually wants to achieve from the war. there is still deep division within the administration. how can you start a war when you haven't got your aims sorted out yet?
By the way
.... ad hominem
