I have a friend who's in the oil industry, and she tells me oil prices have shot up all over the world because of China's unexpected industrialization. (We have India using more oil as well.) In the last year, China's courted small African countries that have recently discovered oil -- Chad, Gambia, and others -- giving them economic aid and weapons, as well as a willingness to look the other way on human rights violations.
Oil companies sneered at the oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge thirty years ago (it's difficult and expensive to extract). Now they want it.
There's also a quiet scuffle over oil rights under the melting polar ice caps between the US, Russia, Canada, and Denmark. Extracting oil from the bottom of the ocean in the Arctic? That's got to be difficult and expensive, too.
Iraq has the largest untapped oil resources in the world (I said in a comment here that the western oil companies never got their straws into it and then there has been embargoes for over a decade).
Then, I think back to all those estimates of world oil reserves back in the 70s. Written before China's economic boom with the assumption Chinese people would continue to ride bicycles to work. Although, true, we have discovered more oil since then.
So I'm making a guess here: Yes. The oil is that valuable. There's a note of desperation to all of this that gives me pause.
I don't have the proof, but the behavior we're seeing and the soaring prices suggests that we're running out of oil much faster than anyone realizes.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2007-10-07 03:30 am (UTC)Oil companies sneered at the oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge thirty years ago (it's difficult and expensive to extract). Now they want it.
There's also a quiet scuffle over oil rights under the melting polar ice caps between the US, Russia, Canada, and Denmark. Extracting oil from the bottom of the ocean in the Arctic? That's got to be difficult and expensive, too.
Iraq has the largest untapped oil resources in the world (I said in a comment here that the western oil companies never got their straws into it and then there has been embargoes for over a decade).
Then, I think back to all those estimates of world oil reserves back in the 70s. Written before China's economic boom with the assumption Chinese people would continue to ride bicycles to work. Although, true, we have discovered more oil since then.
So I'm making a guess here: Yes. The oil is that valuable. There's a note of desperation to all of this that gives me pause.
I don't have the proof, but the behavior we're seeing and the soaring prices suggests that we're running out of oil much faster than anyone realizes.
Icarus