OPEC Sends Its Love

Is the well running dry? -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I'm looking at the sky high oil prices of 2008. The public is justifiably angry and there are accusations flying in all directions. Liberals point to the Iraq War and conservatives point to untapped Alaskan reserves. Right or wrong, the tendency is for voters to blame the Presidential and Congressional incumbents. In today's setting, it's much more of an indictment against Republicans than it is against Democrats. Democrats have had only a thin majority since 2006 and Bush is able to veto any of their measures. The Iraq war, the deficit and crippled economy are the legacies of Bush appointees, Bush policies and Republican carelessness thru the last two presidential terms.

What if someone saw the voter's reaction to the oil market, and decided to take advantage of it? If OPEC were to artificially run up the price of oil in an election year, could it be deliberately damaging to Bush and his cronies? If you look at the 13 members of OPEC, several would be considered outright "evil-doers" by the Bush administration: Iran, Libya and Venezuela, among others. There is no love lost between these nations and the United States. They don't like us on a good day, much less when Bush has put one of them on his "axis of evil". The Arab member nations have never been cool with us landing on their soil to do anything -- even something as noble as democratizing Iraq. They can say they've throttled oil production to lessen green house gases when just maybe, they throttled it to gig the status quo in the United States. Furthermore they're not necessarily spiting their faces by alienating a customer -- they have plenty of new oil demand coming from China and India. There is both humor and irony in the fact that the Saudi Royals gave Bush a bicycle on his recent visit to their land. One might ask if there's a not so hidden message about being less dependent on their oil output.

What if you had a President who fiddled while all the oil burned? What if you had a President who developed testy, strained relations with the very people we might need to make nice with? "What if" is no longer such a big speculation -- welcome to 2008. As I've pointed out in previous blogs, there are no less than 75 credible solutions for reducing oil dependency. Now with the fate of our consumerism and industrialism in the clutches of "evil doers" maybe we should look into some of those credible solutions. With Obama and/or Hillary in the White House, maybe we can try something like open dialog. It doesn't mean you love the other party, but it does mean that you intend to keep the oil flowing while working on alternative technologies.

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