Oh Nooooo!
Quick Facts & Snippets
Figures for 2001:
World Oil Consumption = 68 million barrels per day
Arab Countries Production (including Iran) = 22 Million barrels per day = 32%
OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) Production = 29 Million barrels per day = 42%
OPEC has excess production capacity of 4 Million Barrels a day.
No other country has any significant excess production capacity.
US Strategic Petroleum Reserve can hold 700 million barrels.
The Alaska Pipeline can carry a maximum of 800,000 barrels per day. And it does.
Pre Iraq War II comment from Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds, March 16, 2003:
"What about oil? George Perry at the Brookings Institution estimated an Iraq war could push oil prices up to $75 to $161 a barrel. Industrial economies would implode before oil prices got that high. Besides, traders anticipate trouble, so prices rise long before trouble starts. Oil prices jumped 90 percent before the last Iraq war, and 75 percent before the next one (if it happens)." - Bolding added by me.
Economic Warfare - Remember the USSR?
Here are some interesting comments from our enemies regarding economic warfare:
Boo!
"We are continuing in the same policy to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy," said bin Laden.
"Every dollar of Al Qaeda defeated a million [U.S.] dollars," bin Laden concluded.
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written Al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything."
"We call our brothers in the battlefields to direct some of their great efforts towards the oil wells and pipelines," reads a jihadist website. "The killing of 10 American soldiers is nothing compared to the impact of the rise in oil prices on America and the disruption that it causes in the international economy."
So, as Sean Connery said to Kevin Costner in The Untouchables, "What are you prepared to do now?"
Please write your Representatives and Senators. Just tell them that this issue is important to you. You do not have to tell them what to do, just that it is important.
1 comment:
Oil got to $145 in July and industrial economies are imploding on cue. Second quarter GDP fell in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. -- though not the U.S.
When industrial economies contract, of course, oil prices go back down -- as I predicted they would in the NY Post around mid-year (it's online under my bio at cato.org). My point then and now is that there's a limit to how high oil can go without killing the goose that buys the oil.
I was and remain a tough critic of the Iraq war. My "Intelligence Without Brains" (about the silliness of WMD) was reprinted at antiwar.com. But that war didn't really cause world oil prices to spike -- booming economies in China, India and Latin America did that.
Post a Comment