Oil woes

Right now, the price of a barrel of crude oil is flirting with $60 [and] a Chinese state-controlled oil company has made an $18.5 billion bid for the American oil firm, Unocal.

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[In] the meantime, Exxon -- which just had the impunity to hire Philip Cooney after he was accused of doctoring government reports on climate change and resigned as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality ("The cynical way to look at this," commented Kert Davies, U.S. research director for Greenpeace, "is that ExxonMobil has removed its sleeper cell from the White House and extracted him back to the mother ship.") -- has quietly issued a report, The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, predicting that the moment of "peak oil" is only a five-year hop-skip-and-a-pump away; "Oil Shockwave," a "war game" recently conducted by top ex-government officials in Washington, including two former directors of the CIA, found the United States "all but powerless to protect the American economy in the face of a catastrophic disruption of oil markets," which was all too easy for them to imagine ("The participants concluded almost unanimously that they must press the president to invest quickly in promising technologies to reduce dependence on overseas oil...")

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And if you don't quite recognize the new look of this fast-shifting energy landscape, then how are you going to feel if the Age of Petroleum turns out to be drawing -- more rapidly than most people imagine -- to a close?

Well, hold your hats, folks. Below Michael Klare, an expert on "resource wars" and the author of the indispensable Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency, discusses a new bombshell book by oil industry insider Matthew Simmons, and his unsettling news that everything you've heard about those inexhaustible supplies of Saudi oil, which are supposed to keep the world floating for decades, simply isn't so.

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Go read...

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.