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18 comments on In today's New York Times

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stiffpicken on September 10, 2005 - 1:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
you might need to add someone to the UNDERDOG corner ... is bill clinton now a peak oiler?

quote: "It's not clear to me that there will be enough oil to produce that growth according to traditional energy use patterns."
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Ripley on September 10, 2005 - 3:20pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Nice catch on Clinton.

I'd be pretty ticked off if I were the Chinese.  The U.S. consumes ONE-FOURTH of the world's total oil production, wastes it with huge SUVs and spread out housing, doesn't even make much anymore, and the Chinese are the ones who are supposed to cut back.

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ChrisPhoenix on September 10, 2005 - 5:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
China buys SUV's too. In fact, I read a while ago that SUV's sell fastest over there.

From what I saw (in a one-week visit last spring), the main traffic law is "The bigger vehicle has the right-of-way." But I suspect it's more than that: if you get successful, you want to buy toys. Same as here, but maybe even more so.

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mw on September 11, 2005 - 7:38am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Its been reported recently that signficant taxes are being applied to larger vehicles in China (I seem to recall > 20% or some such number) - a note of it was made on TOD1 or TOD2.

China is not stupid nor are they stuck to following exactly the same path we've been on. They are working on smaller fuel efficient vehicles; they have an alternative fuels strategy; they are working on trying to produce much safer nuclear technology.

Every nation which has grown strong and remained strong did so on the back of cheap energy. I for one do not believe that they are ignorant of that, nor are they likely to simply assume that it will be easy, or even achievable, to gain access to 1/4 or more of annual world petroleum output for their growing economy which would be implied by simply following the path we took.

I have to believe (perhaps better put as want to believe) that they are somewhat smarter than that and are working plans B, C, D, E etc. If not, we are all doomed!

My sense is that they might be peak oilers themselves, and perhaps caught by surprise by the latest round of tightness, we might see evidence of them speeding up plans in that regard.

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18 comments on In today's New York Times

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