Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

30 years ago, Brazil imported 80% of its oil. With a strong sense of purpose, Brazil invested heavily in bio-fuel technology and refocused its transportation energy towards a resource Brazil could manufacture internally—sugar based ethanol. Today, Brazil uses flexible fuel vehicles that can run on gas, ethanol, or any combination of the two. It still has a mandate to be 100% independent of oil in 2011. Yes, Brazil still drills for oil, and they still use it - plenty of it. But at least they've had a plan for upwards of 30 years now. We have virtually none by comparison. If the President had some guts and some vision (like Kennedy did when he said we'd put a man on the moon in the next 10 years) and said "We're getting off oil by 2021", could we do it? Of course we could. It would create huge numbers of jobs, and it would deny billions in revenue to foreign producers many of whom DO NOT LIKE AMERICANS.  But, there's no vision, and no guts. And it is not lik...

Yesterday, the Senate began what is expected to be a week-long, contentious debate over legislation to combat global warming by mandatory reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. You can read up on my post re the World Bank’s experiments with carbon credit trading to see how this is likely to pan out. President Bush said that the measure amounted to "a huge spending bill fueled by tax increases" and that it "would impose roughly $6 trillion in new costs on the American economy." It isn’t just that the alarmists are trumpeting climate model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are predicting catastrophes that couldn’t happen even if the models were right, in order to justify costly policies to try to prevent global warming. The average person conflates alarmism with science – the Senate and House of Representatives being no exception. The results can be tremendously misguided and dangerous legislation. Meanwhile, a U.N. FAO repor...

The United States is in a recession --partly because of global oil prices -- and yet the only thing you hear from the candidates is hot air about things like MPG standards, a gas tax "holiday" and some vague plans about "conservation". Exactly what is it about energy independence from foreign oil that these idiots don't understand?  Energy indepence means one thing only: WE HAVE TO GET OFF OUR ADDICTION TO FOREIGN OIL. Here's the picture, over the last six years:     Look, if you want your country to be independent of foreign oil, then you either have to produce your own, or use alternative fuels. Why is this simple concept so difficult for the McCains, Clintons and Obamas to understand? President Bush understood it, but he's a lame duck who's going out of office soon, so we can't expect much there. 16 years ago, Brazil embarked on a policy of becoming 100% independent from foreign oil, and they've achieved it. Brazil is the world's ...

"There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance." -- William F. Buckley, Jr. (who died today at 82) Gasoline prices, which for months lagged the big run-up in the price of oil, are suddenly rising fast. Some experts say they could hit $4 a gallon by spring. Diesel is hitting new records daily and oil closed at an all-time high on Tuesday of $100.88 a barrel. I may have been a year early in my predictions, but my views have not changed. I drive to work in a Toyota Corolla that gets 37MPG. But that's not what I'm worried about. "The effect of high oil prices today could be the difference between having a recession and not having a recession," says Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist. Wrong, Mr. Rogoff. The effect of high oil prices today could be the difference between the recession we are already in, and a depression of mind-boggling proportions. It's not just oil prices, or real estate down the toilet - its ...