Veep debate lacked energy

Secret energy planning as well as prices, policies, subsidies, wars, and future visions were off the table Tuesday night

I just have to make one general observation on the veep debate -- the willingness of the vice president to tell blatant lies is astonishing. He lied about Iraq & 911, Afghan & El Salvadoran elections (no, terrorists did not attack polling places, in fact the government installed through the Reagan-era sham election did most of the killing), the way his facts could be "checked", the nature of Halliburton. There is so much and many, many blogs are covering. I recommend Rodger Payne for some quality dissection.

Cheney didn't have to tell more lies about energy, though, because no breath was wasted examining the vice president's secret task force machinations with the fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies. Nothing of the secret oil maps of Iraq Cheney had made* for that task force was mentioned -- leaving no line drawn between Enron, Halliburton, energy policy and the taking of Iraq. Beyond Iraq, there was no discussion of Cheney's tireless lobbying for the nuclear industry, for example the junket Cheney took in April 2004 to sell nukes to China for Westinghouse.

Indeed there was nothing on the general effort by the current administration, basically with CEO Cheney at the helm, "to increase the flow of petroleum from suppliers abroad to US markets", as analyst Michael Klare puts it in an interesting January 2004 paper for Foreign Policy in Focus.

I assign great responsibility for this failure to Gwen Ifill (or the forces in control of her) because she should have been able to ask the right questions. Here's the only mention of energy from the whole debate (apart from references to the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA):

CHENEY: You've [Sen. Edwards] missed a lot of key votes: on tax policy, on energy, on Medicare reform.

Cheney knows (and probably Edwards too) that the oil supply problem is extremely serious. As a true believer, Cheney will scour all the earth in an effort to squeeze out the flow of oil he thinks is there. He believes in big drilling and digging projects, big nukes, and big wars in order to feed unbridled growth in demand.

So far, it's not working too well. Big energy has no shortage of government subsidies, despite the year-long Senate hold-up of a huge package of new ones the Republicans want. Cheney would say that it was Kerry's and Edwards's fault for not rubber stamping the administration give-aways. That's nonsense. Kerry is hardly against oil drilling! He just doesn't like the idea of doing it in the ANWR.

But that would not be the worst deep idiocy that Cheney offers. He dismissed energy conservation and efficiency when he said in early 2001:

Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.

There you had the veep lying again. Sound, comprehensive policy would include a strong, government-mandated program of automobile efficiency ("CAFE" standards) and other energy savings to curb demand growth along with development of oil alternatives, including alternative fossil fuels, to ease the inevitable transition away from oil.

The world oil production rate will peak soon. Within a few years, a decade at most, that fact will be, in hindsight, known to everyone. Oil prices will be volatile for a while yet, but the trend is up. People who remember the 1970s (the immediate post-US-oil-peak era) will re-enter familiar territory with all of the younger oil-shortage virgins. Many will react with "what's happening?" bewilderment and a lot of dumbstruck looks as their SUV, big truck, and power-toy gas tanks take ever-increasing percentages of income until they are impossible to keep filled.

The limits on the extraction of the planetary endowment of conventional oil will force everyone to conserve whether we have Cheney's personal virtue or not. Unfortunately, the veep debate shed no light on this problem.

*The Cheney Task Force map package at the Judicial Watch site referred to contains some amazing notes on Saudi oil projects that are "designed to replace declining capacity elsewhere in Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure". How long Saudi can "keep production capacity at 10.5 mbd" is not predicted in the available documents.