Washington (CNN) — President Barack Obama outlined a plan Wednesday to cut America’s imports of foreign oil by a third by 2025 — a response to growing global energy demands and instability overseas.
What a crude little pearl of bullshit. First, even if Obama wins in 2012 (and why would he want to?), he’ll have been out of office for nearly a decade by 2025. He might as well say that by 2025, every American will be king of their very own earth-like planet, a perpetual fountain of youth, and stables full of trick-ass ponies. Dude has no imagination.
Worse yet, he grossly underestimates the magnitude of his “planned” cuts to America’s imports of foreign oil. And it has less to do with the exigencies surrounding peak oil than the fact of peak oil itself. We might be able to reduce our imports by only one third by 2025, if (a) we were operating on the gross Hubbert curve, and (b) the United States took the vast majority of the remaining oil leaving everyone else high and dry.
Unfortunately, we’re not going to get all of the oil that’s in the ground (gross Hubbert curve) out of the ground. We grabbed the good, low-hanging fruit first; and are left with the cruder, more difficult to access, and more expensive to extract and process remnants. Very quickly oil will become more expensive to extract than it’s worth, leaving us operating on the net Hubbert curve, where the declining limb of production is very, very steep; where 2025 indicates world GDP more than halved due to oil depletion alone. Hell, Obama may be presiding over a terminal credit collapse even before his first term is over, due to the severe and continuing financial malfeasance.
Obama’s “plan” to cut imports by 2025 sounds a lot like my retrospective “plan” to be among the long-term unemployed. I forget where I read that Americans are like “super-sized crash-test dummies,” but I’m sure that was part of the plan, too.