From here:
Makes sense for them. When your economy is dominated by a single product, anything that will drastically reduce the global market for that product will have a disastrous effect on on your economy.
Can we torture them before we fuck them?
It’s not as if they couldn’t have seen this coming for a long time, and used those oil revenues for something more useful than subsidising the life styles of the members of the Saudi royal family.
Personally I’ll be glad when that bass ackwards region has no money and no power again. At which point they cant bother anyone nor will anyone be bothered to bother em.
That region is the global cultural equivalent of poor white trash that won the geologic lottery. And just like them they have been pissing their wealth away.
Bin Laden was mad at the Saudi royal family for screwing with his father. Then it transferred to the US who were propping up their corrupt regime.
An oil rich nation of paupers. What’s wrong with that picture?
And why do we help them? Not for the oil, which we could buy from their successors, but we are afraid whoever comes after won’t let us keep bases to use against Russia.
And since Russia is no long a threat in the region, no longer intent on gobbling up the “-istan” countries, we should leave and Bin Laden could go home and run for local satrap.
Saudi Arabia must have the best PR firms in the world. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, none were from Iraq, and which one did we invade. The conservatives should hate the Saudis for banning the importation of bibles, the left should hate the Saudis for how they treat women, yet they seem to constantly fly under the radar.
If “aid” to Saudi Arabia ever comes anywhere near being a part of an environmental agreement, it will completely undermine what support I currently give the climate agenda, and push me deep into mad-hatter opposition.
Fuck Saudi Arabia for asking for international aid? Why stop there? Bangladesh is always asking for disaster relief, you know.
Bangladesh’s GDP per capita is about 3% of that of Saudi Arabia, and it doesn’t use that to support a corrupt royal family and an extreme version of Islam.
Say a nuclear fuel enrichment plant, like the Iranians? That’s going over like a lead balloon!
Never seen such a good combination of user name and post.
I’m sure Saudi Arabia will be able to scrape by if they actually started to do their own work rather than relying on an army of of Bangladeshi (& Indian, Pakistani) labours, Philippine maids, etc. working under slave like circumstances, because the Saudis can’t be bothered to do manual labour themselves.
They need not worry. Every drop of their oil will be consumed eventually. Just because there may be ink-on-paper legislation mandating reductions in emissions it does not immediately follow that those agreements will be strictly adhered to or even honored in any way, shape or form.
And really, how could they honor any such agreement? Is the United States, for instance, going to implement rationing of gasoline for personal use? Will an increase in fuel efficiency actually result in reduced consumption, or more driving? We’ve seen what high oil prices do, so we know that there is certainly a price threshold where the economy (and by extension everybody) suffers. Will potentially putting the country into perpetual recession be acceptable government policy? Even if it is known with absolute certainty what will happen environmentally as a result of oil consumption it does not mean that such advice will be heeded by politicians with other concerns more important to them. That’s the harsh reality of this whole situation.
Oil will continue to be a high-value, necessary commodity for the indefinite future. The Saudis have a lot of it. A reduction in demand in a place like the United States will simply allow some other country to use the surplus, with all of the emissions associated with its use.
About 6%, actually, and that’s irrelevant. We give aid to Israel and Japan.
Anyway, it supports an even more corrupt government and it’s a Muslim state where religious violence is not unknown and quite often even quietly encouraged.
It is comical. The price of oil will probably stay high even if demand went down as the depletion rate in existing mature fields causes less production. So their fears are misplaced, I think.
But anyway, eventually they will run out. They need to have a backup plan. I’m sure they do have a ton of money saved up, probably hundreds of billions of dollars. They export 3B barrels a year or something like that.
The only way long term to use less oil, I believe, would be through electric cars, either plug in hybrids or all electric. And the only way to get baseload power for that (non intermittent but dependable) would be largely with nuclear or coal. Coal is unavoidably dirty so that leaves nuclear (whose waste is toxic but easily contained as opposed to coal whose mercury emissions are in the air and the oceans).
So what is Obama’s stand on nuclear? It’s good enough for France, why can’t we do it more here!? We use 20% of electric from nuclear they use 80%.
I’d like to see a $2 a gallon tax. OR make it the complement of $4 and whatever the current gas price is, so that the tax goes up as oil prices go down, keeping demand constant.
That would usher in the plug in hybrids, etc.
Well, that’s fine for folks who can afford a new car. For me and my crappy, paid-off SUV, that would be a big, big problem. So, fuck that.
The problem probably isn’t with your SUV: it’s more likely to be with the distance you need to drive to work, to go shopping, etc. And that’s a problem with the design of cities in the US, where land is generally cheap, and people want to use a lot of it to build on.
If you’re serious and not just being rhetorical, I’d recommend you do some reading about Peak Uranium. Yes, there is a Hubbert peak for uranium, and if we did what you proposed it would be ruinous for a relatively short-term exploitation. Not a good idea even under the best of circumstances, and almost laughable in the face of the anti-nuclear movement and political limitations.
As an aside, I am a big fan of the whole flag-waving American hatred of all things Middle East. Why?
Cheap flights to New York with Kuwait Air thats why 
Apart from that I couldnt give a blue fuck, except to wonder why this is in the Pit?