Does King Abdullah normally carry a weapon, small sword perhaps? Of course he would not take it into a visit with a host head of state, but you know old habits. The gesture suggests control to me. His bios have no extraneous personal information in them.

gtomkins at 69:The jawbone of an ass
I recall hearing him use that expression one time and snorting at his born-again claims … you’d think he’d at least know the scriptures.

Just like a prominent Democratic candidate is fond of saying, I not saying any of this would be easy. The point is once we as a country got serious about tapping this source, OPEC loses it’s stranglehold on pricing.

I don’t expect to convince you of my opinion, so let’s just agree to disagree on this. None of us know precisely how much oil is left in any field, much less new ones that haven’t been tapped yet.

If anyone cares to read something that challenges the “peak oil” theme, check this out.

It certainly made sense to me.

Production from oil shale apparently uses up about half of the energy extracted in mining, transportation, and heating to extract the ”oil”.

One can just as easily find figures online that show peak oil isn’t here yet. The world is a big place. As our technology gets better were finding huge reserves offshore we couldn’t access before.

Most of these estimates come “cornucopians”. They keep predicting things like a return to $40/bbl oil. They just aren’t very credible. I am not sure what you mean by “huge reserves”. The real question here is can you find and produce enough new fields to compensate for what you are losing from older fields that are beginning to play out. The answer is no. Deepwater and other reserves tend to be more difficult and costly to produce. They also tend to be smaller. So no they don’t make up for what has been lost.

The oil sands in Canada are massive, and will eventually provide us with 20% or more of our oil imports.

Total Canadian imports are about 2 million bbls/day. We use just shy of 21 million bbls/day currently. So say you could boost them up to around 4 million bbls/day or 20%, where are you going to find the other 17 million bbls/day we need (and this assumes our demand stays flat and does not increase)?

Much as we may desire the magic wand to be waved and have the miracles occur, not every issue that is important to me is important to my leaders, of either party.

Is there ANYONE in ANY position of power in today’s US political scene who has provided leadership in these areas? And how successful have they been in advancing this leadership?

It almost sounds like you wish Clinton had acted like BushCo and done things without getting a consensus from an opposition Congress.

Before I go any further, I want to make clear I’m all for conservation and more of it. I know, however, it’s in Big Oil’s interest to push the peak oil meme because it means “peak profits.”

A very strong case can be made there is more oil in shale rock in the Western U.S. than in all of Saudi Arabia.

The oil sands in Canada are massive, and will eventually provide us with 20% or more of our oil imports.

Again, this is not to revel in more use of fossil fuels; I’m just offering a different view on the issue.

Bottom line: The Clintons have never offered any leadership on this issue. Wonder why that is?