Actually, as has been mentioned already, other Middle Eastern countries asked for our involvement and in less than a week we have already passed control of the No Fly Zone (aka not an actual war) to the United Nations and are lessening our involvement. That’s a big difference from a war that has been going on almost a decade in a country we were only given permission to invade because of faulty intelligence.
Like extremetestosterone said, both parties are full of shit. It’s just stupid to bash liberals for something conservatives did or also did.
I’m not sure where you got your information from but whilst China’s demand for oil has increased a lot in the past few years, it’s still nowhere near the consumption of the United States.
The Middle East won’t be running out of oil in our lifetime or our childrens’ lifetime and when they do they certainly won’t be running to the USA! The USA produces roughly 10 million barrels per day and consumes roughly 20 million barrels per day. The maths suggest the US will be dry even before the Middle East reaches it’s maximum peak of production. The same goes for the UK.
The most oil hungry countries will always rely on the Middle East to supply them oil. G8 countries, particularly the UK and USA seem to have a habit in the past 100 years of either invading a country in the MEast or basically helping stage coup d’etats. After the absolute failure of the Iraq War, we seem to be in coup mode at the moment. And thus I concur with the original post for this thread; we love oil and we’re willing to either to force our way to it or make the suppliers feel obliged to give it to us at cheap rates.
Although I talk about the Middle East a lot, I must note the USA’s largest supplier of energy is Canada.
China’s oil consumption beat the U.S. by 4% last year and is still climbing.
Oil shale deposits on the western slope of the Rockies could produce 800 billion barrels of oil. This is not including oil found in the Brakken that can now produce more viable oil thanks to new technology.
By getting involved, we have placed ourselves in a very peculiar place. We are friends at arms length with several other countries in the region – countries where it is illegal to publicly demonstrate. What would happen if a large gathering of youth were to publicly demonstrate in the Kingdom? We certainly wouldn’t take any supportive military stance if the situation became violent in Saudi Arabia.
That’s incorrect for oil alone. I’m going to assume those numbers are ‘oil equivilant’ which is a measure of energy consumption which includes other sources like coal, natural gas and nuclear.
Shale deposits are incredibly expensive to refine that requires fossil fuels in the first place to extract usable oil from the rocks. Though, in fairness, the tar sands in Canada are nearly as expensive to refine. I’m not familiar with Brakken so I shant comment on that.
If the shale reserves are tapped in the Rocky Mountains, it will shoot the USA into having the largest oil reserves in the world. 800 billions barrels does sound a lot and that would instantly define the USA as having the largest oil reserves in world. But to put it into perspective:
If the USA decided to stop importing oil (impossible, I know) and purely used the huge reserves in Rocky Mountains, it would last the country for about 13-14 years. Being realistic, factoring in future discoveries and a small decline in oil consumption, the USA doesn’t stand out in the oil world and most likely see it’s peak of production very soon. The same goes for the UK.
Please don’t think I’m bashing the US! I love the States and it’s people, I’m going there in April! And in regards to it’s energy consumption, more than 10% is created by renewable energy which puts the US on top for producing the most renewable energy in the world.
Not to mention Al Qaeda has allegedly now joined the rebel faction. We now find ourselves on the same side as Al Qaeda? WTF. And I don’t mean “win the future”.
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