Presidents Have NO Balls

Got this little interview of Robert Hirsch via JHK wherein Hirsch, former big wig at DOE and publisher of the 2005 DOE Peak Oil report, pulls back the covers to reveal the nutless sacks that hang between the legs of our presidents.

Question: Under pressure from whom?

Hirsch: From people in the hierarchy of the DOE. This was true in both Republican and Democrat administrations. There is, I think, ample evidence, and some people in DOE have gone so far as to say it specifically, that people in the hierarchy of DOE, under both administrations, understood that there was a problem and suppressed work in the area. Under President Bush, we were not only able to do the first study but also a follow-on study that looked at mitigation economics. After that, visibility apparently got so high that NETL was told to stop any further work on peak oil.

Yes, that was terrible. And it was strictly politics and political appointees—I have no idea how far up in either administration (the current one and previous one) these issues went or now go. People in the Clinton administration had talked about peak oil, including President Clinton and Vice President Gore, and the same thing is true in the Bush administration, and the same is true, to the best of my knowledge, in the Obama administration.

Does anyone know what Leadership with a capital L stands for anymore? Can American just not handle bad news anymore? I can't believe what a clan of pansies we've become.

And no doubt Peak Oil is a downer. It's not a happy ending. Peak Oil won't kill itself via cyanide capsule in a Berlin bunker. It won't collapse like the Berlin wall. It's coming whether we like it or not and everyone is going to have to start dealing with it sooner or later. And the later it gets, the worse it will be:

We found that because the decline rate in world oil production was going to be in multiple percents per year, it was going to take a very long time for mitigation to catch up to the decline in world oil production. Basically, the best we found was that starting a worldwide crash program 20 years before the problem hits avoid serious problems. If you started 10 years before-hand, you are in a lot of trouble; and if you wait to the last minute until the problem is obvious, then you’re in deep trouble for much longer than a decade. As it turns out, we no longer have the 10 or 20 years that were two of our scenarios.

I don't know how anyone in government sleeps knowing they sit on their hands while all this goes down.