We spoke on the phone with Michael T Klare in February 2006.

JL Hi Michael

MK A pleasure to talk to you ….

JL Very good of you to let us talk to you, just for your information we have about 5 of us over here in the room, John (myself), Jamie, Tom, James and Ed…. We have a bunch crazy questions for you about oil. What we are trying to do is less of an interview and more of a discussion, we’re trying to talk to a lot of great minds from around the world about the kinds of things that don’t get talked about much in the press… Jamie found your book and thought it was pretty good… so Jamie why don’t you take it away….

JPC - Hi Michale, I’m Jamie the best good looking in the room… Could you comment on President Bush’s state of the Union Address where he said he would cut imported oil by 75% by 2050…

MK - there’s been a lot of discussion about this, I think that Bush is responding to a growing public uneasiness about this, the public is worried about high prices, hearing about peak oil, there worried about terrorism and worried that the govt isn’t doing enough about all this, so Bush is being something of an opportunist here responding to the genuine public concern about the issue, the media hasn’t really caught on.

As everyone who has looked at his proposals has said, there really isn’t enough meat there to achieve anything in the time that he states. He’s not calling for the type of initiatives that could make a difference to America’s consumptive behaviour. Unless you can compel Americans to drive less, and use less gasoline, every other measure is trivial in comparison… if you keep driving SUV’x with huge tanks of gas nothing else is really going to make a difference, and he didn’t call for any conservation measures like raising the minimum fuel emissions from cars. And secondly you cannot distinguish when the refinery sends out refined gasoline, where that gasoline has come from, whether the Middle East, US, Canada Latin America it all gets mixed up- you can’t just state you are going to cut out the parts from the Middle East - that’s just ridiculous. none of this amounts to anything but the impression that the President is paying attention to people’s concerns about this.
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