President Bush got royal sand kicked in his face today when King Abdullah of our “friend and ally” Saudi Arabia said there was no reason to increase oil production until customers demand it.
Bush asked the good king back in January to boost production but got a similar response.
Excerpts from the AP story:
Saudi officials stuck to their position that they will only pump more oil into the system when asked to by buyers, something they say is not happening now, the president’s national security adviser told reporters.
“Saudi Arabia does not have customers that are making requests for oil that they are not able to satisfy,” Stephen Hadley said. “What the Saudis wanted to tell us was we’re doing everything we can do … to meet this problem, but it’s a complicated problem.”
The Saudis bumped up production in May by about 300,000 barrels, but an energy analyst interviewed by the AP said it was a “token amount” and that the Saudis are still pumping about 2 million barrels a day below capacity.
Bush administration officials seem OK with the Saudis reasoning but as the AP story pointed out:
When Bush first ran for president in 2000, he criticized the Clinton administration for high fuel prices and said the president must “jawbone” oil producing nations and persuade them to drop rates. At that time, oil was nearing $28 a barrel — less than a quarter what it is now.
No wonder Republicans like me are disenchanted …
At least, Bush did agree to cancel oil shipments into the Strategic Oil Reserve, two days after Congress voted to temporarily halt the daily 70,000 barrel shipment.
Not that it will matter all that much. We still don’t have the refineries to produce the gas we need. And we can thank some of the enviro-nuts for some of that, in addition to our own thirst for oil and gas.
Meanwhile, gas prices continue to go up….
i guess his jawbone broke.