With Bush going to Saudi Arabia to beg — again — for lower prices, the media is gaga over a confrontation that has about as much significance as a Rocky Balboa fight.

Even the venerable NYT just published an article, “Bush Rebuffed on Oil Plea in Saudi Arabia,” that opens, “With the price of oil hitting record highs, President Bush used a private visit with King Abdullah to make a second attempt to persuade the Saudis to increase oil production and was rejected yet again.”

Unlike the 1970s and 1980s and even much of the 1990s, neither OPEC nor the Saudis no longer control the price of oil.

If any country had a million barrels a day of (sellable) sparce oil capacity, they could make more than $100 million a day selling it, even if that much new oil dropped prices 20%, which it probably wouldn’t.

Who would sit on that kind of money? Yes, the Saudis are selling over 8 million barrels a day, so they don’t really need the money. But if they have any significant excess capacity, it is sour or high-sulfur crude (see the other experts on the full CNBC interview here). Such crude is not currently in demand: “Many refineries are not set up to process such crude because it is more difficult and expensive to refine into products.”

Even the WSJ, which published the figure on the right, headlined the October article, “OPEC’s Lever Loses Its Pull on Oil” (subs. req’d). As I wrote back then, “We cannot be far from $100+ oil.” Duh!

By the way, the Saudis are much slier than Bush, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, and, most of the press [okay, that's not saying much]. As the NYT and AP reported, Hadley told reporters:

“What they’re saying to us is” that “Saudi Arabia does not have customers that are making requests for oil that they are not able to satisfy.”

What a clever way of sounding to those not in the know [This means you -- Bush, Hadley, and the media] like they are sitting on extra capacity that they could sell, when in fact what they are really saying is that they have no customers for any extra capacity they have.

The situation is not going to get any better soon until the nation and the world develop and deploy at scale a high-volume, low-cost, carbon free alternative fuel:

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On Monday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) gave a major address on global warming policy at the North American headquarters of the Danish wind-turbine manufacturer Vestas, a location criticized as “hypocritical” for his longstanding and active opposition to federal support for the domestic wind industry. In 2004, he introduced legislation that would have eliminated the renewable energy production tax credit, and his continued opposition prevented renewal of the tax credit in 2007 and 2008. He has also vigorously opposed any form of a federal renewable electricity standard.

When asked by Grist magazine in October on his position on subsidies for green technologies like wind and solar, McCain responded:

I’m not one who believes that we need to subsidize things. The wind industry is doing fine, the solar industry is doing fine. In the ’70s, we gave too many subsidies and too much help, and we had substandard products sold to the American people, which then made them disenchanted with solar for a long time.

But in a press telebriefing Monday following McCain’s address, top adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said:

When you look at wind and the production tax credit and you look at some of the other alternatives, they cannot given the current market conditions totally be successful without existing production tax credits.

Pressed by Living on Earth’s Jeff Young whether McCain supported the renewable energy production tax credit, Holtz-Eakin said, “He would want to make sure that we did not at this point in time stop the wind and solar from progressing.”

As each day goes by, it’s becoming more difficult for Holtz-Eakin, who made sure to tell reporters on the call that he is a “PhD economist,” to keep track of McCain’s incoherent policies and inconsistent promises.

UPDATE: Gristmill‘s Kate Sheppard pressed McCain yesterday on his opposition to renewable energy subsidies but his support for nuclear industry subsidies. McCain did not address the contradiction, but did say: “I am unashamed and unembarrassed by my advocacy for nuclear power.” Also at Gristmill, Charles Komanoff finds:

Over the past 25 years, the entire federal subsidy for wind power [$3.75 billion] has been no greater than the subsidy bestowed on nukes each year from the fifties through the eighties [total $154 billion].

Transcript of Press Briefing: Read more

The Toyota Prius is “the world’s first mass-produced petrol-electric hybrid car to hit 1 million in sales.” More than half of those were sold in North America. Toyota’s goal is to sell more than one million per year.

I own one and must say it is a terrific car. I get about 45 miles per gallon combined city and highway — double the mpg of my old Saturn, which was not as big.

I think the comments from the Wired blog bear repeating, considering how GM (and others) mocked Toyota for pushing what they claimed was a money-losing vehicle:

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