Word: barrel
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...Wednesday afternoon, on the New York Mercantile Exchange, a single trader bid up oil until it finally hit the price we'd all been waiting for: $100 a barrel. Driven by trends both short-term (political instability in Africa and speculation) and long-term (voracious new demand from China and India), oil has quadrupled since 2003, doubled since the beginning of 2007 and now reached triple digits for the first time since it began trading on the exchange began...
...wily strategies Charlie had used for filling the pork barrel, he now exercises in his sacred cause. Among his co-conspirators are one of his mistresses, a Houston doyenne named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and a scuzzy, belligerent, occasionally brilliant CIA agent (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Charlie also plays the Israelis and Egyptians against each other, to get them to work together. He tries working his seductive powers on Pakistan's President Zia (Om Puri). In Congress he trades votes and cashes in favors. Essentially, he treats the Afghan war as one big earmark. He makes American generosity seem the coolest...
...then, dramatic and steady, began with something as dull as a rise in oil prices. With that, the laborious process of drawing viscous bitumen out of Alberta's oil sands became ever more viable. Massive shovels churned the earth, digging up the tons of sand needed to produce each barrel of oil. New pipelines were laid. Alberta's already hot economy hurtled forward...
Like a Vice Tax David von Drehle summarized it well in "Oil's Silver Lining" [Nov. 19]: The $100 barrel gives us another chance to change our ways. It's a true gift to the planet from the present economic circumstances. And rest assured, prices are not likely to drop. How could they, since worldwide discovery of oil peaked in 1964? In China and India, hundreds of millions of households dream of getting a car or even two. Let's hope the exponential rise of oil prices will guide us all toward greener aspirations that will encourage the production...
...billion industry in prime condition. But with China's and India's demand for crude inspiring projections for exponential growth and the U.S.'s determination to remain a slave to oil, the oil industry may well have hit a point when the short term is the long term--every barrel not pumped today will be worth more tomorrow. "The Venezuelans are investing as much as they want to," says economist Mark Weisbrot, a co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington. "That is, they're not in a hurry at all to expand production...