There will be no oil man in the White House come 2009. What does that mean for American oil companies?

Question: Which candidate is best qualified to take on resource scarcity?

Michael Klare: I would say that the democratic candidates at this point Senator Clinton and Senator Obama have virtually similar policies, which call for a rapid and big increase in the development of petroleum alternatives in greater conservation of energy. There is no difference between them on these issues. So, either one of them on these issues on my mind would be equally attractive. I think they don’t go far enough quite personally, I think they need to go much further.

Question: There will be no oil man in the White House in 2009. What does the mean for the oil companies?

Michael Klare: Bear in mind that for a dramatic change in policy to take place, we need a congress that is free of influence from the oil companies and not just the oil companies, but the big coal and the natural gas companies and the rest. We are going to need much greater emphasize on petroleum energy alternatives and with out a clean sweep of congress we are not going to make the kind of progress that we need, so we need political reform that is much broader than just the new president and I think that is going to take time. It is going to require political campaign reform. Now, there been efforts in that direction and in fact Senator McCain has been a supporter of that in the past, I think he has backed away from that, but he was once a supporter of that effort. We need much more of that.

Recorded on: 3/14/08