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It was just a year ago that Venezuela’s energy minister, Rafael Ramírez, pledged that his country would be getting billions of new investment dollars from China and that oil production by 2012 will be at 5.8 million barrels per day.

For headhunters like Tom Zay, business couldn’t be better. “I have never seen demand like this,” says Zay, a managing director in the Houston office of Boyden, an executive worldwide search firm. “We’ve had cycles in the past. But this is different.”

The word “polymath” best describes Vaclav Smil. A distinguished professor of energy and environmental studies at the University of Manitoba, he has published 25 books, most on various aspects of energy.

In mid-May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that will allow the U.S. government to sue itself. Of course, that’s not how the bill’s backers sold the measure, known as the “No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act of 2007,” or NOPEC for short.

On November 7, 2005, I sat in seat 13C on American Airlines flight 4631 from Austin to Raleigh, which then connected to another flight to Washington D.C. On the Austin-Raleigh portion of the journey, America representative to the Arab world, Karen Hughes, was seated in 13B.

The ethanol madness continues! Last week, the Senate passed an energy bill mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol per year by 2022 sevenfold increase over current levels. Senators congratulated themselves for their environmental foresight.

Ethanol is a magic elixir. It allows politicians and political operatives to promise voters that America can achieve “energy independence.” In this new energy Valhalla, American farmers will be rich, fat and happy, thanks to all of the money they will be making from “energy crops.”

Wind power is the electricity sector’s equivalent of ethanol — the hype has lost all connection with reality. Last month, a coalition of renewable energy boosters, the American Council on Renewable Energy, released a report claiming that it is “technically feasible to increase wind capacity to supply 20 percent of this nation’s electricity by 2030.”

The numbers tell the story at Petrobras. Over the past four years, the company’s stock price has increased about ten-fold. In the past decade its oil production has doubled to roughly 1.9 million barrels of oil per day.

Paulo Sotero Marques is the director of the Brazil Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Most of the time, I believe that the U.S. and other Western countries, can, if they really work at it, bridge the cultural gap and reach some kind of understanding with the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Roger Pielke, Sr. is professor emeritus of meteorology at Colorado State University and currently a senior scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The ethanol boosters and neoconservatives just can’t help themselves. Whenever challenged on the facts, they reflexively respond “Saudi Arabia.” Merely invoking the name of the world’s biggest oil producer allows them to conflate the issues of oil and terrorism, and in the process, provide justification for the billions of subsidy dollars required to keep the ethanol scam alive and well.

Last month, George W. Bush traveled to Sao Paolo to discuss, among other things, the prospects for increasing the amount of Brazilian ethanol that can be provided to the U.S. market.