Oil and Rival Energy Sources

Mr. President, Very Honorable Minister Jochimsen, Ladies and Gentlemen:Several weeks ago, when my friend Jane Carter so greatly honored me by inviting me to make this talk, she mentioned my "unique" experience with international oil and energy markets. This word unique seems to me to be a good semantic example of overstatement such as is fairly rarely found in English except when required by specific circumstances. We are all unique in this room. The president-elect of your association invited me to take off for the summits and to describe from up there the wonderful countryside of our Earth, irrigated by the economy and lit up by energy, the two sources of mankind's wealth and the subject of this conference. But when I began to spread my wings, I found that the countryside beneath me was extraordinarily familiar and that it was hard to find much of anything to describe that you had not already depicted yourselves hundreds of times.