Peak Oil Media: "Humans > Yeast?", Moyers, Kunstler, Rubin, Olbermann & Krugman
Posted by Prof. Goose on June 28, 2008 - 9:45am
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: Bill Moyers, james kunstler, jeff rubin, original, Paul Krugman, peak oil, peak oil media [list all tags]
Under the fold, a few short videos apropos of the problems we face: Bill Moyers on PBS provocatively talking big oil last night, Kunstler talking the long emergency on CBC, Jeff Rubin on CNBC talking $7 gas, VMT, light rail, and other things, and then finally Olbermann and Krugman talking both US presidential candidates' "energy policy." Include other links in the comments.
Kunstler on CBC talking the long emergency, suburbia, and life without cheap oil...(8 mins)
Here's a provocative Bill Moyers essay on big oil that is not for the faint of heart, which aired last night on PBS. (http://www.pbs.org/billmoyers; 6 mins). "America has become little more than an energy protection force, doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard for the lives of others or the earth itself." I wonder why that is, perhaps because the easy energy is getting harder to get? Hmmm...
Jeff Rubin of CIBC predicts $7 gasoline on CNBC with Erin Burnett, which he says would take 10 million cars off the road. They talk about a lot of the variables and different ideas involved in the situation--it's really good (4 mins).
Krugman with Olbermann on "The Energy Question of 2008" (critical of McCain and Obama both) from MSNBC's Countdown...(7 mins)
Also a conversation with Daniel Yergin, Chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates
on Charlie Rose .... interesting comments
http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/06/27/2/a-conversation-with-daniel...
Direct link to Moyer's piece on the pbs site (the one above is no longer working):
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06272008/watch3.html
working for me.
Hello TODers!
Keep up the great work and thanks again for all your comments!
To update you since Glenn's post let me know what you think of this video interview with JHK:
( what is the future of the cheese doodle? ) http://www.kriscan.com/archives/58
And, this weeks kriscan video is Surfing for Peak Oil:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYhUaby-0xc
Kris
Wow, Moyers doesn't pull punches! I've seen some of his earlier stuff on other issues and he's been much more toned down and analytical. Not that I disagree with him on many issues and he even left out a lot of additional facts.
As a thought game, I wonder what would happen in the US, if the first three videos from this page were run on rotation on all major channels for a couple of weeks? Denial? Anger? Admittance? Action?
There's also a new Richard Heinberg video from Alliance for Sustainability.
One Black Swan is the notion that Communism was good for America. It kept the Chinese and Russians down on the farm and in a de-industrialized state. Once America "won" by converting China into a supposedly capitalist, and thus free state, America lost its position as the prime world customer for oil. This is where the American gambit in Iraq backfired. Our boys died (err... I mean, made the ultimate sacrifice) so that China could have more of the cheaper oil. No wonder Cindy Sheehan is mad. But then again, she's already been "marginalized". So let's not mention her name ever again.
Another Black Swan is the notion that America floats on nothing but an ocean of fast printed dollars. As long as the dollar remains the currency of trade for getting oil, everybody has to get their hands on dollars. So the US $$$ remains buoyant. Sadam was threatening to switch to Euros and to thereby upset the American apple and dollars cart. That's the real reason he had to go. Not just for the oil, but also to save the dollar. With American/British Big Oil moving in to operate Iraq, we know that those fields will continue to be safe for the dollar. That's the real reason Casey died. The noble cause was to preserve the American dollar. Free trade is free trade. But that "don't tread on me" snake isn't hissing simply about "freedom". It's the dollar stupid. He died for the dollar.
Bullshit. "conspiracy theory" has become a pejorative term used to denigrate the notion that the powerful sometimes do things in concert and in secret. The idea that this is crazy has become ingrained and is very convenient. The collusion between the CIA and mafia uncovered by the Church committee was a conspiracy. The illegal efforts to overthrow governments during the fifties and sixties were conspiracies. The real history of this country is riddled with what the ignorant would call conspiracy theories. This, history will show is another in the long inglorious list.
There is a reasonable probability that much of this was pre-planned including a false flags operation by the US government against our own twin towers. And it all worked out very beautifully at first.
GWB had some brilliant passionate speeches ready to roll out right after 10-1/10+1. He had that picturesque moment with the "bull" horn and the NYC firefighter. We all rallied round the flag and round our president. It played out like a fine tuned violin.
Then the strings began to unravel. They didn't greet us with flowers. The oil didn't start pouring forth right away. And China had the audacity to start "growing" their economy and to insist that their citizens should have cars too. The conspirators didn't foresee those parts of the equation unfolding in that way. Those were the Black Swans that swam their way into the story.
It had to be a false flag operation, started by Bill Clinton. All of the highjackers entered the country under Bill and took their so called flight training. Nobody knew where they were, so Bill had to tell George where they were and how to get in touch with them. Bill almost got caught, but his security advisor Sandy Berger went in and destroyed the documents, and got a wrist slap. Then Bush's genius took over. The twin towers and the whole complex were under armed guard 24 hours a day. And the world's best demolition companies take months to strategically place the charges to take down old structures. But, Bush & Cheney were able to do this, perhaps in a matter of days, and probably using jews who worked there, while outwitting all of the guards. And here is where Cheney shined, he paid off 10's of thousands of people to falsify videos of the highjackers going through the airline check points and people to say that they talked to them. And, he bribed the people on the airplane with untold riches for their families if they would only call them just before the crash and lie to them and say that Arabs had taken control of the planes and killed stewardesses in the process. Cheney had secretly cloned himself, and his clones were the pilots of the planes. I mean, it is soooooo obvious that only a retard would not know what happened.
Maybe you should examine your personal fear about this issue.
Retards like this?
http://www.ae911truth.org/
Here is the truth about 9/11 with proofs from reliable sources:
http://a.domaindlx.com/trysite/strangerthanfiction.pdf
Thank you for sharing your antisemitic beliefs with us. However the true truth is that aliens have come here from other planets to test your devotion to our blessed deity, blessed be his name. Mumble, mumble.
The Hebrew Hammer says, "Zionist conspiracy? I'll show you Zionism!"
"Shabbat shalom, motherf***ers!"
How did you find out? I thought we covered our tracks so well.
Cheers,
Dick C.
From an early ASPO newsletter:
www.asponews.org/ASPO.newsletter.027.php
Governments have evidently long employed deceptions to achieve their ends. But the age of mass media and the nature of modern democracy have combined to bring the art of deception to new heights. Is Deception too strong a word? It may well be, but it does come close to describing the misleading imagery and choice of words by which governments seek to secure support from an impressionable and often ill-informed electorate.
(see also : http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0302/S00061.htm )
They are not being quite straight. The American people, who are as generous as any, do not naturally seek to dominate the world, or attack distant people. But they are ready to loyally support their government if they can be led to believe that they are threatened or at risk. Saddam Hussein is said to be constructing, not a good old familiar Atomic Bomb, such as the US dropped on Hiroshima, but Weapons of Mass Destruction: they sound more sinister and threatening. Men in London are filmed running around in white protective clothing to simulate their reaction to an outbreak of unspecified germ warfare. No such attack is under way, but the imagery conveys the sense of threat. Troops and tanks are sent to London Airport at the end of a Muslim feast. Television has greatly increased the scope for promulgating the imagery. “Freedom” is a word frequently used by the US President, both in relation to his own country and now for the Iraqi people after the invasion. It is a euphemism for globalism and the principle of free access to resources by the highest bidder, irrespective of the rights, traditions and wishes of those who live in the territories where the resources occur. The European settlers in the New World faced a similar issue in earlier years but solved it by virtually exterminating the indigenous people. That is now a better-forgotten, distant memory.
The US government must recognise that it depends on rising oil imports to maintain the way of life its people like. It must realise that its growing imports will cost much more when by 2010 as much as 40% of world supply will be coming from just five key countries in the Middle East which regard their oil as national assets. It may fear that its entire economy and world status, along with the strength of the dollar, would be undermined if inflows of foreign investment failed to match its towering foreign debt. It may fear that the Euro would replace the Dollar as the preferred currency for world trade. Such fears may have prompted a radical new foreign policy to try to restore confidence. Deploying military might has been a traditional means of doing so. The pound sterling used to be a world currency, with the Bank of England promising to back it in gold. People had faith in it thanks in part to the British gunboat.
The events surrounding September 11th have been widely questioned by those who find the account full of curious elements. For example, John Fulton, a government official at a homeland security meeting in Chicago, reportedly responded to an accusation that the authorities were ill-prepared, by saying that in fact they were that very day running a simulated attack by a hijacked airliner on the NRO Office in Virginia. Could that explain why the normal defences were shut down? and was the timing a coincidence? They sound like legitimate questions, but others dismiss such doubts as being the crazed expressions of paranoiac merchants of Conspiracy. Whether or not the US government, or elements within it, contrived or connived at the events of September 11th, the incident did provide the practical justification for opening a new “War on Terror”. Those who did not support the United States were declared enemies. It aimed first at Afghanistan, which borders the Caspian and was supposed to be harbouring those responsible for the events of September 11th, before it turned on Iraq for apparently unrelated reasons. An already vilified Saddam Hussein presented a ready-made pretext for a threatened attack on the country, which has about 60 billion barrels left in known fields. That is a much bigger prize than the Caspian, where exploration is giving disappointing results.
Some may imagine that Iraqi oil is there for the taking by simply opening the valve, but in fact an immense amount of work, investment and, above all, time would be needed to rehabilitate the ageing fields and bring the undeveloped smaller ones into production. Under optimal conditions, production might double the current 2 Mb/d by 2010, but that would still meet much less than half US needs. In reality, conditions are most unlikely to be optimal: the fields may be fired during the invasion, and patriots may continue the struggle, as did the Resistance fighters in France during the last world war. So it is more likely that production would fall after a successful invasion. ...
But a military occupation of Iraq would place US forces in a strong strategic position from which to control oil supply from the entire region, quelling local insurrections and propping up puppet regimes. That seems a much more logical explanation for the move than a grab for Iraq’s oil itself. In the event that Saddam Hussein does or may pose a military threat: the only significant targets in range would be the oilfields of other Middle East countries.
An interesting new twist is provided by Turkey, which talks of reclaiming its rights to what is now Iraq, deriving from its centuries of ownership prior to the First World War when the victorious allies broke up the Ottoman Empire, dividing its oil between themselves. Its government offered a bridgehead for the US invasion in return for substantial payments, but the move was defeated in the Turkish parliament, as massive anti-war demonstrations erupted. Germany, Belgium and France have broken ranks with NATO by declining to go to the “defence” of Turkey, preferring to join with Russia in opposition to the threatened attack. Europe has as great a need to access Middle East oil as does the United States, now that North Sea production plummets from depletion.
On February 14th, Dr Blix, the lucid UN inspector, gave convincing evidence to the UN Security Council that Iraq posed no immediate threat to anyone, and that any future threat could be readily controlled by increased surveillance. Television viewers have also seen Tariq Aziz, the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, who is a Christian, on his knees praying at the tomb of St Francis of Assisi, following cordial meetings with the Pope. Massive anti-war demonstrations throughout the world from Stavanger to Skibbereen, not to mention London where over a million marched, show that people are far from convinced by the explanations offered to them as reason for going to war. They were not encouraged when the British government released an intelligence document justifying its support for the war that turns out to have been lifted from a student’s thesis, written long ago. The Times of London carried an admirably measured response in a leading article on February 11th, entitled “There is no virtue or safety in a war like this”, summing up the views of the great majority of people in the country. It remains to be seen if the government will finally represent the views of the people who elected it to do so, facing a courageous revolt in its own party in Parliament.
It seems obvious that if the United States and Britain do invade Iraq, they must have some motive other than the declared one. Oil has to be at the head of the list of suspects.
In terms of depletion, what would control of the Middle East mean? If the people there can somehow be subjugated, then western companies would presumably move in to ramp up the production of oil as fast as they could, which could lead to a fall in oil price, encouraging demand. The consequence would be that global peak would be higher and sooner, giving a steeper subsequent decline. It would make a bad situation worse. A better policy for dealing with growing oil shortage would be for the consuming countries to agree to match their oil demand with the depletion rate imposed by Nature.
[note: the NRO "911" simulation apparently was an emergency exercise about an accidental crash into their headquarters, near Dulles Airport in Virginia - not a terrorism scenario. However, it seems likely that the exercise did serve to confuse the Air Defense response for a critical period of time, allowing the attacks to succeed]
9/11 research is a rabbit-hole of Byzantine complexity full of snares and delusions and peopled with false friends, lunatics, earnest lost souls and a few heroes. It's not necessary to understand all the nuances of science and bureaucracy that allowed the government to get away with mass murder, blame it on swarthy foreigners (of whom many are eager accomplices) and use the incident as (in the words of the Cheney, Jeb Bush et al cabal, the Project for a New American Century) "a new Pearl Harbor." At this critical juncture in human history, it's only necessary to understand why they did it. The motive was Peak Oil, a disaster which will affect everyone on the planet, about which all must enlighten themselves and for which all must prepare.
-- Jenna Orkin, World Trade Center Environmental Organization
http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/2007/05/epa-whistleblower-alleges-more-f...
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Crossing the Rubicon: Simplifying the case against Dick Cheney
by Michael Kane
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011805_simplify_case.shtml
Means - Dick Cheney and the Secret Service: Dick Cheney was running a completely separate chain of Command & Control via the Secret Service, assuring the paralysis of Air Force response on 9/11. The Secret Service has the technology to see the same radar screens the FAA sees in real time. They also have the legal authority and technological capability to take supreme command in cases of national emergency. Dick Cheney was the acting Commander in Chief on 9/11.
Motive - Peak Oil: At some point between 2000 and 2007, world oil production reaches its peak; from that point on, every barrel of oil is going to be harder to find, more expensive to recover, and more valuable to those who recover and control it. Dick Cheney was well aware of the coming Peak Oil crisis at least as early as 1999, and 9/11 provided the pretext for the series of energy wars that Cheney stated, "will not end in our lifetime."
Opportunity - 9/11 War Games: The Air Force was running multiple war games on the morning of 9/11 simulating hijackings over the continental United States that included (at least) one "live-fly" exercise as well as simulations that placed "false blips" on FAA radar screens. These war games eerily mirrored the real events of 9/11 to the point of the Air Force running drills involving hijacked aircraft as the 9/11 plot actually unfolded. The war games & terror drills played a critical role in ensuring no Air Force fighter jocks - who had trained their entire lives for this moment - would be able to prevent the attacks from succeeding. These exercises were under Dick Cheney's management.
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Michael Meacher, Member of the British Parliament, former member of Tony Blair's cabinet
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1036687,00.html
"This war on terrorism is bogus: The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination"
Michael Meacher, Saturday September 6, 2003, The Guardian
Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.
We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".
The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".
Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.
First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.
It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".
Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).
Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.
The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).
In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).
Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).
Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.
The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.
This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.
A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.
Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).
The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.
Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003
Do you actually imagine that anyone is going to read all that?
Line breaks would help, but plonking two essays in a row onto the blog is not reasonable - FWIW the last paragraph sounds sensible.
The "conspiracy theory" label is habitually used as a tool to cut off discussion by those that offer there own preposterous explanation instead, the “just coincidence theory”.
Accept that we will never know the true truth of what happened just as we will never know the full story about almost anything else.
What's done is done.
Thousands died that day.
Thousands more American boys died shortly after.
Hundreds of thousands of nonAmerican nonhumans died in the wars also.
We are where we are.
What's next?
100 more years of the same?
I don't think you understand what a Black Swan is.
Mistakes and idiocy are not Black Swans, they are just mistakes and idiocy. When they are created by blind ideology and fear, all the more so. 9/11, were it not itself a conspiracy, would be a Black Swan. The current flooding in Mississippi is not. Floods happen.
Capiche?
Moyer was absolutely spot on. Provide one fact that shows otherwise. In the meantime, go talk to the survivors of the Liberty and the anyone connected to the Tonkin Gulf incident. There are two real conspiracies both happening in my lifetime.
And should we forget Reagan and Bush's extra-Constitutional patty cake with Iran?
Etc.
Cheers
Cheers
You're right about Moyer. Even though he's talking about oil, he's not talking about the problem. His underlying theme is that it's the big oil companies that are the reason oil is at $140 a barrel and gasoline is at $4. Except they are not the reason, and they probably wish the price of oil would come down too.
No, the reason prices are so high is essentially because of rising demand and shrinking supply. Because the American economy relies on the stuff. And because they're no longer able to pump it out of the ground like they used to.
Yet it's fairly clear that this is what is happening to those who even slightly understand peak oil, yet liberal beacons of talk and TV don't mention this at all. When will even the outer-mainstream media get the point?
Maybe he's talking about a different problem which is also quite large. Specifically:
An illegal war, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraq people and costing literally trillions. Oh, and a few Americans are dead too. And the motivation of those starting the criminal war was access to oil.
Reality check: We all know oil is priced in dollars. But does that mean it's purchased with dollars? Or does the purchaser just take the current dollar equivalent in their local currency and exchange it for the dollar equivalent in the seller's currency to complete the transaction?
The repeated claim that the dollar's value is higher because things are priced in dollars seems empty. Things are priced in dollars because historically it's been a strong, stable currency, and the US is still an extremely large market for most things, especially oil. But does Saudi Arabia insist that European purchasers, for example, pay them in physical US dollars? Or will the Saudis happily accept the equivalent amount, at current exchange rates, in euros or riyals? If it's the latter, then pricing oil in dollars does nothing to create demand for more dollars to be printed or circulated.
It makes no difference whether it's paid for in US dollars or merely priced in US dollars.
If the US dollar falls in value relative to other currencies, then the oil at price X will get them less Riyals or whatever than it used to.
For example, if oil is US$100/bbl and US$100= 1,000 shekels, then the producers receive 1,000 shekels, great.
But if the US dollar plummets to half its value, the US$100/bbl oil, well US$100=500 shekels, so that each barrel only earns them 500 shekels instead of 1,000.
Thus, changes in the value of the US dollar against other currencies, and in the US economy generally, affect exporters' decisions about how much oil to produce and export; and how much oil they produce and export affects the US dollar.
Since oil is priced in US dollars, if the US economy is seen to be tanking, the value of US currency will drop against other currencies. So if they still want their 1,000 shekels a barrel when US$1=0.5 shekels instead of US$1=1 shekel, they'll have to double the price of oil in US dollars.
Alternately, they can seek a more stable currency to price oil against. Like the Euro.
In which case the US$ loses its implied backing in a commodity everyone wants, and turns out to be backed by... not much at all.
ENRON,WORLDCOM,GLOBAL CROSSINGS,WATERGATE,COUNTYWIDE
And I could continue ad nauseum with REAL WORLD
conspiracies.
"The oil revenue will pay for the war"
"Not two days or two months but no longer then two years"
"Aluminum tubes that could only be used for enrichment
of uranium"
"Yellow cake from Nigeria"
"Mission accomplished...smokin em out....few dead enders left...got em on the run...turned another corner...makin progress...winnin hearts and minds..
they will welcome us as liberators..throw candy at our
feet...we know exactly where the WMD are,east west north and somewhat south of Bagdad.
The chutzpah it takes to sling the "conspiracy kook"
label is only equal to the lack of an adversaries
ability to argue the facts.
Moyers is the messenger...attack his message if you can.
I couldnt find fault with anything he said .
Of course I dont have a PHD or even a GED but I do
have common sense...which doesnt seem too common after all.
A "Black Swan" is an unpredictable event. Neither of the two examples you give are Black Swans. They are unintended consequences, but they were not unpredictable. (N.B. Not predicted is not the same as not predictable).
Re: The attempt to convert communist countries to capitalism is surely the attempt to bring them into a global market economy. The fact that policy makers didn't consider what adding 1.5 billion people to the world market would do to prices is a lack of forethought, not unpredictability.
And how has that been working out for the dollar?
--
JimFive
I had a very similar thought to your SamuM. I think all four of the videos under the fold, taken together, paint a very different picture from that we are getting from the MSM, even though they are all technically FROM pieces of the MSM!
It's all about integration. I have maintained that people here at TOD are complex integrative thinkers--they have the capacity to put a whole bunch together. The problem is that it's self-selection. We can't just put these on people's computers. That's why I hit "spreading" us around more and more, so that we can find those people who can get it.
That's why I picked up the Krugman video too. Over at his blog yesterday, he made the point that energy is "one of those issues that’s orthogonal to the usual political divide…"
I think he is dead on. The solutions, centralization and decentralization, are patently ideological, yes. However, the bases for having the attitudes to subscribe to those ideological stances are going to be increasing determined by "where you sit" class-wise and access-to-cheap-energy-wise...which is very different from where we are in our current political universe.
Energy has never been a big deal politically because we have had it cheaply.
PG,
I like the video summaries on a weekly basis. It's a nice change from reading and a good counter to the Sunday morning talking heads blather.
From PG (Prince George).
I'm surprised Moyers didn,t go beyond the obvious -- all the way to the truth, which is we invaded Iraq because Sadaam got tired of being bombed daily for years and decided to sell his oil in euros, threatening the almighty dollar. Not only is oil $140 but our economy and our dollar is in the toilet. Way to go. Oh and Iran is planning to sell their oil in euros or gold. I guess that means another war. Too bad we burned through all of our oil as fast as we possibly could.
Saudi-US relations, American elections, and the price of oil
Given the lack of transparency re Saudi oil assets and production capacity, what follows is conjecture. But what if...
Go back to the TOD analyses posted in March 2007 or so and revisit the Saudi oil production graphs displayed against the OPEC quota for KSA. Compare the graphs with the events.
Does ahyone have a credible explanation for the huge excess production over quota that occurred in the Summer and Fall of 2004 leading up to the Nov election? Was it political? The Saudis weren't happy with Bush for going into Iraq against their wishes, but the alternative may have been even less to their liking - a Pres. Kerry asking for a second time (re another unpopular war), "Who will be the last soldier to die for a mistake?" The price of oil was rising even with the huge bump-up in Saudi production, and Bush only won by, for example, 150,000 votes in Ohio - what would have happened had they produced a million b/d or so less in those months? Would a higher gas price spike going into November have made a difference and did KSA not want to take a chance on the consequences of an abrupt Kerry withdrawal from Iraq - a serious shift in the Sunni-Shiite balance of power in the region? I don't know and neither does anyone else, though many of us have opinions.
Now turn to the 2006 elections. By this time, were the Saudis so fed up with Bush's poor prosecution of the war that a calculation was made to encourage a divided American government by cutting production, keeping prices high, and shifting power Democrats in Congress. Admittedly, conjecture. But remember, KSA's oil policy is that the facts are secret and that, at no time in recent years has the Kingdom ever relented from its assertions that it maintains substantial surplus production capacity - not for one month, not for one minute.
But now, surely with all the trouble high energy prices have been causing in the world for almost a year now, but esp. in 2008, prudence (self-preservation) would have dictated Saudi action to restore production levels - not to perpetuate protected lifestyles in the OECD countries but to avoid the risk of politically destabilizing events, such as the Bhutto assasination, political strife in Egypt, etc. At this point, a US-centric view is unhelpful. The Saudis have to see what's going on in the rest of the world; so their inaction may say a lot about the validity of their (repeated and continuous) assertions of healthy production capacity margins.
This in turn leads to the question of whether something more resembling a market has emerged - some buyers can't afford to buy, some can; some sellers can't sell more (KSA), and some sellers won't (Libya). A market where the "swing producer" no longer exists and can only affect prices by withholding supply - not a particularly useful attribute in the current circumstances. The background on 2004 events is presented to ask this - in far less extreme circumstances than now, KSA bumped up its production suddenly by a large amount. But now, after many months of a far more apparent need in the world market, the Saudis only belatedly and by a smaller margin have begun to respond. What does this mean?
"Just my opinion, I could be wrong."