World Running Out of Oil (Pols stick heads in Saudi sand)

[Octafish]

The world's problems are grave. Here's why we need a President with proven leadership, experience and brains. Otherwise, it's going to be every human for him/her self, much sooner rather than later. And you know Smirk and Sneer will be safe in Rev. Moon's Uruguayan redoubt. — Octafish


The Bottom Of The Barrel
The World Is Running Out Of Oil. So Why Do Politicians Refuse to Talk about It?

By George Monbiot
The Guardian - UK
Dec. 2, 2003

The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five and a quarter days.
 
Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.
 
Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long.
 
The only question is how long. The most optimistic projections are the ones produced by the US department of energy, which claims that this will not take place until 2037. But the US energy information agency has admitted that the government's figures have been fudged: it has based its projections for oil supply on the projections for oil demand, perhaps in order not to sow panic in the financial markets.

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1097672,00.html

[Sliverofhope]

1. Woah

Peak oil is mentioned? By a newspaper? Well, this is interesting.

[Octafish]

14. Between the "Club of Rome" in 1972 and Mike Ruppert in 2001...

... it got almost zero column inches. Why put a drag on the economy?

In all seriousness, this is RONALD REAGAN's fault. Pruneface dismantled ALL the alternate-energy and oil conservation programs of his predecessor, the sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter.

[Minstrel Boy]

20. a kick for the sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter

You're right about it being Reagan's fault.

I remember in my Canuckistani high school in the mid-70s, being taught "if we don't change our habits, in 30 years..." Well, we're here now, and we don't have another 30 years to squander. And all this time the world's been going backwards, not forwards.

If I didn't have kids, I'd be tempted to say "Apocalypse? Bring it on!" We deserve it.

[cthrumatrix]

16. this is why we are in Iraq....and sets the table for the powers that

be to "allocate oil" as we go downhill.

Now...there are always a multitude of reasons for the invasion. Another one is for Iraq's conversion to the Euro 12/2000.

Just a coincidence I guess

[poskonig]

2. Would the price *gradually* go up?

If oil was running out, of course. The gradual increase in price would encourage purchasing fuel efficient vehicles and support for public transportation, no?

[Sliverofhope]

3. The question is, how messy would the transition be

I'm not exactly sure how the markets would react. I've read a lot, but I don't have mastery of the material. Demand continues to increase, and supply, for the first time, will not be able to meet that demand. I don't know if there's a parallel situation I can compare this to.

[Minstrel Boy]

6. I think this crisis is without precedent

Sometimes I allow myself some optimism, and think Richard Duncan's Olduvai Gorge theory can't be right (theory: "the life-expectancy of Industrial Civilization, defined in terms of world energy use per capita, is less than or equal to 100 years"). But most of the time, I feel in my bones that he's right. And it's not just oil that's peaking, but natural gas, which would be an important transition fuel to alternative energies.

The latest revision of his theory (March 2001) is even starker. He'd placed the "cliff event" in 2012, but now thinks we can expect it in 2007. And "the modern way of life is history by 2025."

When you understand this crisis, you can see the method to the Cheney/Bush madness.

http://www.mnforsustain.org/duncan_r_olduvai_cliff_revisited.htm

Duncan:

The Olduvai "slide" from 2000 to 2012 (Now 2007) may resemble the "Great Depression" of 1929 to 1939: unemployment, breadlines, and homelessness. As for the Olduvai "cliff" from 2007 to 2025 — I know of no precedent in human history.

A keen question is posed: "Why are you confident about the Olduvai theory?" My response: "Because Mother Nature then solves for us the (apparently) insuperable problem of the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons, which the human race seems either incapable or unwilling to solve for itself."

Governments have lost respect. World organizations are ineffective. Neo-tribalism is rampant. The population is over six billion and counting. Global warming and emerging diseases are headlines. The reliability of electric power networks is falling. And the instant the power goes out, you are back in the Dark Age.

If God made the Earth for human habitation, then He made it for the Stone Age mode of habitation. The Olduvai theory is thinkable.
http://www.mnforsustain.org/duncan_r_olduvai_theory.htm

[frank frankly]

4. good catch, octafish

they posted it at commondreams.org, too.

i wish i had land...

[Octafish]

15. Thanks, Frank! Small virtual world...

While I visit commondreams.org frequently, I must confess to seeing this on Jeff Rense's. I know, I know ... the guy puts up enough neo-Confederate anti-Israel anti-Muslim anti-minority anti-government anti-Alien anti-UFO BS stuff to make the Truth he posts stand out.

BTW: We'll all have land if Bush has his way — 10X3X6. Do'h! I remembered what the Bush family's NAZI business partners did in Germany. The fiends will just scattered the ashes.

[Sliverofhope]

5. kick

This and the GOP bribe scandal are so important. What shall be done?

[Sliverofhope]

7. Quote from the party's over

Here are four pertinent paragraphs from The party's over, by Richard Heinberg. I just hope someone reads this, since I'm typing it up:

Try the following thought experiment. Go to the center of a city and find a comfortable place to sit. Look around and ask yourself: Where and how is energy being used? What forms of energy are being consumed, and what work is that energy doing? Notice the details of buildings, cars, buses, street lights, and so on; notice also the activities of the people around you. What kinds of occupations do these people have, and how do they use energy in their work? Try to follow some of the strands of the web of relationships between energy, jobs, water, food, heating, construction, goods distribution, transportation, and maintenance that together keep the city thriving.

After you have spent at least 20 minutes appreciating energy's role in the life of this city, imagine what the scene you are viewing will look like if there were 10 percent less energy available. What substitutions would be neccessary? What choices would people make? What work would not get done? Now imagine the scene with 25 percent less energy available, with 50 percent less; with 75 percent less.

Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over

[Minstrel Boy]

8. I've typed with The Party's Over open in my lap too,

so thank you, your labour is appreciated!

Heinberg's book is a must-read. Especially for those still expecting a gentle transition into a fabulous post-petroleum World of Tomorrow.

[Sliverofhope]

9. Aye

Party's Over combined with the horrible food forecasts of Plan B by Lester Brown is almost too much to take. The 2004 elections are literally becoming a choice between apocalypse or no. And like Monbiot says, if you're given the choice between saving humanity or a new set of tableware, more people will accept the tableware. oy.

[Minstrel Boy]

11. "apocalypse or no"

That's it. That's why I've had a knot in my stomach for three years. If Bush is reselected, my choice would be obvious if I didn't have a family. I'd simply drink myself to death. Because the window's closing, folks, and the world can't even get it together for the bloody Kyoto accord. If only our species lived a little longer, to bear the consequences of our choices, maybe it would be different. But our age, I fear, will be the first to pay for our choices, and those of all the generations before us.

Still, until the blackouts, and the television goes out, most people won't know there's a problem big enough to actually impact them.

[Octafish]

17. People like you good DUers are exactly why we can do it.

... And you and your families also demonstrate why it's worth doing.

Fascinating thought experiment about the role of energy in modern civilization that many of us carried out last summer when we lived through the big power outage. We cannot allow that world to enter our reality.

If I may suggest: Jacques Vallee proposed we live in an "Associative Universe." Space-Time and Information are presented to us in a non-linear way. Reality, rather than acting like the needle on a phonograph tracking from beginning to end, has a way of picking up the tone arm and placing it down on the most random track. Like a sailboat's rudder, Vallee believes human consciousness is what moves the needle to the different spots on the record. It’s an excellent example of mind over matter.

PS: There's an even uglier scenario presented by the great Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem: Humanity is an evolutionary stopping off point in the evolution of cybernetic organisms. If we don't change the future, we can always pick up the bottle and head for Baffin Island later. I speak Spanish and have a kayak.

[blm]

38. You're a champ, Octafish

but, I doubt many on DU have the courage to line up and admit that certain candidates cannot handle this issue with a thorough understanding of what it will take. Only one can hit the ground running on this.

[Octafish]

40. There's not much time left for a lot of things...

... pdibel reminds us elsewhere on this thread about water and food. The country and our planet need a President who gets the job started on Day 1. Even though he uses big words and long sentences, here's what Sen. Kerry says about oil, as posted by the League of Conservation Voters (who give JK a 96-percent lifetime rating):

A New Manhattan Project

Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Friday, June 13, 2003

EXCERPT...

With sixty-five percent of the world's oil reserves in Middle East, our over-reliance on oil presents a real threat to national security. We can unleash the spirit of American ingenuity to meet this challenge. My strategy calls for new investments in research, new incentives for companies and consumers, new partnership across the old dividing lines, and higher standards of energy efficiency for both business and government to meet. We can create Americans jobs and confront the dangers to our environment at the same time as we make this nation safer, stronger, and more secure.

The challenge will not be easy but neither was the Manhattan Project. It will require real resources and strong leadership and an unwavering will to make tough choices and take on entrenched interests. But America has shown again and again that when we come together to address the challenges of the day, we will succeed. The message that I bring with me is one that I will carry to every part of our country in this campaign - and it will be central to my Presidency: If we care about the national security of America, we can settle for nothing less than energy security for America. The cause is urgent, and the time is now. 

We need boldness to match the challenges before us. Toughness to meet the threats we face. But with George Bush in the White House, all we've had is politics as usual. And after September 11th, that is just not acceptable.

Time and again he has postponed, equivocated, done nothing or done the wrong thing. I believe that in the war on terror, we have to find Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein - and I wish we already had. But in seeking energy independence, we have to do more than find a little more oil by drilling in and despoiling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - it does far more harm than good, and it is wrong for our future.

Today we have an energy policy of big oil, by big oil and for big oil. It may work for their profits, but it will never work for America. And yet George Bush persists in pursuing a course that can only be described as energy dependence - an approach, that despite all his boasts about a stronger America, will actually risk our hopes, make us weaker, and make both our economy and our country more vulnerable to blackmail by hostile powers. 

CONTINUED...

http://www.lcv.org/Campaigns/Campaigns.cfm?ID=1653&c=4

PS: Thanks, blm. I really appreciate that.

[dpibel]

10. Everything's gonna be fiiiiine

Just wanted to say it first.

I'm surprised this thread's been up this long without attracting someone to patiently explain to all us gloomy Guses that there are just beeeelllyuns and beeeelyuns of barrels of oil in the ground just waiting to be liberated, and after that trillllllllyuns of tons of coal, which technological advances will turn into sweet Tejas crude, not to mention more cubic feet of natural gas than we have numbers for.

Because you rarely see a peak oil or similar thread without one of those folks.

Of course, even if all that sunshine were true we'd still have to deal with the CO2. But let's not talk about that, because it just makes us uncomfortable and sad.

And to all you doom and gloomers whining about food shortages (which just goes to show that you're not really worried about oil, so you have to line up your next catastrophe) I just have this to say:

There's a really good chance that the true disaster is going to be water, and that problem bids fair to hit crises before either of the other two.

"As for me, I favor fire
But ice is nice, and would suffice."

--Robert Frost

[Octafish]

18. LOLITFOD! Hi, Sunshine!

Great post, dpibel! No reason to worry about the perpetual war for perpetual peace, now, is there?

Seems the BFEE really did have a reason for causing all the death and devastation. Gee, to think I actually had a guilty conscience seeing the pictures from the 70 or so war zones and the starving children and the HIV-AIDS patients from throughout the developing world. Like Dickens said about excess population...

Of course things will be OK. We're only the greatest industrialized society since Atlantis.

* Laugh Out Loud In The Face Of Death

— Octafish, Proud Friend of Gloomy Gus

[dpibel]

45. Nice Acronym; the Predicted Arrival

Good acronym; sort of a restatement of the old blues line, "If you see me laughing / Well, I'm laughing just to keep from crying."

Note that it took a full 44 posts for my prediction to come true. . .

[cliss]

12. Nice thread, Octafish.

This is a subject that we need to hammer away at. There should be a thread every day to remind readers that it's about OIL: GOING, GOING, GONE.

I remember watching Bush and his thugs as they were sharpening their knives last January, preparing for war. I thought, "this can't be happening. Have they lost their minds?" I thought about the utter criminality of their motivations about going in. I watched in stupefaction as they moved into Iraq and occupied it, supposedly for the noble reason of "installing democracy" there.

Not quite willing to accept that reason, I wasted no time and jumped on the Internet to find answers. It didn't take me long to find out the real reason for the war. It was about oil. It was about more than that: it was a desperate act to secure the world's #2 supply of easy-to-pump oil which would stave off disaster (for a while, at least).

What we really saw last January, behind the angry facade, are trembling, desperate men who know the truth about our dwindling supplies of the precious 'black gold'. Counterpunch has an article by Stan Goff which spells it out very clearly.

After I had read the article, it all made sense to me. This was a rogue war waged by desperate wildcatters who were willing to gamble your & my future for the sake of their precious oil.

And yes, you're right. The politicians will deny to their last breath that there is a problem. They would rather than we go down in a blaze of glory, burning up the last fumes of gas before they will admit that we are running out of the stuff.

[CaptainClark23]

21. Further,

If peak oil is the motivation behind US land grabs in middle east, take it a step further back to what made those land grabs possible.

who knows better than anyone else the situation with the reserves underground? The energy corps.

Who met w/ Cheney in 2000, the meat and participants of that discussion still unavailable to the public? The energy corps.

An understanding of peak oil puts a motive and context behind the singular event which has been the catalyst behind every single geopolitical event of the past 2.5 years.

who really knew that any oil reserve needed to be grabbed and fast?
who knew that sweeping legislation to handle the populace in time of unrest and mass civil disruption needed to be implemented and fast?

and that should tell you who is really responsible.

9.11 was a set-up. and peak oil is why. you know in your heart its true.

[Minstrel Boy]

23. Military implications of the Bush/Cheney energy strategy

Here's a piece that sets in context the Bush military doctrine and Cheney's energy policy:

THE BUSH/CHENEY ENERGY STRATEGY: IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. FOREIGN AND MILITARY POLICY By Michael T. Klare (A Paper Prepared for the Second Annual Meeting of the Association for Study of Peak Oil Paris, France, 26-27 May 2003)

Klare's conclusion:

By the beginning of 2003, the White House had succeeded in incorporating many of its basic strategic objectives into formal military doctrine. These objectives stress the steady enhancement of America’s capacity to project military power into areas of turmoil – that is, to strengthen precisely those capabilities that would be used to protect or gain access to overseas sources of petroleum. Whether this was the product of a conscious linkage between energy and security policy is not something that can be ascertained at this time; what is undeniable is that President Bush has given top priority to the enhancement of America’s power projection capabilities while at the same time endorsing an energy strategy that entails increased U.S. dependence on oil derived from areas of recurring crisis and conflict.

What we have, therefore, is a two-pronged strategy that effectively governs U.S. policy toward much of the world. One arm of this strategy is aimed at securing more oil from the rest of the world; the other is aimed at enhancing America’s capacity to intervene in exactly such locales. And while these two objectives have arisen from different sets of concerns, one energy-driven and the other security-driven, they have merged into a single, integrated design for American world dominance in the 21st Century. And it is this combination of strategies, more than anything else, that will govern America’s international behavior in the decades ahead.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4458.htm

[CaptainClark23]

25. Bingo. Nice, thanks.

I'm gonna need a bigger apartment soon. I print hard back-ups of all my files. Maybe a thread in GD about how to turn research files into functional furniture....

[Octafish]

27. Oil is considered a strategic resource.

The military needs it for its mechanized forces. The country needs it for its unctuous economy. Farmers need it for making the meat and veggies we eat. The people need it to get to work, school/day-care and the mall. Without oil, as Minstrel_Boy observed, the TVs go off.

BTW: I like your furniture-info file idea, Cap'n. Do you know a patent attorney? And if I could borrow it for a BFEE line of furniture, how about a gasoline-stuffed couch?

Here's how our Chinese friends look at things (probably copied this from Neil's laptop while he was getting a lapdance). Oil, food, and water are the three strategic resources:

China Seeks New Breakthrough in Oil, Gas Exploration

China will boost the exploration for large oil and gas fields to ensure the security of petroleum supply in the new century.

Tian Fengshan, Minister of Land Resources, said Thursday in Beijing that China will select a number of the most prospective areas as target oil exploration regions, and push forward the development of petroleum resources.

At China's first national symposium on the selection of strategic regions of oil and gas resources, Tian said that China will focus on the research of key energy base in the oil-rich Ordos Basin in northwest China. A state level oil and gas resources data bank will also be built.

China has listed petroleum, food and water as the three strategic resources which have great influence on the sustainable development of the economy and society, said Tian.

"If no effective measures are taken to strengthen petroleum exploration, China will become more dependent on importing petroleum and the risks to oil supply will be greatly increased," warned Tian.

CONTINUED...

http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/Gas-Pipeline/37583.htm

[NoKingGeorge]

34. Devils advocate. Life is tough in a third world nation.

An alternative to replacing all the gorging we do on oil (not talking replacing a light bulb,talking replacing our infostructure!) would take years even if we started this afternoon. Who wants to go without water, electricity,transportation and food production for those all years? Be real, I do not think many here would tote water for more than a month. Who here could gather food for the next year?
Just looking at two sides of a story.

[dpibel]

39. How very odd

Let me see can I unpack that devil:

You do not appear to dispute the basic premise, which is: the world is going to run out of oil. If not, your devil's advocacy will work better if you say that up front.

But if you do agree with the basic premise, then what I see you saying is this: "It would be awfully hard to make a transition to a low/no oil existence, so we shouldn't do it." I mean, you don't come right out and say that, but if that's not what your saying, what are you saying?

Also, your devil seems to use a false dilemma. Who here, or anywhere (other than, just to help you out, John Zerzan and his little band of primitive anarchists) is advocating going "without water, electricity,transportation and food production for those all years?"

If the transition is undertaken soon, and seriously, and treated something like a positive Manhattan Project, there's no reason for major dislocation at all (other than the uncomfortable, unthinkable idea that Americans might have to cut consumption).

But it appears to me that your devil calls for sprinting to the cliff. "Let's not do anything because it might be rilly hard," is the best formula I can think of for making it truly, incomprehensibly, horribly hard when when the crash comes.

If you were actually interested in models for how the transition might happen, you could go to http://www.rmi.org/ where some folks have been thinking for a long time about how to make the very transition that frightens you. I don't necessarily agree with all they say (I think anybody who pretends that we can transition to an alternative fuel economy without any change in the American lifestyle is blowing smoke), but they've got a lot of good ideas.

Saying that making the transition away from a cheap-oil economy will require doing without food and water is a straw man.

But think of the alternatives: If you don't want to work toward a voluntary, structured transition, you're gonna hit a wall where the conditions you fear will apply, and it will be too late to do a bloody thing about them.

Voluntarily simplify now, or natural limits are gonna show you some serious involuntary simplification.

[Octafish]

28. A power so great, it can only be used for good or evil.

Thanks for the kind words and the heads-up on the Goff article, cliss! A psychologist clinician friend considers Goff a guru, which gives me hope.

My friend never gives free advice, so I turn to Firesign Theatre for comic relief. They examined this very issue (in a roundabout way) in their 1973 LP, "The Giant Rat of Sumatra."

In the audio-play, Hemlock Stones, the Great Defective, has to unravel the mystery when someone steals the “Zeppelin Tube” of American industrialist Jonas Acme, fair-haired pharaoh of American industry. The Zeppelin Tube is a device of unlimited power, which can only be used for good or evil. Acme, or his son, Frank Acme Jr, attached the thing to his private yacht and used it to dredge the Acme Canal from New York to Chicago.


The Occupation Runs Out of Gas

It Was the Oil and It Is Like Vietnam

By STAN GOFF

Apologists for Bush's little war in Iraq, whose numbers are diminishing in the face of relentless reality, have invested a mighty labor in dismissing two claims; that the war in Iraq is about oil, and that there is a comparison to be made between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War.

The war was never intended as a liberation, the bullshit story that went center stage when the weapons lies fell apart . It was always a re-colonization, now euphemized even by many Democrats as "re-construction."

Nonetheless, the Bush administration believed they would be welcomed as liberators, because Bush has surrounded himself with people whose principle skill is self-delusion, and whose principle aversion is hearing anything that doesn't conform to their preconceptions. If Daddy supervised the tragedy, Junior is supervising the deadly farce.

People who only want to hear good news from their own perspective are easily taken in by con men, and the con man this time was Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi expatriate facing 22 years at hard labor in Jordan for embezzlement. This is the character upon whom Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz--themselves (neo)con men--relied for insight into Iraq, and who told them they'd be welcomed by cheering, flower-bearing, confetti-slinging crowds not unlike Parisians in 1945. That Chalabi hadn't been in Iraq for decades hasn't deterred our intrepid neo-con ideologues. They still want to make Chalabi the Quisling leader of Iraq, under the Kissinger-tutored Viceroy Paul Bremer's.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff09152003.html

[seemslikeadream]

30. They picked a great PR firm for Chalabi and the INC

Burson-Marsteller isworking to enhance the credibility of the Iraqi National Congress as it seeks to establish itself as a legitimate force in postinvasion Iraq. "B-M has been working with the Congress, led by highprofile Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, since 1999, under a state department contract.

We were helping the INC get out statements and videos that made it clear that the exiled opposition was consolidating and moving. It's been a tremendous ride for them and for us"

More on Burson-Marsteller

Corpwatch UK writes, Burson-Marsteller is one of the largest public relations agencies in the world and the most reviled due to its mercenary attitude in choosing clients and contracts. When helping its industry clients to escape environmental legislation or sprucing up the image of some of the most repressive governments on Earth, B-M brings to bear state of the art techniques in manipulating the mass media, legislators and public opinion.
www.guerillnews.com

Dirty hands - a few of Burson-Marsteller's less public clients
Regimes

Argentina's fascist junta
Indonesian Government
El Salvadorian Government
Nigerian Government (during the Biafran war)
Saudi Arabia - hired on Sept 14,2001
Mexican Government to promote NAFTA
Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu
South Korea

Corporate

Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster which killed thousands
Babcock & Wilcox for Three Mile Island nuclear accident
Exxon following the Exxon-Valdez oil spill
EUROPABIO - a body representing the biotechnology industry
www.ethicalconsumer.org/magazine/corpwatch/burson.htm

[Octafish]

31. Image is EVERYTHING.

Perception IS reality. So what if the Truth doesn't match? People don't CARE! Yeh. Right.

Thanks for the heads-up, seemlikeadream! The "competition" for these mega-buck contracts must be sizzling. Somebody must've left Ms. Laila Helms' phone number out of my Rolodex. Oh well. Remember the "babies left on the hospital floor" stories during Poppy's Gulf War 1?

— Octafish

How the public relations industry sold the Gulf War to the US, the mother of all clients

Hill and Knowlton produced dozens of video news releases (VNRs) at a cost of well over half a million dollars, but it was money well spent, resulting in tens of millions of dollars worth of "free" air time. The VNRs were shown by eager TV news directors around the world who rarely (if ever) identified Kuwait's public relations (PR) firm as the source of the footage and stories. TV stations and networks simply fed the carefully-crafted propaganda to unwitting viewers, who assumed they were watching "real" journalism. After the war Arthur Rowse asked Hill & Knowlton to show him some of the VNRs, but the PR company refused. Obviously the phony TV news reports had served their purpose and it would do H&K no good to help a reporter reveal the extent of deception. In Unreliable Sources, authors Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted that "when a research team from the communications department of the University of Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about U.S. policy in the region, they drew some sobering conclusions. The more television people watched, the fewer facts they knew; and the less people knew in terms of basic facts, the more likely they were to back the Bush administration.1

Throughout the campaign, the Wirthlin Group conducted daily opinion polls to help Hill & Knowlton take the emotional pulse of key constituencies so it could identify the themes and slogans that would be most effective in promoting support for U.S. military action. After the war ended. the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced an Emmy award-winning TV documentary on the PR campaign titled "To Sell a War." The show featured an interview with Wirthlin executive Dee Alsop in which Alsop bragged of his work and demonstrated how audience surveys were even used to physically adapt the clothing and hairstyle of the Kuwait ambassador so he would seem more likeable to TV audiences. Wirthlin's job, Alsop explained, was "to identify the messages that really resonate emotionally with the American people." The theme that struck the deepest emotional chord, they discovered, was "the fact that Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his own people, and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be stopped."2

Every big media event needs what journalist and flacks alike refer to as "the hook." An ideal hook becomes the central element of a story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a strong emotional response, and sticks in the memory. In the case of the Gulf War, the "hook" was invented by Hill & Knowlton. In style, substance and mode of delivery, it bore an uncanny resemblance to England's World War I hearings that accused German soldiers of killing babies.

On October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill which provided the first opportunity for formal presentations of Iraqi human rights violations. Outwardly, the hearing resembled an official congressional proceeding, but appearances were deceiving. In reality, the Human Rights Caucus, chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, was simply an association of politicians. Lantos and Porter were co-chairs of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a legally separate entity that occupied free office space valued at $3,000 a year in Hill & Knowlton's Washington, DC office. Notwithstanding its congressional trappings, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus served as another Hill & Knowlton front group, which -- like all front groups -- used a noble-sounding name to disguise its true purpose.3

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3589/us-iraq-lie.html

[FDRrocks]

13. Because the oil companies don't want them to talk about it.

And our democracy is a farce... and all our elected officials have the hand of huge business stuck up thier asses.

The world is out of oil? I don't give a shit, we don't really need oil, we just keep using it.

[blm]

43. Yep....like Koch Industries involved with Bush

and some who call themselves Democrats.

[MadHound]

19. Well don't count on the government to solve this problem

Be it either Dem or 'Pug, both are up to their necks in oil money that funds their campaigns. We all know of Bushies oily ties, but you folks need to look at the Dems oil money also(can you say BP Aamaco?). With hush money like this being thrown around, rest assured that neither party will do a damn thing until the oil runs out.

With that said, I suggest that everybody start preparing now. If you are thinking of buying a new house, think about throwing some solar panels or a windmill in on the deal. If you are remodeling, make it well insulated, with a wood stove as a heat source. If you have a backyard, start planting a garden. If you have just a little mechanical apptitude you can collect falling rainwater(and with a little more mechanical apptitude you can filter it to make it potable). If you drive, start looking into hybrids or hydrogens. If you are an apartment dweller, start making plans to get your own land outside the city. As the old saying goes, any given city is three days away from complete collapse due to food shortages. It is best to be out of that scene.

But the key is do something! Start now to plan and prepare, otherwise you will be in the same situation as the rest of the sheeple, scrambling for too few resources that are to be divvied between too many people. An ugly, ugly scene. It is a guarantee that neither the government nor the corporations are going to do anything other than drill everything in sight, and start more wars for oil. So we have to start doing for ourselves, and the best time to start is now.

[blm]

29. Why the heck do you think some of us support Kerry? He's the only one

who can hit the ground running AGAINST the oil companies and their cronies.

The Koch brothers have put up their sham candidate in Dean to protect their interests. It was no coincidence that Dean came out attacking Democrats first.

[Minstrel Boy]

32. I thought Kerry had the best handle on the Bush-Big Oil nexus,

but then he floats the name of James Baker as a potential Middle East envoy. That's just depressing.

[blm]

37. That was a bone to show bipartisanship for the peace process

and has nothing to do with oil. It pointed to Bush2's failings even by Bush1 standards.

[BeFree]

22. I hate to say this, really I do

Given the current situation and the way our regime is dealing with it, the solution they will come up with is to reduce demand.

Say there's a billion gallons of gas and one billion people who need one gallon a day. It's all gone in one day, right?

Now imagine there are only 100 people. Do the math. That billion gallons lasts quite a bit longer, eh?

Either the next regime is for humanity, or it is not. It is a harsh reality.

[Minstrel Boy]

24. If the problem isn't too little oil, it's too many people,

then it wouldn't surprise me if some criminals in high places think it's time to cull the herd.

[Octafish]

26. It's no coincidence the NAZIs are a division of the BFEE

Countless wars around the world, starving children throughout the developing and developed world, disease, poverty, and want rampant. Yes, that's how to keep the population down the old-fashioned way in polite "society." The NAZIs were more open about it. For 40 years, the BFEE has led America in that direction, to my great shame.

[John_Shadows_1]

33. We're just the peasants and suckers, baby...

.... they'll let us no when we're no longer needed, when Hubbert's Peak has been reached, and when the new world order needs to get a little nastier - Monbiot is great - somewhere on the site monbiot.com there's an article titled "Save us from Finity" that talks about the finite amount of fertilizer to grow food as well.

[Octafish]

42. Food. Water. Fuel.

Without them, we're f--, um, fried.

What bugs me most, DU Friend John_Shadows_1, is that the Bush Organized Crime Family has known about the impending energy crunch for DECADES and has done zip. After seeing that their policies were basically designed to bring death to the largest number of human beings possible, I realized they really don't care. What's really scary is that so many Americans have no clue as to what's being done to them by these monsters.

[BeFree]

35. The centralized control and distribution of oil

Is the chief concern in the continuance of this problem.

The Exxons of the world have us by the short hairs, and they don't intend to let go.

It will be up to each and every one of us to see that our individual energy needs are supplied. The first step is to reduce usage. You know how, just do it. The second step is to make the most economical use of the resource.

While it certainly would be nice if we had leaders who would lead us away from the brink, we can't count on one to begin leading anytime soon.

In the meantime begin demanding that local sources be developed so that your community will be able to ride out the coming storm.

Peace

[Octafish]

41. Thanks, BeFree! That's a good start...

... and it certainly beats the alternative, the current path, which is doing nothing.

Growing up, I always was amazed we were enjoying gasoline at 50-cents a gallon (so, I'm old) and now about $1.59 while Europe was paying $2 to $5 these days. As a young rebel I discovered that, yes, Virginia, there is an Octopus and its oily tentacle does that on purpose.

In my dream world, America finally wakes up and gets serious about energy usage, rationing the petroleum and natural gas to buy time to create alternative fuels. Gov Bush wakes up one day with his critical faculties and conscience intact and decides to do some leadership. He jacks up the taxes on fuel and uses the money for all sorts of neat things. Heeding his call, Congress votes to sink R&D funds into developing breakthrough sciences — from cold fusion kind of stuff (some say is bunkum and others swear by) to solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and every other kind of naturally occuring energy source we can find and tap.

Unfortunately, the reality is much more bitter. Bush would take the money and distribute it to his corporate cronies, who spirit it offshore and make it disappear in the Caymans and Switzerland. Funded from there, the Select build beautiful mountain retreats in the Alps, enormous plantations in the Amazon and pampas, and tropical island resort communites. There they will hide away after the crunch, leaving the rest of humanity to fight it out over the last AA batteries at Walmart.

[frank frankly]

36. kick kick kick kick kick

read it!

[NavajoRug]

44. I think the concern shown on this thread is overblown . . .

The article was written primarily from a British standpoint, and as far as that goes it may be accurate.

I would not worry too much about running out of oil. I spent a lot of time up in Alberta over the last ten years, and I've read things to the effect that the tar sands region around Fort McMurray can supply enough oil to meet the needs of North America for the next 500 (yes, that's 500!) years.

The major issue is not that we are "running out of oil," but that the cost of extracting it is becoming progressively more expensive over time.

[dpibel]

47. Free lunches, decimal places, and things like that

Edit for a typo

Here's a website you might be interested in:

http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Publications/Nuclear%20oil%20sand.htm

It's a website run by the nuclear industry, which thinks that a pretty
good solution to greenhouse gas problems is to use nuke power, so I
don't think they're going to be fronting any really wild greenie ideas.

They claim that there's 300 billion bbl of oil tied up in the Alberta
tar sands.

Now here's a website from the Hubbert Institute:
http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/v98n1/canmex.html
You might want to double check their numbers, since they believe in the laughable Hubbert Curve, but they say that US consumption is 6.9 billion bbl per year. My rudimentary math skills tell me that 300 divided by 6.9 is right about 45, which would be the number of years of US consumption the tar sands would be good for, if you could actually extract it all. So I think your 500 years is off by a factor of 10.

You mention that there might be a problem with expense, and I tend to agree with you. There's also the fact that we have to deal with two kinds of expense: dollars and calories.

For starters, if the dollar cost of extracting that oil is high, then the existence of that oil doesn't mean much to me: I won't be able to afford it, and neither will the bulk of Americans. I know there's some supply and demand aspects to that, but as the price rises, it becomes profitable to sell less to the wealthy, especially when you're dealing with a finite resource.

The other problem is that it costs energy to get that oil out of that sand. That's what the nuke folk discuss in their paper. They think the solution to that problem is--surprise!!--nuclear power.

Even if you think that nuclear power is a spiffy solution, you eventually get to a point where the energy input for extraction is as big as the energy output from the extracted oil. At which time there's not much point in sucking the stuff out. Well, there's some point, if you need the energy in the form of oil, and you're willing to pay the cost represented by a net zero transaction in terms of energy.

Finally, the potential 50-year reprieve assumes flat consumption rates. Even if per capita consumption stayed level (which it hasn't for the last hundred years), you'd also have to have zero population growth, which probably isn't going to happen. Failing that, the 50 years becomes even less.

Call me a cockeyed pessimist if you must, but I take little comfort in the tar sands.

One last nitpick. I don't know how you make Monbiot's article out to be about England. When he says, "You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become," I find it hard to believe he's limiting himself to consideration of the British human. I also suspect that Monbiot is aware of the Alberta tar sands. He's a fairly bright guy.

[NavajoRug]

48. Thanks for the references . . .

I've got a couple of issues with some of the information contained there . . .

1. Figure 1 in the Nuclear Energy Industry article is always going to be suspect in my mind, because identical figures have been published about oil supply at numerous points over the last 50 years. They all show oil production peaking in the near future, and then dropping off almost immediately. Well, guess what -- those predictions have never come true in the past, and I have no reason to believe that THIS time will be any different.

2. This article is accurate in one major respect: the primary issue with oil production is environmental degradation, not an impending lack of supply.

3. The Hubbert report appears to be about eight years old, so I'd be curious to see how this has changed recently. I do know that the U.S. oil imports from Canada have grown dramatically in recent years, primarily because the strong U.S. dollar has made Canadian oil relatively inexpensive compared to Middle East oil.


Any time you read or hear a quote about the projected time-line for a region's supply of oil, you have to consider the varying definitions of what constitutes a valid measure of "projected supply." Over the years, the U.S. Department of Energy has always been predicting looming shortfalls in oil supplies, mainly because they were measuring supply based on "known reserves." New reserves are always being found to some degree, and existing "uneconomical" sources of oil can suddenly become practical to tap.

That is exactly what has happened in Alberta. The tar sands oil deposits are contained in a layer of the earth's surface between two major plates that go down into the earth's crust in a diagonal manner. Much of the 500-year supply I mentioned is located too far down this layer for economical extraction, but that's really not an issue. Every drop of oil that is extracted from the tar sands today was considered "uneconomical" to extract as recently as two decades ago, but once a Canadian company called Suncor developed an efficient method for extraction (it's actually closer to mining than drilling), it was suddenly within practical reach.

"When he says, 'You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become,' I find it hard to believe he's limiting himself to consideration of the British human."

I only suggested that we was focusing on the British situation because the one specific reference he made was to the current situation with North Sea oil deposits.

[dpibel]

50. A couple of questions and counterpoints

Could you please point me to better information about the Alberta tar sands? This is not a good-old-Usenet "prove it"; I just googled up those references for something to work with. If there's a revised estimate of the tar sands reserves, I'd be happy to see it, because I really prefer not to be arguing on dead wrong assertions.

I understand the crying wolf aspect of predictions of imminent shortfalls. I do believe that those predictions date back more like 30 years than 50, although that difference is not critical. A couple of things, though, are.

Whether 30 or 50 years ago, before that, it really didn't even appear on the radar that oil was an exhaustible resource. I mean, I don't think anybody argued that it was literally inexhaustible; it's just that nobody thought much about it. Since the active study of limits on the resource is relatively new, I find it unsurprising that we're still zeroing in on the true limits.

Also, unless you subscribe to the abiogenesis of oil theory, I think everybody admits that there's a limit somewhere. If it's 100 years out instead of 50, that's really not very significant in terms of history, recorded or species.

Admittedly, it might make some difference as to the chances of making a transition to other energy sources and to a less energy-intensive culture. But if we all just relax and say, "Hell, it's a century away. Let's party," there's still going to be hell to pay when the time comes.

And that appears to be the official posture. I mean, we can quibble over precise time frames, but unless you believe that oil is an infinite resource, it has to run out sometime. And, so far, since the finitude of the resource became a subject of discussion, this culture (and western culture in general) has continued using oil like it was going to flow forever.

Maybe the question is whether we (or, in the rosier scenarios, our children or grandchildren) are going to hit the wall going 100 mph, or whether we'll be bump it so softly it won't much matter.

[NavajoRug]

52. Thanks for the reply . . . Interesting points.

I have to admit that I don't have a source at my fingertips for the tar sands reserves. Much of this is based on conversations I've had in the past with people who work up in that region. They aren't exactly rightwing-nuts, either -- so I tend to think they're at least reasonably credible.

I tend to believe that your "soft-bump" scenario (as opposed to hitting the wall at 100 miles per hour) is the most likely scenario. Actually, I stand corrected -- it is practically the ONLY scenario. Not because of wishful thinking on my part, but because that's the way resource depletion has always worked in the world. If the world were to run dry of oil tomorrow (or at any single point in time in the future), then this would be the first time in the history of mankind that the world "ran out" of something. What always happens is that long before something is totally depleted, it just gets too expensive to use it compared to other raw materials that provide similar benefits.

The case of heating homes in New York City is a perfect example. There was a time when everyone in New York City heated their homes with wood stoves. Timber was fairly cheap because so many settlers were clearing land in the surrounding countryside for farms. Why not make some money on the trees you just cut down by hauling them to the city and selling them.

At some point, the cost of the logs got too high for two reasons: the distance that they had to be hauled got bigger and bigger, and the price of wood went up because people had a "better" use for them -- building homes and other things in the growing city. Why burn a log when you could build something with it that would last for years?

Nobody ever would have considered using coal as a home heating fuel source up to that point, because it was too expensive to dig it out of the ground and too expensive to haul it to New York on wagons. But over a period of time it slowly became more practical to use coal, because the price of logs had gone up and things like the steam engine made it easier to haul heavy loads over long distances. At a certain point, someone got up one day and figured out that he could make a lot of money by building a railroad out to the region in Pennsylvania where there was coal in the ground. Heating homes was never the same after that.

This process was repeated sometime in the last few decades, when the supply of coal dwindled and environmental degradation became a public concern. At a certain point, someone decided that he could make a lot of money by spending a couple of billion dollars to construct a network of pipelines to the region, bringing a steady supply of natural gas from all over North America.

Natural gas isn't the end of the process -- nor is oil. Sometime in the future there will be something else out there that we may not even know about. That's just the way things work, it seems.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

46. What might have been

Washington DC-February 1981- Less than a month into his second term, President Jimmy Carter announced his administration's new energy policy at a news conference at the White House. "Geologists know that the world is running out of easily accessible petroleum, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Within 30 or 40 years, oil and its derivatives will be too expensive to use in everyday life, so we need to get ready for that day NOW, so that our children and grandchildren will enjoy at least the same standard of living that we experience today.

"First, I will take a cue from my recent rival John Anderson and propose a 50 cent per gallon tax on gasoline, both to encourage conservation and to fund the necessary transition to a non-petroleum economy. Half the revenue will go to research in developing alternatives to gasoline, plastics, dyes, and other petroleum products as well as technologies for recycling. The other half will go toward building an infrastructure that cuts our dependence on oil

"We will build regional high-speed rail systems, linking the major clusters of cities in each part of the country, thus eliminating the need for many short-haul plane trips. Within cities, we will fund the development of world-class mass transit systems, bicycle paths, and pedestrian improvements. Cities and suburbs will also receive federal funds for redesigning themselves to be less car-dependent, for encouraging in-fill development instead of sprawl, and for devising new ways to live in a world of little or no oil.

"As you all remember, our country was at the mercy of OPEC during the previous decade. Instead of stocking up on weapons to invade these countries and take their oil, as some of my opponents have hinted, we should free ourselves from dependence on OPEC by challenging ourselves to use as little oil as possible.

"Twenty years ago, my predecessor John F. Kennedy challenged Americans to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely. We did it, even though it seemed like an impossible dream. We can do just about anything we want if we have the will and are willing to provide the funds. Join me in ensuring a smooth transition to a post-petroleum world. Do it for the sake of your children and grandchildren. Thank you.

[Minstrel Boy]

49. That hurts,

because it could have been.

Thanks.

[Navy Deep Sea LT]

51. A lot of worrying about nothing...

So oil runs out. Big woop. That's what alternative power is for. When the price of oil goes too high due to supply and demand and it just gets so hard to find and extract, then it will become economical to use alternative power. Then guess what? A bunch of companies will invest a whole lot of money and come up with really great ideas. Ones that will make today's alternative power sources look like cheese-wiz.

Besides, 90% of the world only works hard when they REALLY REALLY have to to get by. Think of all the potential waiting to be unleashed!

[JohnyCanuck]

53. It's not quite as simple as all that.

Oil is an extremely energy dense substance which means that relatively large quantities of energy are contained in relatively small quantitities of oil. We are also accustomed to obtaining that oil relatively easily and at a minimum cost in energy and money as to date we have naturally gone after the best grades and most easily obtainable oil first. It is also relatively easy to convert that oil not just into gasoline and diesel etc, but into plastics and other petroleum based products.

After the Peak Oil event hits, it means that it will take increasing quantities of energy to liberate progressively smaller quantities of oil ulitmately leading to the point where we would be spending more energy to get the oil out of the ground and refine in our refineries than we get from the petroleum products at the end of the process.

Generally speaking it seems that the potential replacements for oil derived from fossil hydrocarbons will require larger quantities of input energy to provide significantly smaller quantities of output energy when compared to the energy we have until now easily obtained from oil. This has the potential to profoundly affect our economies which have been built on the basis of easy and cheap access to energy dense oil.

For example, look at one proposed solution to the problem mentioned by some on this web site. It is a relatively new process, thermal depolymerization, whereby waste products like sewage and leftover turkey guts are converted into oil. See www.discover.com/issues/may-03/features/featoil . However sewage is basically the end product of plant matter that has been grown using extremely energy (oil) intensive factory farming (especially in the West)and then taken in, eaten by humans and then expelled as waste.

Right now the energy to grow that plant material on factory farms is provided by relatively cheap and readily available fossil hydrocarbons and so the recycling of the waste into oil could make some short to medium term economic sense. However, as fossil hydrocarbons become more and more scarce, the oil for running the energy intensive factory farms which produce the plant material humans turn into sewage and the energy used in the process of converting the sewage waste to oil would increasingly have to come from the recycled sewage. At some point we will run into the effects of the Laws of Thermodynamics which say that every time energy is used some of it is irretrievably lost. As I see it, the recycling of sewage (and other waste) into oil and back into sewage again will not be a sustainable process over the long term. Admittedly this process of converting waste matter to oil could help alleviate to some extent the effects of Peak Oil, and alleviate landfill problems but it is not a long term solution to the problem of Peak Oil.

Other proposed solutions such as hydrogen etc. have their own associated drawbacks and problems which will not be easy to overcome and which indicate that it would be somewhat foolish to cavalierly dismiss this Peak Oil problem as an issue that will be easily solved by the guys in white lab coats once the price of oil gets to be high enough. That's a leap of faith many of us are not prepared to take.


The April issue of Discover magazine featured an article titled "Anything into Oil," describing a newly developed process - thermal depolymerization - which can efficiently transform many kinds of agricultural and industrial waste into a highly usable form of synthetic petroleum. Readers of the article could easily get the impression that thermal depolymerization will solve our oil and energy problems.

Of course, the reality is not so simple. Thermal depolymerization is a process that will help an industrial society's energy efficiency as that society gradually loses power due to oil depletion. It is great news, but not a true solution.

Why not? Whatever comes out of the process will inevitably carry less useful energy than what went into the process (this is necessitated by the laws of thermodynamics). True, what goes in is likely to be stuff that, for the most part, would otherwise just end up in a landfill, so there is an overall gain in energy efficiency for the society. However, most of that "waste" input (including plastics, tires, and turkey guts) is stuff produced using high-grade energy from fossil fuels (e.g., tractors burning diesel fuel, plastics made and transported using oil). Thus as there is less "virgin" petroleum available to do work in society, there will be less "waste" available to be transformed into depolymerized oil. The latter will help slow the depletion process (again, there will greater energy efficiency for the society), but over the long haul it cannot overcome the downward momentum of overall net energy availability.

Now, as I have already said, thermal depolymerization is potentially a good thing. It could help us find our way peacefully down the energy-resource depletion curve. However, if the process is advertised - and assumed to be - a means to maintain business as usual, it could in effect not be a good thing at all. Much the same could be said of hydrogen fuel cells, cold fusion, tar sands, and dozens of other recent or potential energy innovations, as well as "sustainable development" and the various business greenwashing initiatives. Whether they are useful strategies or mere distractions preventing us from grasping the essential nature of our dilemma and undertaking the hard choices associated with Plan Powerdown will depend on the way they are perceived. And that in turn will depend on attitudes fostered by political and economic leaders of the society.

http://www.museletter.com/archive/135.html

See also this article Why Hydrogen is No Solution

Now we come to the production of hydrogen. Hydrogen does not freely occur in nature in useful quantities, therefore hydrogen must be split from molecules, either molecules of methane derived from fossil fuels or from water.

Currently, most hydrogen is produced by the treatment of methane with steam, following the formula: CH4 (g) + H2O + e > 3H2(g) + CO(g). The CO(g) in this equation is carbon monoxide gas, which is a byproduct of the reaction.35

Not entered into this formula is the energy required to produce the steam, which usually comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

For this reason, we do not escape the production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. We simply transfer the generation of this pollution to the hydrogen production plants. This procedure of hydrogen production also results in a severe energy loss. First we have the production of the feedstock methanol from natural gas or coal at a 32 percent to 44 percent net energy loss. Then the steam treatment process to procure the hydrogen will result in a further 35 percent energy loss.

Edited to add link to this article Eating Fossil Fuels


To give the reader an idea of the energy intensiveness of modern agriculture, production of one kilogram of nitrogen for fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of from 1.4 to 1.8 liters of diesel fuel. This is not considering the natural gas feedstock.<9> According to The Fertilizer Institute (http://www.tfi.org), in the year from June 30 2001 until June 30 2002 the United States used 12,009,300 short tons of nitrogen fertilizer.<10> Using the low figure of 1.4 liters diesel equivalent per kilogram of nitrogen, this equates to the energy content of 15.3 billion liters of diesel fuel, or 96.2 million barrels.

Of course, this is only a rough comparison to aid comprehension of the energy requirements for modern agriculture.

In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold.<11> Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.