You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2007.
If you think $/£5 a gallon is expensive for fossil-oil based fuels then wait until it hits $20 during the next 5-10 years.
Peak oil already arrived in 2006. Warnings that the capacity for global oil production is soon to drop off were wrong: it’s not soon, it’s happened and prices will now begin to rise exponentially.
Energy Watch Group is a Germany-based group of independent scientists and energy experts who this month released a report that includes nearly 100 pages of exhaustive technical analysis of every oil producing field in the world and every known and proven reserve. The report concludes that global oil production has already peaked at about 83 million barrels per day some time in 2006. They predict that global production will now fall every year, including this year, even with a quintupling of production in Canadian tar sands and new discoveries and developments elsewhere in the world. By 2020, they predict only 58 million barrels will be produced per day, and 39 million barrels per day by 2030. These predictions are made without regard for how high the price of oil goes in the meantime because their analysis is based solely on the technical limitations of oil production and its availability.
“This [the decline in oil production] will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame. The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.
Tony Blair on ‘extremist Islamic ideology’.
“This ideology now has a state – Iran – [not Afghanistan this time, not Iraq either? I thought the late S.Hussein was your axis of evil] that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries [how do you know? what have you done to verify this?] whose people live to wish in peace.”
“There is a tendency even now, even in some of our own circles, to believe that they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone.
“I fear this is mistaken. They have no intention of leaving us alone.”
The ‘extremist’ islamic ideology is just that, extremist. The main stream majority in Iran will not tolerate extreme conservative policy in the same way that the American people will not tolerate a lurch towards fascism. The real agenda however, is that Iran is a powerful and proud country that has its own oil. A country of true democracy and equality with all that oil would be extremely powerful at a time when other previously oil-rich states like the US are facing an uncertain future with declining oil supplies.
UK ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair has accused Iran of backing terrorism and warned the world faces a situation akin to “rising fascism in the 1920s”.
[Yes, kind of. Except that the rising fascism is being caused by Western governments.]
Mr Blair told a charity event in New York that Iran was prepared to destabilise peaceful countries. [Well, since the West has been trying to destabilise Iran for the best part of a century...]
This man is helping to set up the chess pieces for a war with Iran. These are the same moves he and George Bush made at each previous step in their ‘war on terror’. These political madmen are being allowed to conduct their own private experiments at controlling the oil necessary to power our states and keep them powerful. And yet this is occurring while the citizens of the world are trying to move to a more egalitarian, sustainable and ecologically balanced society of man.
The US calls their plan the Long War, or the Project for a New American Century. Its aim is:
“Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
• we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.”
Some European countries (e.g. Britain) seem to have their eyes on similar foreign policies far into the future, with no prospect of a more egalitarian and ecologically balanced world. In fact these policies point to a harsh world of permanent warfare ahead. The alternative of switching to a powerdown is not on the horizon. Fascism is.
Naomi Wolfe documents the similarities between the behaviour of the US state in recent years and the history of states that have succumbed to fascism. The evidence is worrying and the potential is certainly there for the unthinkable to happen again.
Wolfe’s analysis (The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot) hardly touches on issues like the corporate kleptocracy and yet it is a powerful indictment of the shift towards to a tipping point from the far right into full-on fascism. We in Europe and other countries where the plebs are getting too smart and beginning to question and challenge state authority and power should be aware that we are following a similar techno-military route towards suppression of human values and conscience.
The War on Terror was never just an excuse for war and suppression of rights – the war on terror is a real war in which the state is preemptively targeting individuals and groups who challenge it in whatever way. The ecoterrorist and anyone else who challenges the state is a serious threat to the state – whether or not s/he uses violence.
Anyone who marshalls dissent and civil disobedience is an enemy of the state. In our increasingly fragile (see John Robb’s Brave New War) industrial-military-capitalist driven societies a group which uses words alone in order to trip-up a logistics system is as much a threat to the state as a group that uses violence or physical sabotage. Grass roots organisation is what the state wants to crush: the corporate-political globalised world will collapse if the people gain any more power, and the state will do everything it can, legal or illegal, in order to stop it.
The people of Europe need to be aware that the same is happening in our societies but due to our complacency about it never happening here again, and there being less overt organs of state power and oppression, the preparations for totalitarianism and fascism are not as obvious as in the US.
