RE: Peak Oil | from JKBSep 17 2005 - 01:42
By the way: Jeff and I have been following this for months.
Here is an interview with Michael Ruppert. He has linked peak oil with 9/11. If you should want to delve deeper into this subject I reccommend checking out the link: http://www.fromthewilderness.com
If this sort of socio-politico thread bums you out - there are some nice threads about desert island syrups and records...
This is an hugely important topic. It's time we started raising the awareness level.
Crossing the Rubicon: An Interview with Michael Ruppert
Written by Rob Williams Tuesday, 13 September 2005 http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/586/1/
Most people I know have some intuitive sense that the stories told about the way the world works in our culture of daily "news" (and I use the term loosely) are suspect. The real stories about power and the ways power is exercised lie buried beneath the surface. But how deep, to quote The Matrix’s Morpheus, does this rabbit hole go? For those willing to crawl down the hole, U.S. investigative journalism has its own Morpheus, and his name is Michael Ruppert.
A UCLA political science honors graduate and former LAPD narcotics investigator, Ruppert is the editor/publisher of From the Wilderness (www.fromthewilderness.com), a monthly newsletter now read by more than 16,000 subscribers in forty countries, including forty Congressmen, both Houses’ intelligence committees, and professors at more than thirty universities around the world. He is also author of a new and startling book called Crossing the Rubicon, in which he draws on From the Wilderness’s seven years of research to tell a disturbing story about the way the world really works.
What Ruppert shares is not for the faint of heart. He asserts, as other researchers have, that key members within the U.S. intelligence community and the Bush administration helped engineer the 9/11 terrorist attack in order to build U.S. public support for a military invasion and occupation of the greater Middle East. But Ruppert goes way beyond 9/11, arguing that the U.S. economy, built on an unsustainable "growth through debt" model and fed by more than $500 billion a year of laundered C.I.A.-controlled global drug money, is about to crash. Beyond the obvious—massive consumer debt, tremendously high levels of federal borrowing and spending, and spectacular corruption (more than $4 trillion have gone missing from the U.S. Treasury)—lies the specter of "Peak Oil."
What dire news could possibly motivate any political official to consider supporting terrorist attacks on our native soil? The concept of Peak Oil, simply stated, suggests such a terrifying prospect: the planet is rapidly running out of hydrocarbon energy resources. Using geologist M. King Hubbert’s statistical model, which accurately predicted to within one year the coming of Peak Oil in the United States (1970), members of the world’s geological community argue that the world has now reached Peak Oil; less than 50 percent of the globe’s fossil fuel energy remains, and these hydrocarbon resources are the most inaccessible and expensive to locate, extract, refine, and transport to market.
For a world economy powered, literally, by fossil fuel energy, this is sobering news. Our food and clothes are produced with oil (for every calorie of food Americans eat, we burn 20 calories of the stuff); most of the world’s 600 million internal combustion engines run on oil, and the energy to power our home and businesses are sustained on the black gold. No combination of alternative energy sources—nuclear, coal, wind, water, solar, geothermal, hydrogen—come close to matching the ubiquity of oil and natural gas. Pull fossil-fuel energy out of the equation, and our global economy will collapse. Trillions of dollars will evaporate. Billions of people will starve. Many more millions will experience "severe dislocation." How’s that for a euphemism?
Despite mounting evidence on a wide variety of fronts, Americans are in denial about Peak Oil’s impact, and our political leaders, for the most part, have refused to acknowledge the gravity of our situation. "The apparent crisis is about terrorism," summarizes Ruppert. "The real crisis is about energy scarcity." The crisis of Peak Oil, Ruppert suggests, explains why the U.S. government is willing to engage in global drug trading and money laundering to fund illegal covert operations around the globe, to spy on its own citizens, to undermine Constitutional freedoms, and to support attacks by terrorists like Osama bin Laden (himself a CIA intelligence asset). The result? The U.S. government has created a "War on Terror" to justify spending 1 billion a week fighting simultaneous wars ("a war that will not end in our lifetimes," as Dick Cheney says) in Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries central to strategic control of the world’s remaining energy reserves. Trillions of dollars and billions of lives are at stake, and instead of developing alternatives to our fossil-fuel powered way of life, our federal government is squandering what remaining time, energy, and money we have to solve the Peak Oil dilemma by choosing to fight expensive and bloody foreign wars around the globe.
Perhaps Dick Cheney said it best when he stated that "the American way of life is not negotiable." But what about Vermont? Are we willing to work to find solutions? I talked with Michael Ruppert about Peak Oil, 9/11, and Vermont independence.
RW: In Crossing the Rubicon, you provide a book’s worth of evidence to suggest that key players within the Bush administration helped engineer the 9/11 terrorist attacks to provide a pretext for securing the globe’s remaining fossil-fuel energy reserves. What evidence has emerged since your book’s publication that further bolsters this argument?
MR: I think we’ve seen evidence emerging on two fronts. The first is oil and energy: Peak Oil is extremely real and threatening, and it’s more imminent than most people thought. We are looking at serious major energy shortages this year, earlier than we anticipated, and the oil production numbers continue to perform as we thought they would, with decreasing supply, increasing demand, and rising prices.
Secondly, on the military front, we’ve seen retrenchment, globally, in terms of the world’s support of Iran in anticipation of a possible U.S. military occupation of that country, which I don’t think will happen. The world needs Iranian oil; China has invested $200 billion in Iran, India has invested $40 billion, and Germany has invested $8 billion. The rest of the world is making it very clear to the U.S. that we will not be allowed access to Iranian oil, at least, not without a big fight.
We’re also, by the way, seeing plans emerging to balkanize Iraq—suggestions to carve up Iraq into oil-rich and oil-poor regions; with the U.S. controlling oil-rich regions and making occupation that much more affordable, at least in the short term.
RW: You recently suggested that the "window of opportunity" has closed, as far as using emerging truths about the Bush administration’s complicity in 9/11 to bring about political reform. Speak more about this.
MR: With the 2004 presidential election and the 2005 inauguration of Mr. Bush, any window has closed. The 9/11 Commission and Congress have conducted all of their hearings, and the political and legal will to address the truth about 9/11 has evaporated. 9/11 has become history. To focus on 9/11 is a waste of energy.
RW: What of the "9/11 Truth" community?
MR: I appreciate any efforts to educate people about the truths regarding 9/11. I also see the 9/11 Truth community as fragmented, well-intentioned, and politically naïve, sometimes belligerently so. Teaching
RE: Peak Oil | from JB Sep 17 2005 - 01:27
It's time to talk about this.
There is a serious problem coming our way. It is a problem that most of us have not heard about on the nightly news or in the major media yet. Sure, some stories are finally appearing, like last weeks NY Times article about Ghawar - the largest Saudi oil field, but this problem of "peak oil" or "petro-collapse" has been talked about for a long time.
In case you haven't heard, the problem is that the earth is running out of oil. Demand is outstripping supply. Add to that fact that North American refineries have been running full bore with no room for error and numerous facilities have been damaged by KATRINA and we have a fuel shortage and impending crisis. (Yes, it's a crisis) In my worst nightmare it is ROAD WARRIOR mixed with the footage coming out of New Orleans. It won't happen right away, but if you look down the road a ways, it isn't pretty. The irony is that our running out of crude and ultimately it's distillates, is in a strange way, Mother Nature’s solution to global warming. Think about it, with less oil and gas to burn there will be less carbon dioxide in the air adding to greenhouse gases. But if it's any consolation, we'll probably be done in by the financial collapse first, if we don't act quickly to conserve and move to alternative energy sources.
In a polite way, I would like people who might be interested in why a gallon of gas could be $8.00 next year, to start to find out for themselves. Nobody is going to save you, but you can get better prepared for what's coming next in this inconvenient game of dominoes.
Here are some good places to start:
http://www.energybulletin.net/news.php
http://www.oilempire.us/
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