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Peak Oil vs. Peak Wealth
by Malooga
(lifted from a comment)
While I do believe that the concept of Peak Oil is real and will one
day arrive, I see no evidence whatsoever that Peak Oil has arrived. The
evidence is clear that fully 5% of world oil production is
intentionally being kept off the market by the ongoing war in Iraq. The
oil companies are in a win/win situation: oil off, prices high; oil
laws signed, production rises, profits and control ensured.
It is pure bullshit that big oil was not in favor of invading Iraq.
They are too powerful, and it would not have happened without their
acquiescence; they are just too smart, and like all official secrets,
they managed to keep it mum. It is like the same b.s. story of how US
auto manufacturers REALLY want national health insurance to keep their
costs competitive. There is simply no evidence that the big three have
done any lobbying whatsoever for single payer universal coverage; it is
just a cover-your-ass myth perpetuated to keep the dumb consumer
thinking that the companies "care" about people. No, they don’t. They
would be happy to off-shore all production, and that is the way they
are moving.
Back to Big Oil:
An additional 1% is kept off markets in Nigeria do
to the kleptocracy not sharing with gulf locals. And what about the
Falklands, whose huge reserves have yet to be tapped? What Big Oil (and
the US government) wants is complete control of the amount of oil being
put on the market at any time. Control of the "shortages" and the
surpluses, so that the financial sharks can make money in the market
both ways. At that level, it is all a rigged game.
Peak Oil is very much a function of social justice. There will be no freedom allowed in producer nations.
Peak Oil is also just another scam to squeeze the middle class. If
it were a real crisis, there would be national mobilization for
efficiency programs and subsidies. But the ruling elite do not want
national mobilization about anything; they want a dumb, divided, easily
controlled, populace — which is what they strive to create. So with
the Peak Oil excuse, the middle class gets squeezed still further about
something they feel is a law of nature and they have no control of, the
poor stay poor, and the rich continue to build bigger and bigger
houses, and buy more and more oil consuming toys and trinkets.
Peak Oil is one of a number of myth/scams to move along the process of Peak Wealth Redistribution, made easier by fear.
What Peak Oil does in the US, as proven by experience in Germany, is
create a Green Party/environmental movement of educated, well-off,
middle class in hysterical opposition to the dumb, dirty, underclass
and how they live, and in opposition to all social justice/income
equality movements.
Peak Oil is very much a function of social justice. There will now be no freedom allowed in consumer nations.
I have seen this here where I live, where well-off, upper-middle
class people are hysterically proposing draconian rules which will
result in the complete social control of society, especially the poor
and underclass. They refuse to look at the oil consumption curve, which
continues to show that oil is consumed in inordinate amounts by the
ultra-wealthy, and that conservation can best be accomplished by taxing
the rich, rather than penalizing the poor. Yeah, so maybe the rich
wouldn’t be able to fly all over the world several times a month, boo
hoo!
So yes, Peak Oil is a real phenomenon on a finite planet, and one
day it will arrive. But it has not arrived yet, and right now it is
being used as a form of social control. God is always in the details.
Be very careful, folks, and always think deeply about the implications
of all of your actions.
If we really want to conserve oil and are concerned about growth,
how about a law like this: If you make over 100K you are only allowed
one child,; if you make over 200K, no children. That would even out
consumption a bit. You want children, you can’t be wealthy, because
wealthy people burn more than their share of oil.
The poor of the world, the favelas, are not using up all the world’s
oil; the rich are. The real problem is income distribution. We always
pay lip service to "solving the problem of the poor," which really
means some sort of media campaign so that the middle class can ignore
the poor with a clear conscience. But the problem is the opposite. If
we can solve the problem of the rich, we can live on a sustainable
planet.
There simply is no such thing as a rich person who is
environmentally conscious. Rich people consume more resources than the
poor — even those rich who live in Green houses. Solve the problem of
the rich, who are destroying the world in every way possible, and you
solve the problems of a sustainable life.
Don’t worry about Peak Oil; worry about Peak Wealth. If we run out
of oil, we can always burn the rich. Rich people’s oil may not be of
quite the quality of the whale oil used to power the last century, but
it will do. It will do.
two things that i read recently pertaining to this topic
first, from the book global rift: the third world comes of age, by l.s. stavrianos, published in 1981
Since U.S. oil imports and the resulting trade deficits are important factors in these global dysfunctions, a simple way out is suggested by two studies completed in 1981 of the American energy situation. The first was conducted for the U.S. Department of Energy by the Solar Research Institute in Golden, Colorado. The study concluded that heavy investments to promote energy efficiency and the use of renewable resources could reduce American energy consumption 25 percent by the end of the century, and thus eliminate the need for any oil imports. The second study, by the Energy Productivity Center of the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, reached the same conclusion. Energy conservation measures could reduce expenditures for foreign oil from about $80 billion in 1980 to an average of $15 billion annually in the 1990s to zero expenditures after the year 2000.
Despite the findings of these two reports, the Department of Energy announced in March 1981 that it was preparing legislation to eliminate or drastically curtail all programs to encourage energy conservation and to develop renewable fuel sources and other alternatives to oil. This list of federal programs affected by the proposed legislation includes: solar energy research and development, wind energy and ocean thermal development, research on electric vehicles and methane-fueled transport, residential energy efficiency, energy conservation for commercial buildings, consumer education on energy conservation, small-scale hydroelectric projects and energy audits by public utilities.
If the proposed Energy Department legislation is passed and implemented, the consequences are self-evident: continued unprecedented profits for the multinational oil companies currently supplying U.S. oil needs; continued unprecedented profits for the five multinational grain corporations now controlling 80 percent of the world’s grain trade; and continued U.S. dependence on foreign oil, especially from the Persian Gulf region.
Little imagination is needed to extend this scenario. … In January 1980 a CIA analyst called in two reporters from Newsweek and the Washington Star to confirm that the agency had warned the Carter administration that the survival of the Saudi regime “could not be assured beyond the next two years.”
Should the CIA warning prove justified, Washington doubtless would use its naval units in surrounding waters and bases, and dispatch its Rapid Deployment Forces now being strengthened for precisely such contingencies. … Two army officers who worked in the White House, Major Daniel W. Christman and Major Wesley K. Clark, concluded in a study entitled “Foreign Energy Sources and Military Power,” that “U.S. military forces will be ineffective in coercing petroleum-producing states to respond to America’s wishes.” Instead, the outcome could be the disruption of oil operations in the Persian Gulf, with repurcussions far surpassing those of Vietnam… [pp. 813-14]
Little imagination is needed to extend this scenario. if he only knew…
those responsible for reversing so many of the efforts from the 1970s to address energy conservation on a national scale are truely criminals.
the second excerpt has to do w/ tangerine’s under-informed opinion above that “Oil Cos. are lower on the pole than the US Gvmt. and they do not have the power to influence world events in the way Mallooga hints at,” and it comes from peter dale scott’s valuable book the road to 911: wealth, empire, and the future of america, which is just being published.
Domination of the public state by private wealth is not a novelty in America… The novelty since World War II, however, lies in the secret growth and articulation of this top-down power within government. In particular, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a group hidden from the public eye, was created in June 1948 and dominated at first by a small ex-Office of Special Services (OSS) elite from Wall Street. Wall Street’s secret intrusion of its views and personnel into American covert policy justifies our speaking of an American “overworld” — that realm of wealthy or privileged society that, although not formally authorized or institutionalized, is the scene of successful influence of government by private power. [p. 2]
…
In using the term “overworld,” we must be careful not to reify it or attribute to it a unity and coherence it does not possess. It is a term of convenience to indicate, as least initially, a somewhat amorphous realm of sociopolitical change on which we should focus attention. The overworld is emphatically less cohesive than a class… Ultimately its much discussed institutions, like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission, are more significant as symptoms and evidence rather than as sources of overworld power.
The overworld was clearly centered in Wall Street in the 1940s and CIA was primarily designed there. With the postwar shifts of U.S. demographics and economic structure southward and westward, the overworld has shifted, becoming less defined by geography than by the interrelated functions of the petroleum-industrial-financial complex. [pp. 5-6]
…
[jump ahead to the 1950s]
…
Soon what Eisenhower would label the “military-industrial complex” was asserting itself through new lobbying groups, notable the American Security Council (ASC), founded in 1955. The ASC united old-wealth oil and military corporations with new-wealth businesses in the South and West, some of which incorporated investments from organized crime. [p. 18]
…
Violent U.S.-supported overthrows of democratically elected leaders in the 1960s — such as those in Brazil, Ghana, and Indonesia — were followed by a radical increase of overseas U.S. direct and indirect ivestment in these same countries, particularly in fossil fuels. This was relected in changes in the American overworld (now less dominated by the Europe-oriented Council on Foreign Relations) and in the deep state. The CFR became more and more allied with the traditionally powerful petroleum lobby, once primarily domestic but now increasingly global in its concerns. Especially before the withdrawal after 1967 of the British Navy from the Indian Ocean, U.S. strategy in the Middle East was dominated by CIA and international oil players, rather than by the Pentagon. Their policies were in the main pro-Arab and above all pro-Saudi, with the oil companies acquiescing in and even subsidizing the Saudi policy of expanding influence of its extremist and anti-Western Wahhabi sect throughout the Muslim world.
The oil industry is the largest, richest, and most powerful lobby in the world. But the power in Washington of the pro-Arab oil lobby (which journalist Ovid Demaris once characterized as “in itself a subgovernment, with roots planted deep in the soil of real goverment”) was increasingly matched by the legislative lobbying of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Today, U.S. policies on the Middle East, particularly with respect to Iraq and Iran, reflect a consensus of the expansionist agendas of both lobbies. [p. 19]
…
[on military strategy for full-spectrum dominance of the globe to open & protect more markets for u.s. investments]
The same sense of mission as protecting investment can be seen in an article from the Foreign Military Studies Office of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, which was published three months before the 2001 World Trade Center attacks: “The Caspian Sea appears to be sitting on yet another sea — a sea of hydrocarbons. … The presence of these oil reserves and the possibility of their export raises [sic] new strategic concerns for the United States and other Western industrial powers. As oil companies build oil pipelines from the Caucasus and Central Asia to supply Japan and the West, these strategic concerns gain military implications.”
U.S. oil companies had worked actively to ensure this military interest. Since 1995, they had been united in a private foreign oil companies group to lobby in Washington for an active U.S. policy to promote their interests in the Caspian basin. Their meeting with NSC energy expert Sheila Heslin in the summer of 1995 was followed shortly by the creation of an interagency govenmental committee to formulate U.S. policy toward the Caspian. Heslin told Congress in 1997 that U.S. policy in Central Asia was “to in essence break Russia’s monopoly control over the transportation of oil [and gas] from that region, and frankly, to promote Western energy security through diversification of supply.” A former CIA officer later complained about Heslin’s subservience to the oil lobby in the Clinton administration. That oil company influence did not diminish with the election, financed in large part by oil companies, of President George W. Bush (formerly a Saudi-financed oilman) and Vice President Dick Cheney (formerly CEO of Halliburton and board member of the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce.) [pp. 20-1]
we could make a list of world events influenced by the big oil interests someday. i bet many people would be surprised.
Posted by: b real | Aug 18 2007 4:05 utc | 20
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