Folks,

Here’s a photo essay in Orion magazine, which features aerial photos of Los Angeles as art, exploring the nature of the built environment. I think it’s a fascinating way to look at things, and an interesting counterpoint to the back-to-the-land movement. Check it out…and make sure to read the essay, it’s worthwhile.

Oblivion by David Maisel

–C

Folks,

I thought this was a fascinating read. Taken from Jan Lundberg’s excellent Culture Change newsletter, it’s an essay about one man’s journey around the country, in search of solutions to a post-peak oil society. Over the last six months, he has visited numerous intentional communities, particularly The Farm in Tennessee, and interviewed the like-minded from coast to coast, looking for people and communities who are trying to find ways toward self-sufficiency. It’s an eye-opener.

–CJOHN’S PEAK OIL ODYSSEY - SIX MONTHS INTO IT

“Part of The Farm’s original vision was to build a village for a thousand people using alternative energy systems that were economically and ecologically responsible. We believed that we could design a graceful standard of living which would be attractive to large numbers of First World people, while also being within reach of all Third World people.”
- Gary Rhine on living as voluntary peasants, “So Close Yet So Far”, from Voices from the Farm (1998)

Just before the Fourth of July, I left my life as a tennis-playing, wine-drinking, spoiled rich white guy to begin this radical eco-odyssey. And in the six months which have ensued, I have watched the sun rise over the Atlantic and set over the Pacific, joined Peak Oil groups in three time zones, and visited ecovillages as far apart as North Carolina and Oregon. Plus I spent a couple of months training with the Permaculture Army in Berkeley. But it is to The Farm, the thirty-six-year-old intentional community in Tennessee, that I keep returning.

I didn’t hear good things about The Farm when I was on my way to visit. I had participated in the Earth First! Rendezvous in the Appalachian Mountains. There I saw former mountains apocalyptically sliced down to nothing to yield up coal which will be called “clean” to perhaps be liquefied for toxic methanol — marketed as something disingenuous to shut Americans up about Peak Oil and Global Climate Chaos. The Farm was beckoning as a bastion of back-to-the-land activism in one of the mountain-top removal states.

At the Rendezvous I had met a young farmer who lives at The Farm. Her old VW van had broken down somewhere east of The Farm and west of the Appalachians, and she needed a ride back to it. I had still not yet given away my car (I would do so soon enough — to firm up my eco-cred), so I was glad to help her out. “At The Farm,” she told me on the way, as the big-box-bound tractor-trailers and the super-sized SUVs whooshed past, “there is no farming.”

I would hear similar reports about The Farm as far away as the Left Coast. “It’s a gated community now,” a teacher of urban gardening in Oakland said. “It’s like the suburbs now” said a permaculturist in Oregon, “and nobody wants to get their hands dirty by farming.” “It’s a retirement community for old hippies,” said a rich young hippie in Berkeley, on his way to India.

And, well, there is no farming being done on The Farm. As I drove in, I saw thirty-year-old apple trees and thirty-year-old horses. Hundreds of acres of fields lay fallow. It turns out that a lot of Farmies drive the seventy-some miles up to Nashville to buy hyper-priced U.S.D.A.-certified organic goodies at Wild Oats (a Corporate Clone of Whole Foods, where the PR.-savvy system does not allow the cashiers to unionize, but does encourage them to wear tie-dye).

By the same token, however, there is no farming being done in the United States of America — not on a local, sustainable scale, that is, not to any degree worthy of official attention. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of the Census stopped counting farming as an occupation in 1986 — the number of actual, self-employed, traditional farmers had become statistically insignificant. To be sure, there are some non-corporatized farmers still around, but they exist only because they have either a reliable source of non-farm income (as I had), or because they are willing to live in real poverty (the Farmies of the 1970s lived on the equivalent of a dollar fifty per day per person).

But the bottom line is that our corporatized, industrialized, government-subsidized mega-scale methods of petro-food production have made small-scale farming virtually impossible.

And that is the heartbreaking story of American agriculture in the twentieth century, whether you’re talking about grandma and grandpa’s forgotten old farm or whether you’re talking about The Farm. And so if you come to The Farm today looking for a working model for a sustainable, post-petroleum, ecovillaging future, you are going to be disappointed. But then again, where are you going to find such a model in the U.S.?

Back in the 1970s, when there really was subsistence-level farming being done on The Farm, Stephen Gaskin, the founder, coined the terms “Technicolor Amish” and “voluntary peasants” to make it plain how these hippies proudly and idealistically toiled in poverty. But that original hippie energy – that original vision — was not sustainable, and after the big Changeover (as the Farmies still call it) took place in 1982-83, The Farm ceased to be a commune. Private property has been the rule here for a quarter of a century now. Subsistence-level farming is just a collective memory, though the spirit of voluntary peasantry still thrives in the souls of some of the more uncompromising old Farmies.

Albert Bates, for example, who first came to the Farm in 1972, runs what is called the Ecovillage Training Center here, and he has just published a book called The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook. But for the time being Bates is something of a prophet without honor in his own country. Few of the Farmies share his sense of urgency about ecological crisis. And this is a real problem. For from what I’ve seen over these past six months, the Farmies represent the best of what’s being done by the very few Americans who are idealistic enough to want to live in intentional communities and ecovillages.

The fact that so much ecological work remains undone and even unattempted at The Farm is frightening, not because it reflects badly on the Farmies, but because it begins to bring into focus just how horrible a place the vast majority of Americans are in now, as we see daffodils blooming in January and our government’s endgame of other people’s depleted-uranium-infected-blood-for-our-oil enters its fourth year.

The Farmies have not yet built an ecovillage — this is unhappily true — but they do know how to live in peace and kindness with their neighbors – and they can remind us that it is possible to live as voluntary peasants. When they lived on the equivalent of a dollar fifty a day, they really did abide by the founding principle which they had taken verbatim from the book of Acts: “And all that believed were together and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all as every man had need.”

Their experience of voluntary peasantry puts the Farmies on a totally different planet from the rest of America, where the mainstream still, every day, every minute, is made more addicted to their energy-scarfing hyper-consumerism. So when the time comes and the rest of America, having been denied its right to shop, convulses and sickens in the pangs of withdrawal, the planet of voluntary peasantry may well survive Peak Oil and Global Climate Chaos, because the people on it have had some real preparation for life as involuntary peasants.

And, like it or not, that’s what our future seems to hold, and that’s what will force culture change (no matter how much we pray for techno-fixes): the shock of sudden poverty.
So let us go back to Gary Rhine’s words quoted in the epigraph above, from his account of the founding vision of The Farm. It was about:

“… a village for a thousand people using alternative energy systems that were economically and ecologically responsible. We believed that we could design a graceful standard of living which would be attractive to large numbers of First World people, while also being within reach of all Third World people. We hoped to build the model village, live in it, and then get funding to help build similar towns in Third World countries. We also hoped to inspire other First World groups to build similar villages for themselves.”

“During those years we had people living on The Farm who were at the forefront in fields such as architectural design, solar heating, and photovoltaics. We had the know-how and the manpower to build the town we envisioned. But we didn’t build it.

“After a decade of struggling Third World-style in the woods of Tennessee, we were still living in a skeleton of our dream. Instead of building our town, we had been sending many of our most talented and energetic people to do relief work in Guatemala, Bangladesh, Haiti, the South Bronx, and on American Indian reservations….

“By the early 1980s, many of the people who had been in on the original vision were tired of living in a crisis-management state of mind, with systems constantly breaking down because they weren’t built right in the first place. It was frustrating because we knew how to do it right; we just didn’t have the resources. So a large number of people left. I think that if at that time we had been able to build the town and been able to live within the graceful standard of living that we had envisioned as ‘voluntary peasants,’ a lot of us would not have left. We were so close yet so far” (from Rupert Fike, ed., Voices from the Farm).

Rhine, a documentary filmmaker whose special interest was American Indians, disappeared in a plane crash about a year ago – he wasn’t all that old – and so we are led to consider the fact that just as much of the original vision for The Farm has been lost, so have many of the men and women who lived here during the 1970s already died. Yet it is out of the sadness of unrealized and never-to-be-realized dreams that we can learn from The Farm.

And so I am at The Farm as I write this. I am at The Farm to learn, and I am here to share with you what I have learned so far. My girlfriend Betsy is sitting next to me, looking over my shoulder. Betsy’s a close friend of that young woman farmer whose VW van broke down on the way to the Earth First! Rendezvous last July — whom I helped get home to The Farm — one good turn leads to another! Betsy’s been at The Farm, in one way or the other, since 1975. She was born in a teepee in Colorado in 1972– her mother Marilyn had made it during the pregnancy — and when Betsy was two-and-a-half, Marilyn moved to The Farm and began living the life of a voluntary peasant. For the first ten years of Betsy’s life Marilyn did not even own a wallet. Right now Betsy and I are house-sitting for her — she’s gone to Washington, D.C. in a Greyhound Bus with about forty other Farmies to protest our so-called war in Iraq. (Like Betsy and me, Albert’s also stayed behind; he’s entertaining a reporter from Vanity Fair who’s writing a story about the history of The Farm — how odd a topic for Vanity Fair!)

And so, as Betsy looks over my shoulder, she makes sure that what I write here is both full of truth and free from personal or pointless criticism. For this is what I have to learn here. This is where our proper response to our scary future begins: in seeing things just as they are, and then reacting to them with equanimity — by rising above our petty likes and dislikes, our self-protecting projections and false expectations, in order to be able to act with true mindfulness and compassion under any circumstances. For any circumstances are already here.

John Siman is going back and forth between the Georgia coast, where he is working on the refit of the schooner Wanderer (soon to be the Emancipator), and The Farm in Tennessee, where he is writing, among other things, a book titled Disconnectivities: Watching America Heat Up and Hubbert Down; or, Always Astonished. He can be contacted at john “at” thefarm “dot” org

* * * * *

References:

Voices From The Farm, edited by Rupert Fike.
copyright 1998.

Book of Acts: the New Testament, Acts, 2:44, 45.

Ecovillage Training Center:

thefarm.org

Albert Bates’ book: The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, reviewed in Raise the Hammer, January 10, 2007:

www.raisethehammer.org

Earth First! Journal:

earthfirstjournal.org

Folks,

This is republished from Wealth Daily. It’s my critique of the latest oil data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), and concludes that we will be seeing higher oil prices soon.

–C

Something’s Gotta Give

By Chris Nelder

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

When an irresistible force such as you

Meets an old immovable object like me

You can bet as sure as you live

Something’s gotta give

Something’s gotta give

Something’s gotta give

That Johnny Mercer standard was going through my head as I looked over the Oil Market Report published yesterday by the International Energy Agency. They forecast that global demand will increase this year at a rate of 1.6%—nearly double last year’s growth rate of 0.9%—to 86 mbpd, 1.4 mbpd higher than last year.

“Where exactly,” I asked myself, “do they think that oil is going to come from?”

The “irresistible force” in this case is the economic powerhouse of China. With a blistering economic growth rate of 10%, its demand for oil is rising at a rate of 5.4%, from 7.1 to 7.6 mbpd. China alone accounts for fully one third of the projected global increase in demand this year.

The “immovable object” would be, more accurately, the unrelenting reality of the nonrenewable resource that is oil.

The IEA says where they think that oil is going to come from: the former Soviet Union and Africa primarily, at 0.5 mbpd each, and a few little bumps from elsewhere: 0.2 from OPEC (all in the form of natural gas liquids, not crude), 0.2 from Latin America, and 0.1 from North America.

Put another way, the IEA says that the non-OPEC producers are going to increase their production at a rate of 2.8% in 2007 . . . when the growth rate last year was less than half that at 1.2%, and in 2005 was a mere 0.3%.

Well, now, that’s a mighty optimistic scenario! And look—the supply increase will exactly match the increase in demand. Amazing!

The IEA has data that the rest of us only wish we had. And they have lots of experts who really understand this stuff, or should. So why do they come up with a forecast that they must know is extremely optimistic, even wrong?

I suspect it’s because the thing that’s gotta give is the price, and they don’t want to be the ones to say it.

Between the geopolitical woes that continue to plague Africa’s oil industry and the lack of maintenance throughout Russia’s aged and rusting oil production infrastructure, it’s hard to imagine the two being able to increase production by a million barrels per day between them. And when you factor in the necessity of foreign investment and technology for the new oil projects and enhanced oil recovery of the older fields, then look again at the risks that Western oil firms would have to take to send their money and personnel to those far-off and unstable places . . . well, I just don’t see it happening.

The oil majors have preferred to prospect on Wall Street through mergers and acquisitions these last several years than to keep taking the risks of drilling three out of four dry holes or having their investments seized for far less than face value by a national oil company and being unceremoniously booted out once things get going. Other than the pressing need to maintain their reserves, which has proven to be a serious problem these last few years, there is little to make Big Oil want to take those chances.

The IEA is right to show some caution in its OPEC forecast. Increased recovery of natural gas liquids & condensates is possible, and 0.2 mbpd worth seems like an achievable target. But it’s telling that they don’t foresee any increase in actual crude from OPEC—very telling. Either they don’t believe the Saudi claim that they have some 2 mbpd of spare production capacity, or they believe that OPEC will honor recent production cuts and maintain production at existing levels in order to defend the price. Or perhaps they know that OPEC is tapped out, a paper tiger whose roar is becoming a bit tired and weak. At present, the demand for OPEC crude is 0.3 mbpd higher than in 2006 and remains above existing OPEC production.

So why not pin hopes for a balancing of supply and demand on the X-factor producers in FSU and Africa? There are too many variables in either case to make a serious production forecast, so any projections have a built-in CYA factor. A 2.8% growth rate over there . . . yeah, that’s the ticket!

The inconvenient truth that is apparently too much for IEA to bear saying is that those 1.4 mbpd are likely what Matthew Simmons calls “conceptual barrels.” You want them to be there in order to balance out supply and demand at current prices, but they’re only there on paper.

Unfortunately, as Simmons says, “Conceptual oil and gas reserves are easy to talk about but very hard to use.”

Here’s what we know to be true:

• The world’s top three oil fields are in decline, and the top four sources of U.S. imports are in decline. We know, with some certainty, that the existing top producers are in decline, but there is no way to predict with any certainty that the new projects expected to fill the gap this year will actually materialize.
• Russia, currently the world’s top producer of crude, just cut its oil production growth forecast for 2007 from 2.5% to 2.1%. But the IEA’s projection is that the FSU will increase its production by 4.1%. They must be very optimistic about bringing online new projects in the Caspian Basin—far more optimistic than I am, at least.
• Stockpiles of crude are dropping at more than three times their normal rate. According to the EIA, oil reserves will be down to their lowest level in
  three years by the end of June. And with the recent record-setting cold snap across most of the U.S., unusually large withdrawals from distillate and natural gas inventories are anticipated.
• With the U.S. planning to double its Strategic Petroleum Reserve and China having started filling its own, demand will stay strong.
• The IEA, like most of its peers, has an abysmal predictive track record, but there is something about it that’s actually fairly reliable: they consistently paint a rosier picture than actually comes to pass.
• Global demand is rising by 1.4 mbpd in a year that started off as the warmest on record.
• Experts like Matthew Simmons have already stated that the world is past the
  peak of global production. If this is true, then any increases projected for 2007 are pure fantasy.

Time will tell whether the IEA is just playing politics with this report or whether they know something that the rest of us don’t. But the numbers that we have, as imperfect and opaque as some of them are, seem to tell a different story.

Something’s gotta give. There is no reason to think that China’s overheated economy will slow this year, and the same goes for India. OECD countries are gradually getting a handle on their demand for energy and are slowing or even stopping their growth. Oil demand in the U.S., for example, actually fell by 0.4% in November, year on year, for the first time since 2001. We may expect further reductions in developed countries as their growth slows, efficiency improves and they continue switching over to natural gas from oil-based fuels for heating and electrical generation.

So if economic growth in developing countries is the “irresistible force,” and if supply gains are fantasy, then it’s clear what’s going to give: the price.

Barring some unforeseen favorable circumstances—which seem unlikely—we may expect crude prices to go higher, possibly much higher, into the spring.

Until next time.

Chris Nelder

Folks,

I have been greatly relieved to see some of the truth about the Office of Special Plans coming out into the open…finally. I first blogged it in June 2003, quoting an article from Newsweek, so we’ve known about it for nearly four years. I have blogged it seven times since then.

OK, so this investigation is about four years too late to save us from getting into the Iraq debacle, but at least the truth is coming to light. Now that the White House’s deceptions about the war are becoming public knowledge–no longer something that can be cast aside as “conspiracy theory”–perhaps we can also have a real debate about Iraq. Again, yes, a debate we should have had before the war–and would have had, had the Republicans dominating all three branches of government not stonewalled it, but better late than never, I guess.

I am reminded again of one of my favorite quotes by the Dr. Martin Luther King: “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

–C

Feith Takes the Fall

By Mark Thompson/Washington

Friday, Feb. 09, 2007

For a person most Americans have never heard of, Doug Feith has been called terrible names by very important people. In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward quotes General Tommy Franks — appalled at the quality of intelligence about Iraq — railing that Feith, then the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was “the f—king stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” Today, there was another bad review. Feith got publicly slapped by the Defense Department’s inspector general for developing pro-war intelligence on Iraq — outside of official channels — that now seems plainly wrong. The IG concludes that Feith’s office, on a free-lance basis, made claims “that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community.” The report said that Feith’s shop exaggerated the purported links between Saddam Hussein’s government and al Qaeda. “That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the armed services committee. He said the Feith’s work, “which was wrong, which was distorted, which was inappropriate … is something which is highly disturbing.”

Feith may have been one of the Bush Administration’s most fervent supporters of war with Iraq but, in truth, he was only a bit player. Indeed, he is the third bit player in the Iraq fiasco to be paying for the sins of his superiors recently. For a couple of weeks now, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been in the dock in federal court in Washington, trying desperately to keep his one-time boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, from being stained by the responsibility for Libby’s chats with reporters and government officials about Valerie Plame’s CIA job. Then, just yesterday, Army General George Casey was raked over the coals by Senators who didn’t think his past 30 months in command of U.S. ground forces in Iraq warrants his elevation to Army chief of staff. While he did get the promotion, the Senate vote of 83-to-14 was the poorest showing for an Army chief since Vietnam. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Casey should be held accountable for giving Congress too-rosy assessments of the war as the situation there spiraled downward into chaos. “I have questioned in the past and question today a number of decisions and judgments that Gen. Casey has made in the past two and a half years,” McCain said. “During that time, conditions in Iraq have gotten remarkably and progressively worse.”

This trio of woes seems to have a common thread: Underlings snared while trying to please their bosses. It’s almost like blaming the hammer instead of the carpenter for a bent nail. Speaking to the Associated Press, Feith took umbrage at descriptions that his work was “inappropriate.” Said he: “The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow ‘unlawful’ or ‘unauthorized.’” He has a point: it was the Bush administration that chose Feith’s reports over those generated by its $1 billion-a-week intelligence operation. Feith’s work was most certainly authorized — from the very top.

Source: Time: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1587982,00.html

Folks,

Here’s my latest piece, originally published at Energy and Capital. It explores some of the salient reasons why the Bush administration must be panicking over its failed policies on energy, climate change, and the Iraq war.

As always, I welcome your feedback.

–C

The Desperation of George W. Bush

By Chris Nelder

February 7, 2007

The mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the
desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself
with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is
concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There
is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of
wisdom not to do desperate things.

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Last week, CommonDreams published a clever, hard-left article titled “Game Over: Thirty-Six
Sure-Fire Signs That Your Empire Is Crumbling” by David Michael Green. One
of them was, “You know your empire’s crumbling when a massive environmental
nightmare is looming around the corner, and your emperor not only ignores it,
but claims it isn’t real while taking steps to exacerbate
it.”

Hard criticism, but true.

And then, wonder of wonders, after a
career spent casting doubt on global warming science, and favoring Big Oil at
all times and at all costs, President Bush changed his tune in the State of the
Union speech a few weeks ago, claiming that new energy technologies “will help us
to confront the serious challenge of global climate change.”

That’s the first time he has mentioned “climate change” as if it were real.

He went on to acknowledge the great
risks inherent in our dependence on foreign oil, and the necessity of
developing energy alternatives—specifically mentioning solar, wind, clean coal,
nuclear, biodiesel, and cellulosic ethanol.

He also requested a doubling of the
Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

And he pledged to push for fuel
economy standards, to cut gasoline use “by 20 percent in the next ten years.”

You might think that a renewable energy champion and peak oil worrier such as myself would have cheered aloud, or breathed a sigh of relief.

Follow the Money

Let’s just say I’ll believe it when I see it.

One year ago, in his SOTU speech, he
famously declared that “America is addicted to oil.” But a few weeks later,
the budget he sent to Congress actually cut $100 million from federal energy conservation programs.

And one year later, our oil
dependency is in worse shape than before, by any measure.

In this year’s SOTU speech, he
championed solar and wind energy. But in the budget he sent to Congress a few
weeks later, investment in wind-energy research was actually cut by $9 million,
down 26%, and money for solar energy was cut by $7 million, a 10% decrease from
last year

The proposed fiscal 2008 budget for
the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is $181.5 million–$6.1 million less
than last year’s budget request.

In fact, Bush has pledged to work
toward energy independence in every single one of his previous State of the
Union addresses…while our dependence on imports
grew from 53% to 66%.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so cynical. The
$9 billion that he requested in his 2008 budget for alternative energy,
especially cellulosic ethanol, is money well needed, and well spent. I’m all for
it, and betting big on it!

And at least I can take some comfort
that he finally dropped that nonsense about the “hydrogen economy.” After being
the centerpiece of his glowing vision for the future in previous years, in this
year’s speech, the word “hydrogen” wasn’t uttered once.

Oops: the budget request for
hydrogen technology research is up 25 percent, to $18.4 million.

That’s right, the hydrogen economy
snipe hunt just garnered more of a budgetary increase than the cuts to solar and
wind put together. One has to wonder how that made sense to anybody.

And there was zero money in the
budget for geothermal, arguably the cleanest and greenest of all land-based
energy sources.

Yes, the President did an excellent
job of sounding like he was strongly
in support of renewable energy…while in the actual budget, fossil fuels and
nuclear energy each got more than a 30% increase.

Game Over: Nine Sure-Fire Signs that Your Leaders are Panicking

If you just listen to the rhetoric,
it certainly sounds like Team Bush has finally come around about renewable
energy and climate change.

But the reality is, it’s just a “modified limited
hang out”. The phrase dates to a conversation between President Nixon and
his cronies, and refers to “a strategy of
mixing partial admissions with misinformation and resistance to further
investigation.”

Bingo.

The reality is that Bush & Co.
are in a state of quiet desperation, slowly and deliberately making partially
misleading, partially true statements to show that they know the truth about oil
and global warming without it actually costing them too much politically, and
without having to actually do anything differently.

They’re just trying to get out ahead
of the issues, so they don’t get crushed by them.

Because it pays more to follow the
money and the facts than the rhetoric, let’s review the case for the desperation
of George W. Bush.

Exhibit A: Crude Prices Bounce Back

After an 18% plunge to the $50s in
the first half of January, WTI crude has bounced back to within a buck of where
it started. That’s odd, considering that it’s the world’s biggest, and most
vital commodity, and nothing special happened, isn’t it?

Not really. As I have argued before, I
believe the recent low price of crude is simply due to the groupthink of Wall
Street, and has little to do with the underlying value of the commodity. In the
low 50s, oil was oversold, and now we’re going to follow a similar trajectory to
that of this time last year…only as we will see shortly, I think it will go well
past last year’s highs.

Exhibit B: Passing the
Peak

The first reason is simply that the
world’s number one oil field, Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar, is in decline.

According to Jeffrey J. Brown, an
independent petroleum geologist, the well-respected Hubbert Linearization Method
of oil field production analysis shows that Saudi Arabia is 58% depleted, and
the world is 48% depleted…about where Texas and the lower 48 peaked, and started
irreversible declines in production.  “Based on the HL method and historical
models,” he said, “I believe Saudi Arabia and the world are now on
the verge of irreversible declines in conventional oil
production.”

This is something that Matthew
Simmons, founder and Chairman of the world’s largest energy investment banking
company and author of Twilight in
the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy,
has been saying for several years now. He has been running himself ragged,
traveling the globe and warning about a Saudi production
collapse.

Well, in a January 31 interview on
Bloomberg television, he dropped the bomb: “We have hit peak
oil.”

That’s it. The party is officially over.

He also said that oil is “unbelievably inexpensive” and that we’re “giving it away”
a ten cents a cup. In some countries, he explained, they’re already paying the
equivalent of $300 a barrel, and there’s no reason it couldn’t happen here: “I
think the most important thing to realize is that if demand is accelerating, and
there seems to be nothing on the horizon to slow down oil demand, and supply
can’t…then prices don’t sort of stabilize at ten cents a cup!”

A $300 barrel of crude equates to $9 a gallon gas. Ready for your next $180
fill-up?

And we now know that our
2nd largest oilfield, Mexico’s Cantarell, is in a
catastrophic, 28% annual decline. The U.S.’s number two source of imports
could be finished in less than four years.

As if to prove the point, the Saudi
oil company (Aramco) and the Mexican oil company (Pemex) are both cutting their
deliveries of crude—selling less oil to refineries than they have asked to
buy. 

On balance, falling production in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Norway—a loss
totaling up to 1 million barrels—will not be made up by new production coming on line during
2007.

With Ghawar, Cantarell, Forties
& Burgan in terminal (and very rapid) decline, it’s game over. Game over.
Commence the slow crawl up the other side.

Of course, none of this is a
surprise to us. We
knew that we had reached the peak before the Simmons interview. And we knew that the
other major fields of the world could hardly be counted upon to make up the
losses from the other major fields.

Exhibit C: Begging Canada

Last month, the Bush administration
sent a team from the Department of Energy to meet with Canada’s natural
resources agency, to ask them to bypass environmental rules in order to ramp up
production from its oil sands by a factor of five…even though, as has been well
recognized already, they have neither the natural gas nor the fresh water to do
it.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper had
the good sense to say no, refusing to implement a fast track method for
environmental assessments, which would have been needed in order to meet the
Bush administration’s timetable.

How desperate are you, when you come
begging to Canada, little ol’ weak Canada, asking them to wantonly destroy their
environment without a second thought in order to meet your energy needs, and you
get denied? That’s gotta sting.

Exhibit D: Doubling the SPR

At maximum capacity, the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve currently sports a grand total of 56 days’ worth of import
protection, according to the DOE. Given that we’re past peak and that all five
of our top suppliers have serious issues, two months’ worth doesn’t exactly give
me the warm fuzzies. Apparently, the Bush administration agrees. You don’t
double your SPR when you’re feeling secure.

But they’re not the only ones.
China and India are
quickly building their own strategic reserves.

All of which adds up to security of
demand, if nothing else. Hello,
higher prices.

Exhibit E: Climate Change
Disinformation

On February 2, the Bush
administration found itself squarely, and very publicly, on the wrong side of
the climate change issue, when the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) published its much-anticipated report on climate change. Three
years in the making, the report is the most comprehensive, global, and
peer-reviewed study on climate change ever written, bringing together the work
of more than 800 scientists, more than 450 lead authors from more than 130
countries, and more than 2,500 expert reviewers.

In short, it’s humanity’s
best attempt at getting the story right.

It said that greenhouse gas
emissions will continue to change the climate over the next 100 years, causing
sea levels to rise by a half-meter. In turn, millions will be displaced from
their coastal and low-lying communities, causing waves of environmental
refugees. Snow in the mountains will disappear, desertification will intensify,
oceans will die, and so will people, due to deadly heat waves, as world temps
rise by some 3C – 5.8C. 

On the very same day that
the IPCC report came out, another story broke: that the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) had sent letters out to scientists around the world, offering
$10,000 to anyone who could undermine the IPCC’s report, asking for essays that
“thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs.”

And who is the AEI? A think tank
that has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil, with 20-plus staffers who
have also worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, former
ExxonMobil CEO, is their board’s vice-chairman.

But Exxon’s efforts go far beyond
that. Last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report, showing
that Exxon had spent some $16 million since 1998 to “seek to confuse the public
on global warming science.”

Maybe the best summation of all, about the Bush team’s denial of climate change, came just a few days ago, in a letter to clients sent by the manager of Vice President Cheney’s own personal investments, Jeremy Grantham. You read that right. (As far as I know, Mr. Cheney has not issued a response.)

In the GMO Quarterly Letter 2007, he had a sharply worded essay entitled “While America Slept, 1982-2006 —
A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data.” He
wrote:

Successive U.S. administrations have taken little interest in either oil substitution or climate
change, and the current one has even seemed to have a vested interest in the
idea that the science of climate change is uncertain. In fact, we have spent the
last large chunk of time in this country with a strong bias to feel-good data at
the expense of accurate, hard data in this field. This attitude seems to be
reflected in the spin on U.S.
economic success, which we’ve commented on several times, exaggerating,
sometimes substantially, the absolute and relative performance of the
U.S. economy. It has certainly been
reflected in the general desire for environmental issues to be benign and
optimistic or to simply go away.

The U.S. policy
approach to climate change (and other environmental issues) has been similarly
casual in its unwillingness to plan for the long term. There is now nearly
universal scientific agreement that fossil fuel use is causing a rise in global
temperatures […] Yet the U.S. is the only country in which environmental data is
steadily attacked in a well funded campaign of disinformation (funded mainly by
one large oil company). This campaign has used and reused the solitary,
plausible academic they can dig up, out of hundreds working in the field, plus
one famous novelist – without qualifications in the field, but, still, for
heaven’s sake, widely quoted by the administration – and one Danish economist
who really doesn’t get Pascal’s Paradox, but does seem to have shares in The Wall Street Journal.

Clearly, Team Bush is desperate to
get on the right side of the climate change issue.

Exhibit F: Grasping At
Straws

How desperate are they? Desperate
enough to lobby the IPCC and ask them to include in the summary for policymakers
some nutty strategies for dealing with climate change, such as putting giant
mirrors or a giant sunscreen into orbit, or pumping tiny droplets of sulfate, or
reflective dust, into the atmosphere as “important insurance” against rising
emissions. The IPCC demurred, calling the ideas “speculative, uncosted and with
potential unknown side-effects.”

Some observers have connected these
outlandish ideas with the very real-world phenomena of aircraft vapor trails
that don’t dissipate normally, so-called “chemtrails.” I will admit, there was a
time that I didn’t give the chemtrail theory the time of day. But after last
week’s display of chicanery, I’m not sure I can rule anything out.

Exhibit G: The Hurricane
Threat

We’re six months away from the start
of the hurricane season, and New Orleans and much of the rest of the Gulf is
still in ruins—apparently forgotten by the Bush administration, as it merited
not one word in the President’s State of the Union speech.

If, by some miracle of climate
effects, we get through the coming hurricane season without further damage to
the cities of the Gulf, he might get away with it.

But if the warming waters of the
Gulf play the same role they did in 2005, we could see even fiercer storms. And
the President’s neglect of the areas damaged by “Katrita” will serve as a stark
reminder to Gulf’s residents that they had better not pin their hopes on FEMA
coming to the rescue this time, either.

Exhibit H: Military Refocusing on Africa

Peak oil observers know that the
only remaining places on the planet where we may hope to significantly increase
oil production are Africa, and the Caspian Basin…both targets of intensive trade
lobbying by China, which is rapidly sewing up long-term oil supply contracts in
both regions.

So we have been watching, and
waiting, for the Bush administration to go after them militarily, as they have
in Iraq.

Unfortunately, due to President
Putin’s iron-fisted control of Russia, and his aggressive moves to throw out the
major international oil companies and nationalize all of its energy assets, the
U.S. is in little position to jockey
militarily for a control point on the Caspian.

But Africa is another matter, and yesterday, February 7, that
shoe finally dropped. Even as Chinese President Hu toured the African continent
cutting oil deals, the White House announced that it will create a new military
command for Africa by September of next year,
consolidating under one command the responsibilities that have been spread among
three commanders.

There’s no reason to announce such a
far-off program now, other than to publicly counter the Chinese. It was just
another move, and counter-move, in the global game of oil chess.

If you’re following the playbook,
the next move should be for the U.S. to conduct some sort of false flag operation
in Africa, a Gulf of Tonkin maneuver, to give us an excuse to start building an expanded military presence there.

Exhibit I: Iraq

I have saved the most compelling
exhibit for last, because most of the Bush administration’s reasons to panic
begin and end there, in pursuit of its oil. The Bush and Blair teams have both
repeatedly denied that our involvement in Iraq had
anything to do with oil, but the facts speak otherwise. I think it should be
obvious to any rational person—after all, as I like to point out, their main
export isn’t broccoli—but I shall build my case as any good detective would,
identifying the motive, the opportunity, and the means.

The Motive

The motive, by now, should be clear:
the peaking of global oil production, the growing dependency of the
U.S. on massive levels of oil
imports, and our lack of control over the foreign oil producers on whom we
depend.

This motive is no longer a matter of
speculation. As we now know, from the many revelations of the last few years,
and particularly from the ongoing trial of Cheney’s second in command, Scooter
Libby, Team Bush went to extraordinary lengths to sell the war against
Iraq. They knew their evidence was
flimsy, and that the contrary intelligence was significant, but they went with
it anyway, because they had decided long before that they must establish a
strategic foothold in the oil-producing nations of the Middle East.

In March 2001,
President Bush appointed Dick Cheney to head up a secret energy task force
called the National Energy Policy Development Group, due to the current concerns
about oil and gas supplies. But rather than push for renewables and domestic
alternatives, the task force pushed to “make energy security a priority of our
trade and foreign policy”…a clear reference to ensuring that the
U.S. had access to foreign oil, no
matter what. And, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by
Judicial Watch, we know that the task force was looking specifically at “a map
of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts
detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield
Contracts.’”

Thus, the Bush
administration’s intent to secure control of Iraq’s
oil was clear, well before the attacks of Sept. 11.

The Opportunity

The need for a good opportunity to
achieve the geostrategic imperatives of American global domination were spelled
out years ago, in two reports.

The first was by Zbigniew Brzezinski, National
Security Advisor during
the Carter Administration, entitled “The
Grand Chessboard - American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives”
(1997). In it, he made this famous observation: “As
America becomes an increasingly
multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on
foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely
perceived direct external threat.”

The
other was by the Project for A New American Century (PNAC) whose primary
architects included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Richard Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld, called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (September 2000). In it, they
recognized the same need, for “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl
Harbor.”

The 9/11 attacks provided the crucial opportunity, the “new Pearl Harbor.”
And so the Bush and Blair teams ginned up support for the invasion of Iraq, using 9-11 as a springboard and conflating al Qaeda and the Taliban with Iraq and Saddam Hussein…connections that were endlessly repeated, never supported, and ultimately, roundly disproved.

Let us not
forget that the very first thing American troops did, upon entering Iraq, was to
secure oil facilities and the Oil Ministry—the only governmental agency, in fact, that
was secured. They went to the oil straight away, even as an orgy of looting and
destruction ensued in the rest of the country, leaving some of the most precious
treasures of human history in the hands of black marketers.

The Means

The
strategy for taking control of the oil is only now coming to light, after years
of behind-the-scenes wrangling, as the neocons argued for wholesale
privatization, and the oil majors argued against it, all too aware of the
physical risks they would take by painting such a target on themselves.

Last month, in a very well-done series on “blood and oil” published by the UK Independent,
we learned that new
legislation was to have been passed in December by the Iraqi parliament, but it
got derailed by the raging civil war. Iraqi officials were hoping to have the
law enacted by March. “It would allow the first large-scale
operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was
nationalised in 1972,” they reported.

What the law would do
is legalize the plundering of Iraq’s oil fields by the
international oil majors, via “Production Sharing Agreements (PSA’s)” which give
the companies a share of the oil produced in exchange for investing in
infrastructure.

Naturally, the oil
companies’ shares are obscenely large, taking double (or more) the usual shares
under such agreements. Even better, the agreements are irrevocable for 30 years.
Bo-nan-za!

And due to the
structure of the PSA’s, the Iraqis still officially have ownership of the oil
fields…they are merely “sharing” the revenue with their generous foreign
investors! Privatization without all the ugliness of the actual word.

Nice trick, eh?

The legislation is being written
largely by BearingPoint, “an American consultancy firm hired by the
US government, which had a
representative working in the American embassy in Baghdad for several months.”
Apparently most Iraqis have never even heard of the plan: “Three outside groups have had far
more opportunity to scrutinise this legislation than most Iraqis,” said Mr
Muttitt. “The draft went to the U.S. government and major oil companies
in July, and to the International Monetary Fund in September. Last month I met a
group of 20 Iraqi MPs in Jordan, and I asked them how many had seen the legislation. Only one had.”

No wonder then that Iraqi Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki told The Wall Street
Journal two weeks ago that he wanted to bow out as prime minister before his
term expires. I’ll bet he does…and before his loyal citizens find out what he’s
done, too!

All the
Bush team needs to do now is hold things together in Iraq long enough
for its parliament (before that, too, falls apart) to put the law into place.
Then we have an orgy of contract-signing, and the job is done. As the
Independent reported: “It’s a mad rush to get something there,” said James Paul,
the executive director of Global Policy Forum, a New York watchdog group. “The companies are
saying, ‘Before any troops are withdrawn, we have to have these contracts.’”

Apparently, they have been busy.
According to the US-based Centre for Public Integrity, more than 150
US companies have already won
some $50 billion worth of oil contracts in Our case is complete: motive, opportunity, and the means.

…And The Bill

And then
there is our undisputable expenditure of blood and treasure. According to the
Congressional Research Service, the Iraq war has so far cost $500bn, and Nobel
prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz reckons the total cost of the
Iraq war to the U.S.
will be about $2 trillion. By comparison, the Vietnam war cost about $614bn in
today’s dollars.

And so far we have lost 3,111 soldiers, and brought home another 23,417 wounded.

That’s serious commitment. Not the sort of thing you do just because, say, you’re
sympathetic to those poor people over there who were suffering under that
madman.

That leaves just one small remaining issue: how to maintain security such that the
oil infrastructure can actually be built, and operated, and the oil exported
successfully, without being blown up every 15 minutes by some
insurgent?

So Bush is
doing what he has always done, when he finds himself deep in a hole: dig harder!
The 21,000 troop “surge” is a joke—that only rolls back the troops levels to
where they were a few months ago…and they were no more effective at stopping
the violence then, than they will be now.

There’s only one thing to call it: an act of desperation. Hardly anybody
on the Hill supports the idea, and retired General Barry McCaffrey called it a
“fool’s errand.”

I guess that’s what you get for sending a fool to do your work, now isn’t it?

So much for the bravery of minks and muskrats.

Panic Sets In

The Bush team has realized, or is
about to realize, what most people already know: That there is no free lunch,
and there is no free energy. That there’s no way to bully or drill our way out
of these problems. And that the problems are, quite literally, lapping at our
feet. And they have been on the wrong side of every single bit of it.

One of my favorite observers on
energy is oil expert Dr Ali Morteza Samsam Bakhtiari, former senior adviser to
the National Iranian Oil Company. “The biggest problem is the 120 million
United States citizens who live in their suburbia,” he
says. “They are the biggest force on the planet but no one in the
U.S. is thinking about this. And when you don’t think, you panic.”

James Howard Kuntsler, a noted Peak
Oil commentator, has a bit more sympathy: “Peak is making us insane and passing
Peak will make us more insane. There may be no moment of clarity, only new kinds
of delusion and disorder. We’ll keep behaving the way we do until we can’t, and
then we won’t.”

Even the U.S. banks are
showing the signs of panic. In 2006, they increased their nominal holdings of
commodity futures to $1.6T as of Q3 2006…nearly tripling their exposure in just
nine months.

That might be speculation…or it might be panic.

And speaking of panic, that’s what we’ve been seeing in Mexico over the last few weeks, as
poor people riot over the rising cost of tortillas, their main source of
calories.

Why are tortilla prices rising? Because of the increased demand for U.S. corn by the burgeoning
corn-ethanol industry.

Didn’t take long for that snake to eat its own tail, did it?

I hope that Bush’s late-to-the-party support for renewable energy is effective.
I hope it with every ounce of hope I can muster.

But these are desperate measures,
there’s no two ways about it. And if he’s panicked…shouldn’t we be, too?

Until next time….

–Chris Nelder

Folks,

The progressive cause lost one of its very best and brightest yesterday, as Molly Ivins succumbed to cancer.

She was really my kinda gal: her heart was always with the common man and the progressive cause, but her trenchant critiques and her rapier wit cut the Left as easily as the Right.

She was nobody’s fool. She could boil endless layers of Beltway gobbledegookdown to straight and simple talk without even trying, and she could depants a Texas politician in a New York minute with a single well-turned phrase. I lost count of the times I breathed an explosive sigh of relief after reading some of those phrases, as if she had taken a huge burden off of me by speaking the straight and simple truth when all around was confusion and noise.

But maybe more importantly, her aim was true. I haven’t done a count, but having read her over the years, I think the record would show that she was right on the money most of the time.

She had so many brilliant quotes, it’s impossible to choose one carefully, so here’s one more or less selected at random:

Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?

Oh, it’s just that your life is at stake.

She is also the one who coined the President’s nicknames of “Dubya” and “Shrub.”

I won’t try to tell her story here–there are hundreds to choose from. But if you aren’t familiar with her work, I encourage you to take a look at her thousands of articles and her many books. Or maybe you’d like to check out the half-dozen blogs in which I featured her work.

She was an American treasure. The only other person I can think of who can hold a candle to her unabashed progressiveness, and her plainspoken, incisive wit, is Jim Hightower…and I pray for his good health.

I’ll be missing you, Molly. Missing ya huge. Nobody did it better.

Letting her have the last word, then, here’s her last column.

–C

Molly Ivins: Stand Up Against the ‘Surge’

Original Source

Posted on Jan 11, 2007

By Molly Ivins

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that we simply cannot let it continue.

It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. “You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically,” he said.

His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.

Bush’s call for a “surge” or “escalation” also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested after months of investigation and proposals based on much broader strategic implications.

About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: “The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own—impose its rule throughout the country. … By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed.” But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.

A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country—we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls. We know this is wrong. The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.

Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Ted Kennedy’s proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. And if Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration’s idiotic “plans” and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recent colleagues.

Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” It’s like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?

As The Washington Post’s review notes, Chandrasekaran’s book “methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq’s fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis.”

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now!”

Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.