Peak Oil – get the reading glasses out, a healthy debate from all sides is shaping up for Americans.
It’s going to get more and more strange as the super corporations start “going green.” Wal-Mart is pouring advertising money into National Public Radio, public television and Chevron is paying for full page ads in large daily newspapers to clean up their image. The Peak Oil issue is getting out there, sample some of what I’ve found in the last two weeks.
A Classic Liberal mentions “it” …
Bill Moyers lent his opinion recently about the future to a graduating class at Clinton, New York’s Hamilton College and apparently did not receive the protests from students that Sen. McCain or Secretary of State Rice received. In fact, Moyers spoke up and delivered a rather honest look to just what kind of world we are leaving our children. I got a big kick out of the fact he is reading two of the three books I just finished this last winter.
Part of his speech below will give you a taste.
Frankly, I'm not sure anyone from my generation should be saying anything
to your generation except, "We're sorry. We're really sorry for the mess you're
inheriting. We are sorry for the war in Iraq. For the huge debts you will have
to pay for without getting a new social infrastructure in return. We're sorry
for the polarized country. The corporate scandals. The corrupt politics. Our
imperiled democracy. We're sorry for the sprawl and our addiction to oil and for
all those toxins in the environment. Sorry about all this, class of 2006. Good
luck cleaning it up."
You're going to have your hands full, frankly. I don't need to
tell you of the gloomy scenarios being written for your time. Three books on my
desk right now question whether human beings will even survive the 21st century.
Just listen to their titles: The
Long Emergency: Surviving the Convergence Catastrophe; Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; The
Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations.
These
are just three of the recent books that make the apocalypse prophesied in the
Bible...the Revelations of St. John...look like child's play. I won't summarize
them for you except to say that they spell out Doomsday scenarios for global
catastrophe. There's another recent book called The
Revenge of Gaia that could well have been subtitled, "The Earth Strikes
Back," because the author, James Lovelock, says human consumption, our obsession
with technology, and our habit of "playing God" are stripping bare nature's
assets until the Earth's only consolation will be to take us down with her.
Before this century is over, he writes, "Billions of us will die and the
few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the
climate remains tolerable." So there you have it: The future of the race, to be
joined in a final and fatal march of the penguins.
Moyer’s complete speech (well worth the time reading it) is available at: Pass the Bread
But there is more … from the Free Market folks
The Adam Smith tribe is getting into the act by beating the phony ‘free market’ bongos yet again, from the political right with Lewis J. Walker’s condescending dictates to the investing hordes looking for something in the economic soup kettle.
He writes at Free Market News Network:
Every sensational theory about the future attracts pessimists and optimists, and
Peak Oil has futurists all over the map. Dr. Mark Jaccard is an economist
focusing on sustainable energy systems. A professor in the School of Resource
Management at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, Dr. Jaccard is author of a 2005
book, Sustainable Fossil Fuels: An Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and
Enduring Energy (Cambridge University Press). Says he: “The doom-and-gloom
forecasts for gas, coal and oil are wrong…reports of the death of fossil fuels
are greatly exaggerated.” The professor opines that oil, gas, and coal will
still meet 58 percent of global energy needs by 2100.”
Daniel Yergin,
author of The Prize, his 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil
industry, rejects many of the theories that global production is about to tank:
“This is the fifth time we’ve run out of oil since the 1880s.” (USA Today,
10/16/05).
Take it for what it’s worth these folks are all into any crooked scheme to make a buck 24/7/365 and it’s all okay as long as they make the buck.
But the outstanding EnergyBulletin.net Peak Oil News Clearinghouse which first started me down this trail pointed out to those that just have to make a buck and dump their money into something with the following:
Walker mentions Hubbert, Deffeyes, Daniel Yergin, the Hirsch Report and other
big names. The problem is that this isn't analysis -- it's free-market
cracker-barrel wisdom, interspersed with quotes and anecdotes. Cracker-barrel
wisdom works well in stable periods of little change, but not at historical
inflection points. For business people and investors, Peter Tertzakian's recent
book "A Thousand Barrels a Second" is
a much better guide to the issues. Byron King who publishes
in Energy Bulletin is also an excellent source.
And more from the politically slippery Hillary Clinton …
She recently gave what sounded like a campaign stump speech to the National Press Club detailing some of her proposals on energy policy beginning with describing energy security concerns:
Our present system of energy is weakening our national security, hurting our
pocketbooks, violating our common values, and threatening our children's future.
Right now, instead of national security dictating our energy policy, our failed
energy policy dictates our national security. We would never leave 10 percent of
our military or intelligence assets vulnerable to an easy attack, but that's
what we've allowed to happen with oil.
Just one terminal in Saudi Arabia
handles about one out of every 12 barrels of the world's oil exports. That's
enough to trigger a new crisis beyond the scale of the 1970s, if it were cut
off. One terrorist attack has already been foiled there, and other threats have
been made.
Note that she has not offered to withdraw troops from Iraq,
but her speech does go into specific details on the creation of various funding
programs for energy research, including a windfall tax on the mega – profits
from Big Oil. However she is a long way from acknowledging the cataclysmic
potential of Peak Oil and the societal crisis it portends for “the American way
of life.”
Her complete speech was transcribed by the important Raw Story internet news organization at: Clinton unveils plan to reduce oil imports by 50%
And BBC’s Greg Palast gets C – Span jam on his face on Mother’s Day!
Get it while you can! A whole hour of Palast and R. Emmett Tyrell, American Spectator magazine get slammed together, a “free market” conservative elder v. investigative journalist plugging his book on M$M (and keeps a grin on his face). Palast keeps soap boxing from an oil drum. Tyrell scolds and redbaits Palast as a “socialist” and “conpiracist” and early on offers to leave the C – Span seat for “the John Birch Society.”
Palast drops a small oil news bomb about Chavez announcing this week that Venezuela has more proven heavy crude oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. Palast also makes a rather curious statement about just how much oil there is and Chavez’s intention to stabilize the market at a $50.00 margin with the Bush administration’s cooperation.
This program ostentatious purpose was to plug Palast’s new hilarious and scathing book, Armed Madhouse but one wouldn’t understand it without C – Span’s referee (and new White House Correspondent Association’s president) who had to repeatedly intervene and steer the slugging back to the text of the book. Callers from Scotland to Texas got in the act.
Then within days here comes a confusing direction from Palast Guerilla News about No Peaking: The Hubbert Humbug followed almost immediately with Why Palast Is Wrong written by Palast concerning energy cartels and depletion?
This video segment is available at this C-SPAN site under “Most Recently Watched Segments” category. It will quickly disappear into the organizations archives after 15 days.
But wait, … there is some good local journalism getting out there!
And thanks, again to Energy Bulletin for steering us to it! A southern university touches bases with local researchers and scientists doing something about the perfect storm of catastrophes ahead. How far off the deep end is this news?
And the Brits are definitely cranking out the docu – dramas with a May 30 BBC – Channel 2 release of If... The Oil Runs Out. Could this effort be as significant in preparing the fair island people of the North Atlantic with the 1985 classic "Edge of Darkness"?
We Americans really don’t get it … here is a crack shot by James Howard Kunstler on The Suburban Fantasy at Common Dreams which might be his latest attempt at initiating and answering the pertinent and largely ignored question: Is it even possible these days to define a valid doctrine of political Progressivism?
I encourage readers to check out his essay agitating, as unique and humorous as he is at: Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : Progress and scroll down through the comment section for the line: “We are the gluttonous 500 lb fatman who raids the cafeteria and devours everything before the rest of the employees take their lunch break.”
Sorta makes one sick watching the festivities during this “holiday.”
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