Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ray McGovern Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern revives the neocon’s old nickname, the ‘crazies,’ to describe their approach to oil depletion, the possibility of an overt war with Iran and the problems of the Israeli-US military nexus for peace in the Middle East.
Another wave of mergers may be building in the energy industry as persistent high oil prices, stockpiles of cash and a shortage of inexpensive places to drill are driving companies to eye their competitors.
This month’s ASPO Newsletter includes a depletion profile of Malaysia, and collates some of the most important energy news from the last month.
The crucial needs that must be met in an age of decline are damage control, cultural survival, and the building of a new society amid the ruins of the old. Political and business interests aren’t going to meet these needs, or do anything else helpful; oil is to the modern industrial nations what corn was to the ancient Maya, and the ahauob of Washington and Wall Street have turned to war just as their Maya equivalents did.
Any production numbers for OPEC are subject to the key question: net or gross? This pattern, of domestic oil demand increasing much faster than production, is common to far more than 9 out of 10 oil producers, both OPEC and nonOPEC. Net exports, therefore, will always tend to grow slower than national production.
Sure, Big Oil is raking in money. But new reserves are more elusive, and governments are bargaining harder.
Prices of crude oil could surge to as high as 80 dollars a barrel within the next two years but such a level would not last long, OPEC’s acting secretary general was quoted as saying.
Our Government is well aware of Peak Oil thus the 5% Petrol Tax is an underhanded market signal. A signal that alternatives need to be developed to our energy hungry, drive in utopia, recreational shopping lifestyles.
A council of community leaders is forming to raise awareness of peak oil and its ramifications for Western Massachusetts and to support responses.
General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the 1991 attack on Iraq, told the US Congress in 1990: “Middle East oil is the West’s lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77% of the free world’s proven oil reserves, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world runs dry.”
Latest figures from the oil industry have confounded expert predictions of a price fall in the last two months. As prices have remained above $50 a barrel, Opec’s statements in particular have come under close scrutiny.
The Uncle John’s 2005 voyage is part of a wider effort to better understand methane hydrate. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has funded the Gulf of Mexico Joint Industry Project, a 4-year, $13.6 million, cost-shared effort to develop technologies that locate and safely drill through or near the hydrate.
