Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Pressed for time, Ahmad Hussein refuses to spend hours queuing for petrol at one of Baghdad’s teeming gas stations so he takes his car to a street vendor where it costs six times as much to fill up.
As the world’s known deposits of fossil fuel are being run down, not least because of the growing demand of economies such as China’s, the day may come when the big consuming countries will have to fight – literally, in the worst case scenario – for supplies. But it does not have to turn out that way if the far-sighted in Asia can persuade their countrymen to put aside the past and work together to ensure energy security for all.
The month of November in a US presidential-election year is not supposed to be particularly eventful, but this year may be an exception, in the light of the gathering storm over Iran’s nuclear program, due to be reviewed by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in late November.
China’s Communist rulers have a blunt message for anyone who frets about the planned Chinese takeover of Canada’s biggest mining company: Get ready for more to come.
Cheap versions of the “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and The Collapse of The American Dream” are now available to anyone wishing to send it to an active soldier.
“The US makes dollars; everyone else makes things to get dollars.” Stan Goff explores the role of the US dollar as the standard reserve currency in the context of capitalism’s intrinsic need to expand and the global peak in oil production.
Scores of Iraqi oil workers have been killed or maimed since last year’s invasion after they defied death threats and remained in their posts, Oil Minister Thamir al-Ghadhban says.
Oil depletion is not a future event that we can ignore. It is real. It is upon us. The economic and cultural destiny of mankind is inexorably tied to the availability of oil.
Iraq has issued an open invitation to the world’s largest oil companies to exploit its vast reserves.
If someone sitting in air-conditioned comfort in one part of the world believes that what happens in Iraq or Nigeria, Venezuela or Colombia doesn’t affect him or her, Sonia Shah’s Crude: The Story of Oil takes that little daydream and shakes it up.
Asian giants and economic rivals India and China are locked in battle to secure stakes in oil fields and blocks in the new energy haven of West Africa, officials and analysts here say.
Not only does the Iraqi government hand over their crude oil to US corporations, they now ban Iraqi farmers from saving their seeds. Transnational biotech corporations are given control over Iraqi seed banks.
