What they don't want you to know about the coming oil crisis

Jan 20, 2006 -- Almost everywhere geologists have looked - which
means everywhere by now, at least at some level of exploration -
there is no oil because one or more of the key geological
requirements is missing, (for example source rock) . Only one well
drilled in every 10 finds oil. Only one in a hundred finds an
important oilfield. And the more wells that are drilled in a
province or country, the smaller the oilfields generally tend to
become.

"We've looked around the world many times. I'd say there is no North
Sea out there. There certainly isn't a Saudi Arabia."

In February 2005, Matthew Simmons speculated that the Saudis may
have damaged their giant oilfields by over-producing them in the
past: a geological phenomenon known as "rate sensitivity". In
oilfields where the oil is pumped too hard, the structure of the oil
reservoir can be impaired. In bad cases, most of a field's oil can
be left stranded below ground, essentially unextractable. "If Saudi
Arabia has damaged its fields, accidentally or not," Simmons
said, "then we may already have passed peak oil."

Chris Skrebowski believes that, from as early as 2007, the volumes
of new oil production are likely to fall short of the combined need
to replace lost capacity from depleting older fields and to satisfy
continued growth in demand. In fact, given the time frames with
which offshore oilfields are developed and depleted, it seems
certain that there will be nowhere near enough oil to meet the
combined forces of depletion and demand between 2008 and 2012. If
there were, it would be from projects we would know about today (oil
companies liking as they do to boast to their shareholders about
every sizeable discovery). Given the inevitable time-lag from
discovery to production, there is now no way to plug that gap.

There is worse: people in the oil industry must know this. They
should be alerting governments and consumers to the inevitability of
an energy crunch, and they aren't.

"The perception of looming decline may be worse than the decline
itself," Campbell said. "There will be panic. The market overreacts
to even small imbalances. Prices are set to soar in the absence of
spare capacity until demand is cut by recessions. We will enter a
volatile epoch of price shocks and recessions in increasingly
vicious circles. A stock-market crash is inevitable."

"If the economic recovery continues," Skrebowski added, "supply
will get very tight from 2008 or 2009. Prices will soar. There is
very little time and lots of heads are in the sand."

Oil in the Caspian (an oil field maybe the size of North Sea) is
central to every scenario that envisages oil supply meeting demand
off into the 2020s. The oil industry has long regarded the Baku-
Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey . Turkey has had 17 major
shocks in the past 80 years, and the pipeline is supposed to last
for 40 years.

As for competition over diminishing supplies: The Pentagon
established a Central Command in 1983, one of five unified commands
around the world, with the clear task of protecting the global flow
of petroleum. "Slowly but surely," Michael Klare concludes, "the US
military is being converted into a global oil-protection service."

Beyond the Middle East Five, the Bush strategy of supplier
diversification will look to eight main sources, which Klare calls
the Alternative Eight: Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Russia,
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria and Angola. These countries and
their oil operations are characterised by one or more of the
following attributes: corruption, organised crime, civil war,
political turmoil short of civil war, and ruthless dictators. The US
military is being forced into deeper relationships with such
regimes, including joint military exercises.

The bottom line for Klare is this. "Any eruption of ethnic or
political violence in these areas could do more than entrap our
forces there. It could lead to a deadly confrontation between the
world's military powers." Because obviously, in a world as
enduringly addicted to oil as ours is, others are going to be
looking for their own supplies. Russia and China will be among them.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article339928.ece

Adapted from Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy
Crisis, by Jeremy Leggett, published by Portobello Books.

-----------

(In addition:) emerging shortages of several major industrial
commodities including cement, steel, and (perhaps most importantly)
copper – the essential ingredient of electrical transmission lines.
Then there is the problem of compound growth or the fact that at
current growth rates within two decades (2026) there will be as many
internal combustion powered vehicles in China as there are on the
entire planet today (with very relaxed emission control standards).
Cal Tech Vice Chancellor David Goodstein in 2003 that it takes 30
years to replace an energy infrastructure even if a solution is
found.

Michael Ruppert

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/012306_world_stories.shtml#
1

New Study Raises Questions About Sustainability Of Metal Resources

Researchers studying supplies of copper, zinc and other metals have
determined that these finite resources, even if recycled, may not
meet the needs of the global population forever. According to the
study, if all nations were to use the same services enjoyed in
developed nations, even the full extraction of metals from the
Earth's crust and extensive recycling programs may not meet future
demand.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060123122555.htm

Iran's Bourse, the Dollar and "Pre-emptive" War
We all know (hopefully) from reading Dr. Gordon Prather 3 times a
week here at Antiwar.com and World Net Daily (and even from rags
like the Washington Post) that if the government of Iran began to
enrich uranium for nuclear bomb making purposes right now, it would
take them 10 years to make one simple gun-type nuke (Prather's term)
(and nevermind the delivery system). In other words, all the hype
about some imminent nuclear danger is a pack of lies.

Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., the great witness to the Office of Special
Plans, has said repeatedly that she believes one of the principal
reasons for the invasion of Iraq was that in the year 2000 Saddam
Hussein had begun demanding Euros instead of dollars as payment
for "his" oil.

Now there is this incredible article by Krassimir Petrov, Ph.D.,
along the lines of Dr. Prather's piece this weekend speculating that
the reason the neocons and the Israeli government keep asserting
Iran will have nukes and require bombing by March is because they
are about to open a new oil and gas exchange - the Iranian Bourse,
and will be demanding payment in Euros.

This is bad news for the US dollar because the Saudis et al. demand
dollars for their oil and the powers of the Earth must therefore
hold large amounts of US currency. Iran, a state run by people who
for some reason aren't happy with us, plan to demand Euros in their
new exchange. That could lead to the government banks of the world
to diversify their holdings and a flooding of the US with our
government's paper money that has been held in those foreign
accounts. Then comes inflation - bad inflation.

The War Party may have decided that the time is now for pushing the
nuke program lie and striking while the getting's good.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P2608

http://www.countercurrents.org/us-petrov200106.htm

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Suitable for Framing?

By Peter Teague, AlterNet. Posted January 26, 2006.

True reframing means letting go of the thinking behind the multimillion-dollar institutions on which many of us depend for a living.

It's a funny thing about the term "framing:" The more it gets used, the less we seem to understand what it means. Three years after George Lakoff emerged from academia to help make framing a household word among progressive activists, most of us are now thoroughly confused about what a frame is, or how to distinguish a frame from a slogan, message or spin. Consider this recent teaser for AlterNet's new blog, Echo Chamber:

Some current frames: The president broke the law by authorizing spying; this Republican Congress is the most corrupt in history; Alito is an extremist judge who will set the country back decades and can still be defeated. Are these frames working? Are they the right message? Stay tuned to the Echo Chamber to find out.

More accurate questions would have been: Are these frames? Are they messages? Is there a difference?

What we learned from Lakoff early on is that framing begins at a deep conceptual level. It is really about how we understand the world and our place in it; how we define problems and solutions; how we organize ourselves to achieve our goals; and how we talk about all of it.

Despite attempts to fight the tide, framing has come to mean finding better words and images to communicate with various audiences (the president broke the law by authorizing spying). The problem (and I think it's serious), is that we're proposing "frames" that are actually messages within frames, that evoke frames of which we remain oblivious. In the name of fixing a problem (we don't have a clue what the frames are in which we're operating) we're actually perpetuating it.

I think getting this right matters, because what framing really points us to is a deep rethink that forces us to challenge our assumptions and identities and that will require a reorganization of many of our efforts. It is not sloganeering, messaging or spinning, all of which leave our assumptions, identities and institutions comfortably in place.

Genuine re-framing is the hard work that progressives will have to do if we are to have any hope of offering a serious challenge to right-wing domination of American politics. It is the work that must precede message framing: Message framing without deep conceptual reframes is like hanging pictures in a house in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward right now. Without exposing the mold and the rot, taking things down to the foundations where necessary, and then framing new walls, windows and doors, we're not going to build a home that will last.

What will this hard work involve? For starters we'll need to identify and then question some of our underlying core assumptions. A prime example: The assumption that we can build an effective counterweight to conservative and corporate hegemony from the conglomeration of several different issue or identity-based "movements."

We now have decades of experience with this theory -- that if each issue movement does a good job, then it will all come together in some bright tomorrow. But despite the massive growth of progressive "civil society," we're no closer to the birth of a genuine movement than we were 25 years ago. Only by exposing the fallacy will we be free to think differently, to focus on articulating our goals in terms of shared American values, to be explicit about building a majoritarian movement.

There has never been any illusion that any of the academic theorizing about framing made sense without organizations and leaders who could do the real work of reframing. But this gets very tough, because if we do this right, it has to mean challenging basic assumptions about what the problems and solutions are, and this may in turn demand radical rethinking of our organizations and alliances.

For example, we might be less sanguine about leaving the issue of global warming to the environmental experts if, instead of understanding it in terms of too much carbon in the atmosphere, we thought about it in terms of solutions, including:

• The potential for a transition to a clean energy economy.
  
• The creation of millions of high-skill, high-wage jobs.
  
• Taking responsibility for our common future.
  
• Developing and sharing new technologies with the developing world.
  
• The transformative effects of energy democracy versus energy domination.

To suggest a genuine reframe inevitably means we'd actually have to think about letting go, not just of identities, but also the thinking behind multimillion-dollar institutions on which many of us depend for a living. This is why I think most of the mainstream reframing efforts now under way will stop well short of what's needed. The framing experts have proven unwilling or unable to lay out the unvarnished truth about what's at stake, and even if they did, our large institutional leaders won't, and probably can't, make the kind of changes necessary; they may have too much invested in the status quo to be the change we want to see in the world.

This will leave the real work to those on the margins, where change usually takes place. And this is exactly where it's happening. For example, the best of the metro advocacy and organizing groups are challenging the narrow confines of traditional issue categories. They are working on the things that are of primary concern to their communities and developing broader visions of what those communities can be. They're bringing labor, community and faith groups together and linking up to build real power in some of the largest states. These organizations don't need framing experts to urge them to let go and move on. They're operating in new and effective ways without needing to do a lot of explaining (other than to funders, who remain a problem); it just makes sense.

While the mainstream groups and their consultants seek to contrast "conventional frames" and "new frames" within each traditional issue category, the best of the new work turns the tables: Forget the categories, focus on cross-cutting solutions that appeal to broad audiences, and then begin to build a bigger movement by bringing together folks who are open to busting out. This is genuine reframing, in my understanding, as opposed to setting out new policy proposals or messages within the existing categories.

This all points to the possibility of a new movement that will manage the alchemy that has eluded us for so long: to be greater than the sum of our parts. We can't underestimate the magnitude or the challenges involved in what we're trying to accomplish. And I'm convinced that we make it infinitely more difficult if we fail, at the outset, to challenge our assumptions, beliefs and identities. Only then will we be able to build a new politics in which environmental, social and economic justice activists, business people, civil rights organizers, health care reformers, children's advocates, labor unionists, peace campaigners, veterans and all the rest of us will find a home.

This is what framing really needs to be about for progressives: bringing these elements and elements we haven't even imagined yet into a new movement that includes us and transcends us.

Peter Teague is a program officer at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. The nonprofit Independent Media Institute, AlterNet's institutional parent, receives funding from the Foundation.

FIRST WINTER OLYMPICS:

With the Winter Olympics coming up I thought that this bit of historical background was appropriate.........Enjoy the games.................PEACE................Scott

January 25, 1924

On January 25, 1924, the first Winter Olympics take off in style at Chamonix in
the French Alps. Spectators were thrilled by the ski jump and bobsled as well as
12 other events involving a total of six sports. The "International Winter
Sports Week," as it was known, was a great success, and in 1928 the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) officially designated the Winter Games,
staged in St. Moritz, Switzerland, as the second Winter Olympics.Five years
after the birth of the modern Olympics in 1896, the first organized
international competition involving winter sports was staged in Sweden. Called
the Nordic Games, only Scandinavian countries competed. Like the Olympics, it
was staged thereon every four years but always in Sweden. In 1908, figure
skating made its way into the Summer Olympics in London, though it was not
actually held until October, some three months after the other events were
over.In 1911, the IOC proposed the staging of a separate winter competition for
the 1912 Stockholm Games, but Sweden, wanting to protect the popularity of the
Nordic Games, declined. Germany planned a Winter Olympics to precede the 1916
Berlin Summer Games, but World War I forced the cancellation of both. At the
1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, ice hockey joined figure skating as an
official Olympic event, and Canada took home the first of many hockey gold
medals. Soon after, an agreement was reached with Scandinavians to stage the
IOC-sanctioned International Winter Sports Week. It was so popular among the 16
participating nations that, in 1925, the IOC formally created the Winter
Olympics, retroactively making Chamonix the first.In Chamonix, Scandinavians
dominated the speed rinks and slopes, and Norway won the unofficial team
competition with 17 medals. The United States came in third, winning its only
gold medal with Charles Jewtraw's victory in the 500-meter speed-skating event.
Canada won another hockey gold, scoring 110 goals and allowing just three goals
in five games. Of the nearly 300 athletes, only 13 were women, and they only
competed in the figure-skating events. Austrian Helene Engelmann won the pairs
competition with Alfred Berger, and Austrian Herma Planck Szabo won the women's
singles. The Olympics offered a particular boost to skiing, a sport that would
make enormous strides within the next decade. At Chamonix, Norway won all but
one of the nine skiing medals.