Workers of the World ... at its Peak ... for whom does the oil bell toll?

Author: Franz J.T. Lee

First paragraph (Teaser):

Over the last decades ... from the point of view of the USA ... caught in corporate political and economic fraud and policies that totally ruin capitalism and imperialism themselves, Alan Greenspan regularly has "informed" us about the state of "health" of the world economy. His speeches are excellent examples of bourgeois, capitalist, diplomatic ideology, of not saying this, of not saying that ... so that nobody could say, that he had said so or so.

Rest of the text:

As such he curries favor with the republican devil and the democratic, deep, blue sea, with Wall Street, with the Bush-Junta.

In spite of the fact that highly respected oil industry experts such as the banker Matt Simmons (of Simmons and Co.), who served on president George W. Bush's Energy Advisory Committee between 2001 and 2004, and the Washington based energy consulting firm PFC Energy, all talk about "Peak Oil," Greenspan never tells us what precisely it is all about; and for the coming decade, what are its immediate consequences and devastating impact for billions of already pauperized, obsolete, manual laborers around the globe.

Furthermore, the application of the United Nations' "occult," strategic plans for the "reduction of world poverty" and the launching of the United States' "Project for a New American Century," including its European and Asian variants, is being hidden from us by the international mass media ... which does not "inform" us ... at what human cost the global power elites intend to postpone the current imminent world energetic Armageddon for a little while, hence giving themselves, as imperialist ruling classes and corporate bosses, as well as the fractional intellectual laboring class, a new lease of life.

In fact, we are finding ourselves, if not in, then definitely at the brink of, a genocidal world war, that is already threatening to throw powerful atomic bombs on North American and Eurasian cities.

For the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and Latin America, for permanent, world socialist creation, concerning the above, in one of my latest commentaries, I have underlined the emancipatory necessity of precise, scientific knowledge and of incisive, philosophic orientation in the launching of immediate social-revolutionary projects, and the successful launching of future, national, medium range, socio-economic plans and also of long-range, international energetic policies.

See: http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=42622

The oil industry expert, Jan Lundberg, introduces Peak Oil as follows: "The end of abundant, affordable oil is in sight, and the implications are colossal. About now in our hydrocarbon phase of human history, we have pulled out of the Earth approximately half of the available petroleum (crude oil and natural gas). The other half still in the ground is harder to extract and may not -- as assumed -- fuel the global economy or even provide a transition to another phase…"
(For all quotes below, see; articles published by: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ )

Concerning the parliamentary discussion of the Australian "Petroleum and Other Legislation Amendment Bill," congressman Andrew McNamara, in his excellent presentation about peak oil and gas, explains to us in a simple and understandable manner the apocalyptic essence of "Peak Oil." He warns: "Peak oil represents the most serious and immediate challenge to our prosperity and security. It will impact on our lives more certainly than terrorism, global warming, nuclear war or bird flu. While it may not be a term with which members are familiar now, I predict it will come to dominate debate in this place over the next 10 years."

Now, concerning the term itself, he explains: "The concept of peak oil was identified in 1956 by the late US oil industry and government geologist M. King Hubbert. Dr. Hubbert suggested that the rise and fall of oil production in a nation, or indeed the world, would follow a pattern for individual wells; that is, rising sharply from when oil under pressure in the ground is first spiked, increasing as more wells are sunk, plateauing when half the oil has been extracted and tapering away as the remaining recoverable oil is pumped out."

This is known as the "Hubbert curve." Hence, having reached the "halfway peak", the trouble really starts: "all oil flows decrease as the pressure in the oil basin declines. The cost of recovering the oil rises exponentially from this point as it has to be extracted with greater degrees of technical difficulty, such as flooding the reservoir with water to float residual oil into a recoverable position."

In spite of the difficulty to acquire precise data, especially with reference to oil reserves, already the US energy administration itself has admitted that its production of oil peaked in 1971; and that probably the production of all oil producing nations outside the Middle East peaked in 1997.

The following indicates how difficult it is to find exact data about oil reserves and future production.

On February 5, 2005, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group was forced to admit that the figure in its 2002 published estimate of its total oil and gas holdings was incorrect. It was totally over-estimated, and the Group had to admit that two-thirds of its listed prospective wells in 2004, turned out to be dry holes in 2005. The Group was fined $US 151.5 million for cheating the international stock markets. Similarly, the estimates of the OPEC oil producing countries change permanently.

As quoted by the above author, according to an article published in the "Scientific American" of March 1998, by Dr. Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere "...one fact is indisputable: when the Middle East peaks between 2006 and 2020 the world will have passed peak oil, and oil prices will commence to climb irreversibly until recoverable oil reserves are exhausted within 50 years."

Other sources, like the "Business Magazine" of November 7, 2004, inform us that a senior oil industry executive, Francis Harper of BP "expects global oil production to peak between 2010 and 2020."

The USA, with it's "mini-population" as compared to that of China, consumes a quarter of global oil energy, and the energetic demand of fast growing economies like China and India may soon surpass the consumption of the traditional metropolitan industrial countries. Real trouble is brewing on the military horizon.

Furthermore, global oil could peak at any moment, be it tomorrow or in 20 years; however, what does this mean for Venezuela, for the Bolivarian Revolution, in the light of the resuscitation by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of an OPEC that was in decomposition and that was converted by him into a revolutionary weapon against the militarization of Oil?

* Remember, that in the 1980s, six of the 11 OPEC countries had revised their oil reserve figures upwards, between 42 and 197 per cent, the scientific accuracy of which is pretty doubtable.

The exact predictability of peak oil gets complicated, taking into consideration the above. But given, that all big oil discoveries themselves peaked 40 years ago, the panorama for Venezuela and OPEC is not bright at all, never mind the upgrading of reserve figures.

Expressed in a different manner, for every four barrels that we consume today, we only discover one. And, as Fidel Castro indicated in an interview a while ago, it is much easier to discover an elephant on the horizon than an ant. All the current small findings, in Guyana or Surinam or elsewhere, in no way approximate the size of the long ago discovered giant oil findings, like the Ghawar fields in Saudi Arabia, that produce eight million barrels a day, and which have peaked already.

At the current level of global production, other fossil energy sources like coal, cannot effectively replace oil. The production processes to convert it into a substitute for oil would use more energy than they produce, hence, they would function as net energy losers. Also, as we know, apart from radiation and storage dangers, nuclear power produces the very same net energy loss problem. And liquefied natural gas is subject to the same Hubbert curve as oil. Including solar energy, and excluding electro-magnetic energy from the vacuum, all other energy sources combined and available to us cannot produce the current, necessary volume of energy we derive from oil.

What awaits us, McNamara portrays as follows: "For some alternative energy sources, such as ethanol, far more energy is expended in planting, fertilizing, growing, harvesting and processing than its end product renders. No other energy source can fly planes or drive heavy trucks and machinery. Further, most of the world's fertilizer is now made from natural gas, and most of the world's pesticide is made from oil. As fuel prices double and then double again in the years after the peak, we will be faced with some very hard choices in the fields of agriculture, food distribution and transport generally."

Concerning the above, like I mentioned in a previous VHeadline commentary, the "wretched of the earth" are in serious trouble, will have to pay the price to rescue the opulent parasites and megalomaniac blood-suckers of this world.

Once more "Les Miserables" are being threatened with murder by social order, as happened to them so many times before, like in the Transatlantic slave trade, like being used as cannon fodder in colonial and imperialist wars, like being extinguished by genocide and torture in concentration camps, perishing in the merciless atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the slaughter of a million "communists" in Indonesia, and being massacred nowadays in the Fallujahs of Iraq.

Michael Ruppert, and also Thomas Bearden, in a similar line of arguments I have expressed in previous commentaries, again warn us: "The political fact, however, is that global inertia in response to Peak has driven our species, all of it, past the point of no return. There is no changing course for us. We have committed to a path of bloody destruction that can no longer be postponed or evaded."

Concerning the "path of bloody destruction," Ruppert informs us further: "Battlefield intelligence is a different critter. It presupposes that there is nothing more important than the battle that has been joined at this moment. If the battle is not won, there are no future choices. Hence nothing matters other than the war that is being fought today. No Yaltas or Potsdams; no future deep cover moles will be needed."

"Every country in the world is betting everything it has on this one hand knowing that after 2007 or 2008 the game ends. The map of the future after that is unknowable and, to large extent, irrelevant. That's why Rumsfeld has won the battle to control American intelligence operations and why the new National Intelligence Director John Negroponte is getting the job."

Whether we believe it or not, countries like China are already preparing themselves for the coming collapse of the world economic market, as a result of Peak Oil: "China is experiencing massive shortages of coal to power its electrical generation." - multiple sources.

China is already buying and hoarding 60% of the world's commodities: (Oil, Cement, Aluminum, Copper, Zinc, Manganese, Steel, Coal, Gold, Silver, etc.). It has bought so much cement that it has caused a slowdown in US construction. Last year it bought 90% of the world's steel output and shipped it to China." - multiple sources.

Why?

According to Ruppert: "Because soon there won't be enough fuel for the globalized transport of such heavy things, nor, presumably, for their industrial exploitation. The world may also be at war shortly, further endangering international trade and transport."

Now, although many of us juggle around with concepts like "Children of God," maintaining that "we are all human beings" and that "we all belong to the human race" or "are all Christians," we do have to ask a serious, global, social class question:

Within the next decade, how will the global corporate Moguls and Mongrels solve the "energy crisis"?

* How did they solve all their crises, depressions, recessions and crashes across history?

* How many hundreds of millions did they sacrifice on the burning stake of Moloch?

Who is currently in serious, immediate danger of extinction by the billions, because they do not serve the global class interests of capitalism and imperialism anymore?