Peak Oil

Democracy Now: 'Has Global Oil Production Reached Maximum Capacity? A Debate on Peak OilWith the price of oil soaring to record highs and oil companies reporting record profits, many are asking whether the world has reached peak oil production. Peak oil occurs when half of all existing oil has been pulled from the ground. Some experts believe we are at peak now while others disagree. We host a debate on the issue with Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute and Michael Lynch of the Strategic Energy & Economic Research. [includes rush transcript]
As the price of oil soars to record highs and oil companies report record profits, today we look at some reasons why this may be occurring. Last Friday, oil prices rose to over $75 a barrel with consumers paying an average of $2.91 a gallon - 68 cents higher than a year ago. Yesterday, Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, reported the fifth highest quarterly profit for any public company in history. In January, Exxon posted profits of almost $11 billon, which was the highest quarterly profits of any company ever. Exxon now holds the first, second, fourth and fifth spots of highest quarterly earnings of any company. And Dutch Shell, another oil company, holds the third spot. With the mid-elections looming in November, Congress and President Bush are scrambling over what to do about the public's increasing concern over the rising oil prices and corporate profits. Yesterday, the President and some Republicans called for eliminating the $2 billion dollars in tax breaks that Congress passed as part of the energy bill last August. Some Democrats have called for a repeal of oil and gas tax breaks worth more than $10 billion dollars over the next five years. Earlier this week, Bush stated some of his ideas to address the problem. A conference is being held in New York City this week examining an issue that is getting increasing attention. The Peak Oil Conference, sponsored by Local Energy Solutions and the Five Borough Institute is bringing together experts in energy, agriculture, economics and geology to address what they say is partly the cause of high oil prices. Peak oil occurs when half of all existing oil has been pulled from the ground. Therefore oil becomes more expensive and the economy goes into recession. Some experts believe we are at peak now while others disagree. Today, we host a debate on the issue of peak oil:
Julian Darley, founder and director of the Post Carbon Institute and Global Public Media. He is also author of "High Noon for Natural Gas: the New Energy Crisis" and co-author of the forthcoming book "Relocalize Now! Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil." Michael Lynch, President of Strategic Energy & Economic Research. Previously, Michael was Director of Asian Energy and Security, at the Center for International Studies, M.I.T., as well as a Lecturer in the Diplomatic Training Program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.' Luister en lees verder: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/28/1439240

Iran 44

De bezetenheid van de Westerse wereld ten opzichte van Iran is opmerkelijk, vooral wanneer die afgezet wordt tegen de gelatenheid en zelfs openlijke steun van het Westen aan Israel. Iran heeft een nucleair programma, Israel bezit nucleaire wapens. Iran heeft nooit met nucleaire wapens gedreigd, Israel wel. En toch worden tegen Israel geen stappen ondernomen, tegen Iran wel. Dat mag voor het Westen redelijk lijken, maar niet voor de rest van de wereld, en zeker niet de islamitische wereld. De Washington Post bericht: 'Report Sets Stage For Action on Iran.
U.N. Nuclear Agency Provides Evidence Needed to Open Security Council Debate. PARIS, April 28 -- In a sharply worded report, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Friday that Iran is accelerating its uranium enrichment efforts and hiding crucial information about its nuclear program. The report opens the way for the U.N. Security Council to debate potential actions against Iran. The Vienna-based U.N. nuclear monitoring agency said serious gaps in the information provided by Iran made it impossible "to provide assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear materials and activities" or to assess the role of the Iranian military in the nuclear work.The eight-page report provided official evidence that the United States, Britain and France have sought to launch a push for possible sanctions against Iran. But Russia and China, also permanent members of the Security Council, have repeatedly expressed skepticism with that approach. President Bush said after the report's release that "the world is united and concerned" about Iran's "desire to have not only a nuclear weapon but the capacity to make a nuclear weapon or the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon. Lees verder: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042800321.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

Hijacking Catastrophe

'Hijacking Catastrophe' is de naam van een documentaire die buitengewoon de moeite waard is om te zien. U kunt die documentaire nu via Information Clearing House bekijken. Karen Kwiatkowski, luitenant-kolonel buiten dienst van de Amerikaanse luchtmacht, schrijft er het volgende over: 'Better than anyone to date, the Media Education Foundation has quietly and accurately documented the most important history of 21st century thus far in their recent video and DVD release, Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear, and the Selling of American Empire. Hijacking Catastrophe is powerful, understated, straightforward and educational. In a single meticulously organized hour of evidence and analysis, viewers are treated to a thoughtful explanation of modern American empire, neo-conservatism as a driving force for the current Bush administration, and something I have not seen before, a real economic analysis of what is driving some of our current "global war on terror."
The film examines the Bush Administration’s investment in neo-conservatism, and the early, and already horrific, results. While past performance is no guarantee of future earnings, Hijacking Catastrophe shows exactly why America’s "new conservatism" is a pyramid scheme of inhumane proportions. The film examines eight aspects of the current situation of American foreign policy. The film provides an explanation for the obvious continuity between Cold War policies and those of the present. It examines long-term neoconservative thinking and how this peculiar version of Jacobin utopianism ascended from its rather inauspicious political roots. The film explores the dangerous territory of how the post 9-11 national shock was carefully cultivated by neoconservatives in Washington to support their own long-held objectives in the Middle East. Hijacking Catastrophe then documents the Pentagon and White House process of disinformation, exaggeration, and media-supported propaganda between 9-11 and America’s March 2003 invasion of Iraq. It describes the neoconservative vision of military dominance over a supine, energy-rich Middle East, not only for its own sake, but as a warning to other potential international rivals. Hijacking Catastrophe describes the cost of empire in a way so comprehensive that it becomes clear that neo-conservatism, as a foreign policy guide, comes with a very real moral, political and financial garnishment of every American, and of American children yet unborn. The cost is shown not only as a current financial outlay or in lives unlived on the part of soldiers and marines, but in terms of an alarming debt burden, loss of domestic freedom, the growing and invasive state, a permanent tattering of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.' Zie: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article6895.htm

Iran 43

Zbigniew Brzezinski was de nationale veilgheids adviseur van president Carter van 1977 tot 1981. In de Los Angeles Times schrijft hij: 'Talk of a U.S. strike on Iran is eerily reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq war. IRAN'S ANNOUNCEMENT that it has enriched a minute amount of uranium has unleashed urgent calls for a preventive U.S. airstrike from the same sources that earlier urged war on Iraq. If there is another terrorist attack in the United States, you can bet your bottom dollar that there also will be immediate charges that Iran was responsible in order to generate public hysteria in favor of military action. But there are four compelling reasons against a preventive air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities: first, in the absence of an imminent threat (and the Iranians are at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war. If undertaken without a formal congressional declaration of war, an attack would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the president. Similarly, if undertaken without the sanction of the United Nations Security Council, either alone by the United States or in complicity with Israel, it would stamp the perpetrator(s) as an international outlaw(s). Second, likely Iranian reactions would significantly compound ongoing U.S. difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps precipitate new violence by Hezbollah in Lebanon and possibly elsewhere, and in all probability bog down the United States in regional violence for a decade or more. Iran is a country of about 70 million people, and a conflict with it would make the misadventure in Iraq look trivial. Third, oil prices would climb steeply, especially if the Iranians were to cut their production or seek to disrupt the flow of oil from the nearby Saudi oil fields. The world economy would be severely affected, and the United States would be blamed for it. Note that oil prices have already shot above $70 per barrel, in part because of fears of a U.S.-Iran clash. Finally, the United States, in the wake of the attack, would become an even more likely target of terrorism while reinforcing global suspicions that U.S. support for Israel is in itself a major cause of the rise of Islamic terrorism. The United States would become more isolated and thus more vulnerable while prospects for an eventual regional accommodation between Israel and its neighbors would be ever more remote. In short, an attack on Iran would be an act of political folly, setting in motion a progressive upheaval in world affairs. With the U.S. increasingly the object of widespread hostility, the era of American preponderance could even come to a premature end. Although the United States is clearly dominant in the world at the moment, it has neither the power nor the domestic inclination to impose and then to sustain its will in the face of protracted and costly resistance. That certainly is the lesson taught by its experiences in Vietnam and Iraq. Even if the United States is not planning an imminent military strike on Iran, persistent hints by official spokesmen that "the military option is on the table" impede the kind of negotiations that could make that option unnecessary. Such threats are likely to unite Iranian nationalists and Shiite fundamentalists because most Iranians are proud of their nuclear program.' Lees verder: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-brzezinski23apr23,0,3700317.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Nederland en Afghanistan 63

John Quincy Adams was de zesde president van de Verenigde Staten. In 1821 formuleerde hij de uitgangspunten van de Amerikaanse politiek. Hij wees erop dat de VS 'goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... [America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.' Lees verder: http://www.fff.org/freedom/1001e.asp Bijna twee eeuwen later doet en is de VS precies waarvoor Adams waarschuwde. De vraag is waarom het Nederlandse kabinet dit steunt. Waarom zitten Nederlandse militairen in Afghanistan? Wat denkt men daar te doen? Monsters bestrijden? En een nog fundamentelere vraag: staat het voortbestaan van de Nederlandse natie op het spel als we geen militairen naar Afghanistan sturen? En als dat niet het geval is, waarom besteedt het Nederlands kabintet dan honderden miljoenen euro's om militair aanwezig te zijn in Afghanistan? Een leger is om een land te verdedigen, niet om ergens ter wereld een copie van onze parlementaire democratie te vestigen die de meerderheid van de mensen daar zelf niet willen. Waarom is daarover geen publiek debat? Gezien het toenemende gevaar van aanslagen is de vraag ook waarom dit onderwerp beperkt blijft tot een politieke koehandel tussen de elites in Den Haag?

Amerikaanse Nucleaire Wapens

De Amerikaanse auteur Benjamin Phelan schrijft in Harper's Magazine: 'Debunking the nuclear "bunker buster." According to Defense Department estimates, there are perhaps 10,000 underground military installations in the world. Most, no doubt, are crude ammo dumps, but some are literally subterranean fortresses. The most dazzling is the complex beneath Russia's Yamantau Mountain, begun under Brezhnev but completed only recently; tunneled sideways into the Urals southeast of Moscow, the complex sits below thousands of feet of quartz, insulated from an American ICBM attack. China, too, has an extensive system of underground bunkers and command shelters, including hundreds of fortified missile silos, complete with living quarters, that are scattered throughout its 3.7 million square miles. In North Korea the reliance on tunnels and bunkers is even more obsessive. Underground weapons factories there are believed to employ as many as 20,000 workers; the nation has tunneled under the DMZ and into South Korea, has dug in upward of 10,000 pieces of artillery along the border, and even has built underground airstrips. Iran possesses an underground uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz that can be expanded or altered in secrecy. Libya's vast chemical-weapons plant at Tarhunah, though now apparently in disuse, is still standing, still underground, and could be quietly reopened by a lapsed Qaddafi. Without satellite surveillance showing its construction and burial, the world might still be ignorant of Syria's As-Safirah chemical-weapons factory. These installations, and countless others unknown around the world, constitute the last class of targets that America's current arsenal cannot credibly threaten with swift annihilation. Since the Cold War, the U.S defense community has become obsessed with the problem of bunkers and how to destroy them. The solution put forward has, of course, been expensive new weaponry. Soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration made a push for new nuclear programs, the most conspicuous of which was the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), designed to destroy deeply buried bunkers. During the first presidential debate this fall, John Kerry made much of his opposition to the program. "Right now the President is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons," he said. "We're telling other people, ÔYou can't have nuclear weapons,' but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using. Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down, and we're going to make it clear to the world we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation." But Kerry's gesture, while well intentioned, was largely empty. The United States already has a nuclear bunker-buster, the B61-11, which was tested during the first Bush Administration and deployed in 1997 under Bill Clinton. In the eyes of potential adversaries, the B61-11 is inherently a weapon that, in Kerry's phrase, "we might even contemplate using": alone in our vast nuclear arsenal, the B61-11 is tailored not to deter a full-on attack by a large nuclear competitor but to preemptively strike a smaller state. If, as Kerry rightly argues, the RNEP is a provocation to non-nuclear states in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, it is hardly more so than the bunker buster we already possess.
Were the effectiveness of bunker busters to be demonstrated, the weapons might conceivably be worth the risk and expense. But in fact, even a cursory consideration of the science shows that bunker-busting nuclear weapons are a wasteful and dangerous delusion.' Lees verder:
http://www.harpers.org/BuriedTruths.html Of: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042006O.shtml

Verarmd Uranium 2

Information Clearing House bericht: 'GIs, Beware Radioactive Showers! Bush’s impending, insane nuclear attack on Iran has provoked an unprecedented rebellion within the top leadership of the United States military. At the same time, depleted uranium (DU) is steadily taking down our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s time for the soldiers to follow the lead of their commanders in order to end the war. Was Army Sgt. Michael Lee Tosto the first American victim of the Bush administration’s March 2003 “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq? The 24-year-old North Carolina tank operator died “mysteriously” in Baghdad on June 17, 2003. The Iraqi capital was saturated with radioactive dust from the initial explosions of 1,500 American bombs and missiles, many of them made from solid depleted uranium. After the saturation bombing, the city was the scene of street battles with M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, A-10 Warthog attack jets and Apache helicopters firing DU munitions. The army told Sgt. Tosto’s family that he died from pulmonary edema and pericardial effusion, or cardiac failure, after showing flu-like symptoms. Young Michael Tosto believed George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. He believed he had been deployed to Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein from nuking the United States. Michael died before we all learned that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are nuking the world. Michael Tosto died, young and innocent, when they nuked him.
After Michael’s funeral, a fellow soldier contacted Michael’s wife Stephanie and told her that his buddy started coughing up blood and his lips turned blue and was dead within 48 hours after the first symptoms. According to Tom Flocco, upon whose story this account is based, “. . . the Tostos say their GI was in excellent health — in his prime of life. And Stephanie Tosto told United Press International, ‘When my husband died, the casualty officer asked me, “Is it possible that Michael had heart problems?” Michael did not have heart problems. One other time they asked me if he had asthma. He was never sick.’ ” Inhaling depleted uranium causes pulmonary edema. Symptoms include bleeding lungs, bronchial pneumonia and vomited blood. Pericardial effusion is a common cause of death among leukemia patients. Michael’s mother, Janet Tosto, reported that military officials told her that her son Michael’s military autopsy exhibited elevated levels of white blood cells. Exposure to depleted uranium can cause lymphocytic leukemia. Tom Flocco consulted Dr. Garth Nicolson of the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach, California who said, “Just one microscopic particle — let alone thousands — trapped in a soldier’s pulmonary system for one year can result in 272 times the annual whole body radiation dose permitted U.S. radiation workers.” Lees verder:
http://www.notinkansas.us/ Of: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12861.htm