DrumBeat: October 5, 2008

(The Oil Drum) - Reactor shortage to sour India’s nuclear dream

In the 1980s, there were about 400 nuclear suppliers and 900 nuclear-certified companies in the US. These have shrunk to fewer than 80 suppliers and 200 certifications.

The euphoria of the nuclear deal will soon die down and it will be time to deliver on the promise to supply electricity. The crucial problem of supply of uranium is said to have been resolved, but little has been said about the shortage of critical components for building new nuclear reactors worldwide. The problem starts with the heart itself — the reactor.

READ MORE HERE

The Impact of the Credit Crunch on Energy Markets

(The Oil Drum - Discussions about Energy and Our Future) - The credit crunch is already having an impact on energy markets. New projects are harder to fund. Highly leveraged companies are sometimes finding it necessary to shed assets. Some players are finding themselves to be the indirect casualties of other players, like Lehman, that have already failed. Long term, we will probably see consolidation and lower production than would have been the case without the credit crunch. Of course, if there is a major recession, it is possible that we won’t need as high production.

In this post, I have tried to bring together some of the impacts of the credit crunch on the energy industry that are already being felt. If you are seeing other impacts, please make note of them in the comments.

One article seems to suggest that speculators are being driven away from the oil and gas industry, and that more care is being taken with counter-party risk:

READ MORE HERE

Van Jones: We Can’t Drill Our Way Out of Our Energy Problems

(AlterNet.org: Environment) - In an electrifying speech, Van Jones explains that we have to invent and invest our way out of the economic and environmental crises.

The following speech was given at Netroots Nation 2008 in Austin, Texas.

I have a little bit of whiplash. Thirty-six hours ago I was in the Arctic with Jimmy Carter. This is not a joke, you all. (Laughter) It sounds like a joke, right? You hear about the black guy in the Arctic with Jimmy Carter? No, I was really … (Laughter)

I was really in the Arctic, man, the abominable snow Negro. No, I was really there. (Laughter) And the reason, so I’m a little bit jet-lagged, but I want you to know, if you didn’t know, it was kind of kept quiet until it was over. But a number of people, huge dignitaries, all got on a boat and went to the Arctic. We spent eight days. Jimmy Carter was there. Madeline Albright. Tom Daschle. Larry Page from Google. But not just liberals and progressives; the head of DuPont was there, eight days on a boat, to look and see if what’s happening with climate change is real. The head of Monsanto was there. We had Republicans and Democrats, young people, old people, state leaders, Catholics, evangelicals.

And I want you to know that after eight days of looking with our own eyes of what’s going on, looking at the glaciers receding, looking at the animals and life up there that’s suffering, watching the actual results and impacts of global warming, that every single person who is a part of that delegation, Left, Right and otherwise, agreed that Al Gore has been right the whole time. Global warming is real.

We have to do something about it. Nobody who goes and spoke at this thing has come to any other conclusion. You need to understand that. This is our moment. This is our opportunity. Before I get to my comments, though, since we’re here, I want to tell you about my personal experience in the Arctic.

First of all, they had us on this boat, man. Lot of people have bad experiences of boats, man. You know, we’re … (Laughter) far back memories, man. I was like, I don’t like this. (Laughter) It was tough, man. And then, boats are not big things. They’re not airplanes. I guess it’s left over from the days of scurvy or something. They’re small. And, OK, I busted my head open, man. I’m serious. I busted my head open on a bulkhead, like the first day, which was not very impressive. (Laughter) So, a little bit woozy.

The other thing that happened was, we had a meeting. We had a delegation, this meeting of the delegation of polar bears. And they’re very polite, the polar bears. And they’re very friendly. The polar bears were not as skinny and scrawny as I expected. They were definitely smaller than they were supposed to be, but they also looked toned, looked pretty healthy.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: AlterNet.org: Environment,  Van Jones, Sep. 20, 2008 ]

Carpooling numbers on the rise

(DenverPost.com) - Someplace between Kipling Street and the Mousetrap, somewhere between the driver’s seat where Brian Scarborough sipped hazelnut coffee and the shotgun seat where Brian McCall slurped regular, at some mark on the radio dial between Rush Limbaugh and NPR, a commuting insurgency began.

The three people riding from Arvada to Greenwood Village in Scarborough’s BMW station wagon concluded they had become committed carpoolers, rather than random employees thrown together by $4 gas. One month into their experiment, and the three road warriors have gladly given up their American birthright to drive to the office alone.

“You find out it’s easy. You don’t have to give up too much freedom,” McCall said on a recent workday as the BMW sped past Belleview Avenue at 6:42 a.m. “I used to feel guilty as the only person in the car. If gas went down to $2 a gallon, I’d still carpool.”

READ MORE HERE [ Source: DenverPost.com, Michael Booth ]

Good news, bad news

(EnergyBulletin.net) - I starting reading the news, and following links, and reading a backlog of articles I've been meaning to read, and lo and behold, I noticed a pattern. Our society is changing. We rely so much on oil, that as the price skyrockets, we have no choice but to change. Are you noticing a shift?

read more [ Source: EnergyBulletin.net ]

Peak caviar

(EnergyBulletin.net) - Once, black caviar from the Caspian Sea was ubiquitous in Russia in its typical blue cans. Now, it has disappeared. "Peak Caviar" has taken place around 1980 in Russia. ... "Peak Caviar" is another confirmation of how common the "Hubbert" behavior is. It doesn't matter if a resource is theoretically renewable, as sturgeons and whales are. If sturgeons or whales are killed much faster than they can reproduce, then they behave as a non renewable resource; just as crude oil.

read more [ Source: EnergyBulletin.net ]

Per capita US military energy consumption

(EnergyBulletin.net) - We all know that energy consumption per capita in the U.S. is amongst the highest in the world. How much is the per capita consumption in the Department of Defense? 25 per cent more than the U.S. average.

read more [ Source: EnergyBulletin.net ]

Deep Green: peak oil changes everything

(Greenpeace UK) - Here’s the latest in the Deep Green column from Rex Weyler - author, journalist, ecologist and long-time Greenpeace trouble-maker. The opinions here are his own.

As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.

Oil is a fixed asset of the planet, representing stored sunlight accumulated over a billion years as early marine algae, and other marine organisms (not dinosaurs) captured solar energy, formed carbon bonds, gathered nutrients, died, sank to the ocean floors, and lay buried under eons of sediment. Like any fixed non-renewable resource, oil is limited, and its consumption will rise, peak, and decline.

World oil production increased for 150 years until the spring of 2005, when world crude oil production reached about 74.3 million barrels per day (mb/d), and total liquid fuels, including tar sands, liquefied gas, and biofuels reached about 85 mb/d. In spite of the efforts since, and tales of “trillions of barrels” of oil in undiscovered fields, liquid fuel production has remained at about 85.5 mb/d for three years, the longest sustained plateau in modern petroleum history. Discoveries of new fields peaked 40 years ago.

Meanwhile economies everywhere want to grow, so demand for oil soars worldwide. The gap between this surging demand and flat or declining production will drive price increases and shortages. That’s peak oil.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Greenpeace UK, Rex Weyler, August 4, 2008 ]

12 Tips for the sustainability shift

(The Huffington Post) - These days, most people sense that our world is off balance and that we are sliding steadily towards some dark abyss. It can be hard to keep a cheerful positive outlook when you consider just these three signs of trouble:

1. Recent record high oil prices may be just the beginning of never-ending price escalations as increasing demand for oil (China and India are growing at about 10% per year) collides with global oil production that has been pretty much flat for the past three years, and shows all the warning signs of impending decline (Peak Oil).

2. Even the best-case projections from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) indicate that escalating natural disasters exacerbated by global climate changes may be enough to bankrupt many nations over the course of the next few decades.

3. Roughly 90 percent of the large commercial fish (swordfish, marlin, tuna, shark, etc.) have disappeared from the oceans over the last fifty years and it is projected that current trends will result in the collapse of all commercial seafood species in the oceans by the year 2048.

I hate to break it to you, but simple steps, like changing your light bulbs and driving a hybrid car, though they are good steps in the right direction, will not be enough to save our world from collapse. If we consider “Plan A” to be business as usual, which is currently consuming, depleting, and poisoning the natural systems that maintain life on Earth, then we might call a sustainable alternative “Plan B”. It has been estimated that a viable Plan B could be implemented by diverting just 1/6th of the world’s current military expenditures to supporting and implementing the sweeping changes needed to shift our world’s course from collapse to sustainability. Are we that stupid, short sighted, or selfish that we can’t devote this much to saving our planet?

There is no single “right way” to implement Plan B, but the following list (an excerpt from Edition II of When Technology Fails) would go a long way towards insuring that we and our children will have a world worth living in:

1. Change the tax structure. Plan B will only succeed if we shift the tax structure to provide significant support for those materials, processes, industries and investments that contribute towards building a sustainable economy, while penalizing those industries and structures that stick to the “old way” of doing things, continuing to consume our dwindling resources and ecosystems in non-sustainable ways. Funds gained from fees and penalties can be used to pay for rebates and tax incentives that promote the rapid industrial retooling and changeover to energy and resource conserving processes, machines, automobiles, and so on. During World War II, in a matter of just 6 months, the entire US production of consumer automobiles was shut down and converted to production in support of the war effort. If we could do that, We Can Do This!

2. Rebuild our cities. Over one half the human population now lives in cities, and they consume more than one half of our energy and materials. By restructuring our cities for mass transportation, moving away from their current focus centered on the individual automobile, and retrofitting our buildings for energy efficiency and integrated distributed renewable energy power generation (our buildings could generate most or all the power they need using current technologies), we could reduce our cities’ fossil fuel consumption by a factor of 10:1 within the next decade or two.

3. Rebuild our railways, waterways, and mass transit systems: A world running short on oil must focus on efficiency rather than simple convenience. If we don’t act now, while our economy is still working reasonably well, how will most of us get around, or ship our goods, if gas goes to $10 or $20 dollars a gallon and we have not developed better alternatives to diesel trucks for long distance hauling and private gasoline powered automobiles for local transportation?

4. Rebuild our homes, office buildings and factories. Today’s showpiece energy efficient buildings often consume one-tenth the energy of the average building, and some buildings are net energy producers that actually generate more power than they consume. The current crash in the building market could be turned around with zero-interest loans and tax incentives to retrofit buildings for energy efficiency, providing badly needed jobs while cutting green house gas emissions and reducing oil imports and trade deficits. From a resource, energy, and materials point of view, it is far “greener” to retrofit existing buildings than to tear them down and start over.

5. Rebuild our industries. There must be domestic and international financial incentives to revitalize economies while saving energy and materials through junking old inefficient processes and machines and replacing them with state-of-the-art technologies. The Western world has benefited greatly from the use of natural resources gleaned from underdeveloped countries. It is time we repay this debt by sharing renewable and sustainable technologies with the developing world, doing our part to ensure that we leave behind a world that can feed and sustain our children. All of our efforts will be to no avail, if we take care of our own country while doing little to help replace the inefficient processes and industries of rapidly industrializing giants like India and China.

6. Fund and support renewable energy development. Focus on the rapid development of renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, and biofuels. Particular emphasis on wind power, which is already cost competitive with coal. When you level the playing field by eliminating subsidies, wind energy is already more cost effective than coal, nuclear, or oil for the generation of electricity. Develop biofuels from multiple sources (preferably other than corn, which produces just a little more energy than it takes to grow and process), including cellulosics and algae, to provide oil alternatives both in the transportation industries and as material feedstocks for industrial processes such as plastics.

7. Eliminate population growth. Reduce global population growth to the point where the population of our planet levels off, followed by a decline in world population. On a planet where the estimated long-term carrying capacity is on the order of 1 to 2 billion people, if we can’t control our own population growth, nature will do it for us. Most people would agree that it is much more humane to provide family planning education and birth control materials for all people on Earth than for the population to find its natural level through starvation, plagues, and wars.

8. Share the wealth. Develop binding multinational regulations and governing bodies to ensure that the world’s oceans and forests are harvested sustainably. Develop some form of resource equity-sharing program to reward third-world countries for conserving their resources, such as rainforests, topsoil, and sensitive ecosystems. We must revamp our economic systems which currently reward businesses that are causing great ecological harm, by allowing them to reap higher profits due to the fact that they are not charged for the harmful resource depletion and environmental degradation resulting from their business practices. Simply exporting our polluting heavy industries to the third world, where they are not as well controlled or monitored as in the west, makes the global sustainability problem even worse.

9. Reach out to developing countries. The developing countries of the world all want what the Western countries already have. They must not be left out of the equation. We have the potential to rapidly develop and deploy technologies to shift our economy from a carbon-intensive energy base to one based on renewables. By sharing this technology with the developing world, we can help to significantly improve their average standard of living while at the same time allowing them to leapfrog older coal and oil-based technologies, much as how the cell phone created the opportunity for most of the developing world to bypass line-based phone systems. If we miss this opportunity, our chances of avoiding catastrophic global climate changes, or economic and ecological collapse, are practically zero.

10. Replace coal-burning power plants. If we are to stand a chance for capping greenhouse gas emissions, current coal-burning power plant technology must be replaced. If a successful carbon dioxide sequestering technology proves feasible, we could continue to burn coal, but only when the new technology is in place.

11. Global relocalization: buy local. Economies are bound to relocalize as energy and transportation costs rise, making it once again both environmentally and economically beneficial to live, work, produce, grow, and buy locally. Buying local helps keep our dollars circulating locally in what is known as the “local multiplier effect.” When we buy foreign oil, produce, or material goods, these dollars often leave our country for good.

12. Make all decisions based on sustainability. All business decisions should be made while giving serious consideration as to whether that particular decision contributes toward sustainability or takes us farther from the goal of creating a sustainable world.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: The Huffington Post, Matthew Stein, July 30, 2008 ]

Russia takes control of Turkmen (world?) gas

(BuzzFlash.net) - From the details coming out of Ashgabat in Turkmenistan and Moscow over the weekend, it is apparent that the great game over Caspian energy has taken a dramatic turn. In the geopolitics of energy security, nothing like this has happened before. The United States has suffered a huge defeat in the race for Caspian gas. The question now is how much longer Washington could afford to keep Iran out of the energy market. Curiously, the agreements reached in Ashgabat on Friday are unlikely to enable Gazprom to make revenue from reselling Turkmen gas. Quite possibly, Gazprom may now have to concede similar terms to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two other major gas producing countries in Central Asia. In other words, plain money-making was not the motivation for Gazprom. The Kremlin has a grand strategy. Russia and China have a heavy agenda to discuss in energy cooperation far beyond the price of Turkmen gas supplies. But suffice it to say that Gazprom's new stature as the sole buyer of Turkmen gas strengthens Russia's hands in setting the price in the world gas (and oil) market. And that has implications for China. Moscow would be keen to ensure that Russian and Chinese interests are harmonized in Central Asia. Besides, Russia is taking a renewed interest in the idea of a "gas cartel". Medvedev referred to the idea during the visit of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Moscow last week. Note: Continuation in the comments section.

» original news

Study: Saudi oil exports may start falling in 2014

(PeakOil.com, Bloomberg) - Saudi Arabia’s oil exports may start to fall in 2014 after it reaches maximum production capacity of 12.5 million barrels a day and domestic consumption grows, Chatham House said in a report.

“Once production levels off at a plateau, exports will decline” as local demand rises, the London-based think tank said in report titled “Ending Dependence: Hard Choices for Oil- Exporting States.” Current Saudi output capacity is 11.3 million barrels a day, Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said June 30.

While production may hold steady for decades, the kingdom’s exports may fall as more oil is diverted to the local market. The Saudi economy absorbed 20 percent of the country’s oil output in 2006, Chatham House said, citing data from BP Plc’s Statistical Review and national statistics. The report didn’t estimate a figure for future demand. Local consumption rose 7 percent last year to 2.15 million barrels a day, BP data show.

To ensure the Saudi economy keeps growing, other sources of income will be needed to replace oil revenue, which may plateau by the middle of the next decade, according to the report’s authors John Mitchell from the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies and Dundee University Emeritus Professor Paul Stevens. Saudi Arabia, Iran and Nigeria will stop exporting oil by 2040, the researchers said.

Oil output from Iran, Kuwait and Nigeria, whose production capacity represents more than a quarter of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ total, will level off as soon as 2010, the report said. Oil exports may last longer if producing nations scrap domestic fuel subsidies to reduce energy use or adopt renewable energy.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: PeakOil.com, Bloomberg ]

Peak Oil - How Will You Ride the Slide?

Geopolitics - July 9

(EnergyBulletin.net) - India left hits out at government, The Iraqi Oil Ministry's new fave five, Iran to "hit Tel Aviv, U.S. ships" if attacked.

read more 

Matt Simmons (Bloomberg): Peak Oil Now, Oil Perhaps to $300

Video analysis from the Bloomberg Report discussing that the world has already reached Peak Oil. This was post in 2007.

 

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Bloomberg Report, YouTube.com ]

Oil hits high near $146, then eases _ but not much

NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices briefly soared to a new high near $146 a barrel Thursday, extending the previous day’s record-shattering rally before easing somewhat as the dollar gained ground against the euro.

Americans hitting the road for the July Fourth holiday were confronted with an unwelcome record of their own: The average retail price for regular gasoline jumped to within two-tenths of a penny of $4.10 a gallon, according to AAA, the Oil Prices Information Service and Wright Express.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: The Associated Press ]

Potential Iran-Israel conflict sends oil prices up

Oil prices climbed above $142 US a barrel Tuesday amid concerns about a potential conflict between Iran and Israel and a weakening U.S. dollar.

Also on Tuesday, the International Energy Agency downsized its estimate of how much oil will reach the market. The agency said supply and demand figures will be close through the next five years, despite lower overall estimated hunger for crude as the world adjusts to record prices and cuts its consumption.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: CBC.ca ]

Behind Skyrocketing Oil Prices

Last month came the news that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating potential manipulation of the oil trading market.

That’s a good thing, though the CFTC is not exactly the most aggressive regulator around. (Says Judy Dugan of Consumer Watchdog: “On its face, the investigation smacks of the fox investigating a hen shortage in the chicken coop.”)

Market manipulation may be contributing to the recent oil price spike — though even in the worst case, it is only part of the story. The most important factor is supply and demand: supply is having trouble keeping up with unabated demand growth.

Are Wall Street firms and hedge funds in fact manipulating the oil market? Perhaps. There are certainly enough conflicts of interest, and unregulation, to make such activity plausible. These aren’t exactly guys with an honorable track record.

Whether speculation is driving price up is a separate issue from manipulation. Investment dollars are pouring into oil futures, pretty clearly driving up price. This reflects supply and demand for oil futures as an investment tool, more than available supply and demand for actual crude oil. Some nontrivial portion of the recent run-up in price is almost certainly due to this speculative activity, which is fueled by leveraged buying (use of borrowed money).

READ MORE HERE

Oil prices a speculative bubble? Not so fast!

The breathtaking run-up in oil prices is linked to the crisis of world financial institutions. What the U.S. Government should not do.

The quadrillion dollar question is, of course, “Why the breathtaking run-up in the price of oil?”

U.S. congressional hearings on the subject and the potentially controversial decision of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to inspect and scrutinize the U.S. financial sector (blamed in part for the price explosion) reflect grave and growing worldwide concerns.

Oil remains on the front burner this summer.

Analyses and commentaries, virtually in the millions, keep contrasting “market fundamentals” with “speculation” (“real” with “financial” factors). It may be argued that this is a false dichotomy. Much of what is treated as “speculation” ought to be considered among “fundamentals” once we extend this category to include some harsh and unchangeable realities in international monetary and financial affairs.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

Peak Oil Review — June 30, 2008

While last week started quietly, Thursday and Friday turned into a frenzy, with prices surging from a low of $132 a barrel on Wednesday to touch a new high of $142.99 on Friday. The week closed with oil at $140.21, another new high closing price. The $10 a barrel increase was mostly due to financial developments—such as a weak dollar, a major drop in the equities markets, and a flight to the safety of commodities—rather than to oil industry news.

Industry news for the week was mixed. Shell started up its offshore platform that had been overrun by Nigerian militants, while Chevron in Nigeria declared force majeure due to a pipeline bombing last week. China seems to be producing more gasoline and diesel in response to the recent price increases. Iraq is on the way to a banner month producing 2.5 million b/d in comparison with the 1.5 million averaged in 2007 and Mexico’s Cantarell oil field continued its relentless decline.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

Imagining peak oil - June 30

As forecasters take that possibility more seriously, they describe fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend our free time.

The more expensive oil gets, the more Katherine Carver's life shrinks. She's given up RV trips. She stays home most weekends. She's scrapped her twice-a-month volunteer stint at a Malibu wildlife refuge -- the trek from her home in Palmdale just got too expensive.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

Nuclear & sequestration - June 30

(EnergyBulletin.net) - ITER costs give partners pause (fusion pricetag jumps), Nuclear cost estimates may put end to renaissance, Carbon sequestration: bury the idea, not the CO2

read more

BC activists call for no new approvals after visit to Alberta tar sands

Edmonton - A group of British Columbian activists who have just completed a three-day "learning tour" of the Alberta tar sands are calling for an end to new approvals for tar sands expansion at a press conference today.

READ MORE HERE

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: It Was Oil, All Along

Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus 5 million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the Earth itself.

READ MORE HERE

Rachel Maddow on Bush’s War for Oil

"If you don't want to be seen as a colonial power, you stop acting like one." Rachel Maddow says that the occupation of Iraq is all about the oil. permanent link: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/waroniraq/89746/

READ MORE HERE

Citing Need For Assessments, US Freezes Solar Energy Projects

Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years. The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states - Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

READ MORE HERE

Why the Oil Industry Benefits from Bottled Water Sales

The process of producing PET plastic bottles involves a number of different stages using multiple producers in the supply chain. Some of the corporations are widely recognizable, while others are more obscure. The important point in this analysis, however, is that the bottled water manufacturers are the end point of a supply chain that contains some of the biggest polluters on the planet.

READ MORE HERE

Extra water, wind strain Northwest power grid

The Northwest is awash in electric power this spring. Rivers are swollen. Columbia River dams are running full bore. Wind farm blades are spinning. That should be good news for the Northwest, where hydropower is cheap and wind is a leader in renewable energy. And it should be good news for California, a huge electricity consumer that often sucks up Oregon's springtime surplus. But a doubling of wind-power supplies and an unusually concentrated surge in water levels have challenged this season's power operations like never before. The result: wasted power generation, excessive spill through the dams and a sometimes frenzied juggling of dam and transmission schedules. Oregon and Washington can't use all the electricity that's available. And southbound transmission lines that are at capacity can't take the extra power California consumers otherwise would eagerly devour.

READ MORE HERE

Prices & speculators - June 28

Although some policy-makers have blamed producing countries for steadily rising oil prices, many experts say more fundamental factors are a growing demand-supply imbalance, a weak dollar, and market speculation.

"Most members of OPEC are already producing at peak capacity, and Saudi Arabia, which has the greatest spare capacity, has been incrementally increasing its production --with the result that its spare capacity has been plunging to relatively low levels," Dariush Zahedi, a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies in at UC Berkeley, told IPS.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

Hemp Ethanol Saves the World

I was searching the internet for the link between Henry Ford's invention of the automobile and all the wars that have seemed to follow..and the connection to oil. I came across this interesting site. I don't know how accurate some of his claims are about the oil industry asking for Prohibition, because people were making their own fuel from hemp and alchohol, but I found it intriguing.

READ MORE HERE

Oil: The Weapon of the New World Order

For China, the biggest prize in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, home of a quarter of the world’s reserves. Since September 11, tension in U.S.-Saudi relations has provided the Chinese with an opportunity to win the heart of the House of Saud. To Washington’s dismay China has also set its sights on Iran, announcing that it will not support sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. No doubt that as China’s oil demand grows, so will its involvement in Middle East politics. China is likely to provide the region’s energy exporters not only with diplomatic support but also with weapons, including assistance in the development of WMD. NOTE: Aside from some "propagandistic" language, this article does a good job of explaining the whole oil picture.

READ MORE HERE

How Bush Helped Establish a Corporate ‘New World Order’

'Terrorism' is merely the pretext cited by George W. Bush to begin a series of oil wars that John McCain says may last '10,000 years'. Bush has helped his corporate 'base' create a 'New World Order' in which robber barons of big oil, assisted by 'big media', rule the world and plunder its resources. Bush is their tool!

READ MORE HERE

The Food and the Energy crisis, fiction or reality?

In these murky times, where priorities and values have been turned upside down by the political propaganda machines, where revenge is rendered into self-preservation, aggression transformed into courage, fanaticism into a mark of the real man, dissent into betrayal, sadism into protectionism, pathology into normalcy, and pre-emptive war into peace, the push to assassinate the middle class remains active and healthy.

As a result, wages are down, inflation is up, commodities have spiraled out of control, and the greenbacks have plummeted into low records. The US dollar supremacy is in doubt, which might pave the way for a new currency within a new order under the security and prosperity partnership process.

Not surprisingly, the price of oil keeps going up negating the laws of supply and demand, and the food prices has also become so increasingly inflated that a food shortage is promoted creating a worldwide panic.

The question is why? Reshaping economies, indebting nations, and controlling the petroleum of the world is essential for total world domination, where all nations are subdued and impoverished. Therefore, all nations will suffer weakened sovereignty, and become dependent on the global tans-national masters of the universe.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: GlobalResearch.ca ]

Canada’s Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project on Earth

Because of their sheer scale, all Canadians are affected by the Tar Sands, no matter where they live.

If you live downstream, your water is being polluted and your fish and wildlife may be dangerous to eat. If you live in Saskatchewan you are a victim of acid rain. If you live in BC, “supertankers” may soon be plying your shoreline carrying Tar Sands oil to Asia. If you live in Ontario, you are exposed to harmful emissions from the refining of Tar Sands Oil. And the impacts do not stop at Canada’s border – US refineries are re-tooling to handle the dirty oil from Alberta.

READ MORE HERE