http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0301-12.htm
Published on Monday, March 1, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America?
by Robert Freeman
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
tells the story of a South American Indian tribe that has devised an
ingenious monkey trap. The Indians cut off the small end of a coconut
and stuff it with sweetmeats and rice. They tether the other end to a
stake and place it in a clearing.
Soon, a monkey smells the treats inside and comes to see what it
is. It can just barely get its hand into the coconut but, stuffed
with booty, it cannot pull the hand back out. The Indians easily walk
up to the monkey and capture it. Even as the Indians approach, the
monkey screams in horror, not only in fear of its captors, but equally
as much, one imagines, in recognition of the tragedy of its own lethal
but still unalterable greed.
Pirsig uses the story to illustrate the problem of value
rigidity. The monkey cannot properly evaluate the relative worth of a
handful of food compared to its life. It chooses wrongly,
catastrophically so, dooming itself by its own short-term fixation on
a relatively paltry pleasure.
America has its own hand in a coconut, one that may doom it just
as surely as the monkey. That coconut is its dependence on cheap oil
in a world where oil will soon come to an end. The choice we face
(whether to let the food go or hold onto it) is whether to wean
ourselves off of oil-to quickly evolve a new economy and a new basis
for civilization-or to continue to secure stable supplies from the
rest of the world by force.
As with Pirsig's monkey, the alternative consequences of each
choice could not be more dramatic. Weaning ourselves off of cheap oil,
while not easy, will help ensure the vitality of the American economy
and the survival of its political system. Choosing the route of force
will almost certainly destroy the economy and doom America's short
experiment in democracy.
To date, we have chosen the second alternative: to secure oil by
force. The evidence of its consequences are all around us. They
include the titanic US budget and trade deficits funding a gargantuan,
globally-deployed military and the Patriot Act and its starkly
anti-democratic rescissions of civil liberties. There is little time
left to change this choice before its consequences become
irreversible.
The world is quickly running out of oil. In the year 2000,
global production stood at 76 Million Barrels per Day (MBD). By 2020,
demand is forecast to reach 112 MBD, an increase of 47%. But additions
to proven reserves have virtually stopped and it is clear that pumping
at present rates is unsustainable. Estimates of the date of "peak
global production" vary with some experts saying it already may have
occurred as early as the year 2000. New Scientist magazine recently
placed the year of peak production in 2004. Virtually all experts
believe it will almost certainly occur before the end of this decade.
And the rate of depletion is accelerating. Imagine a production
curve that rises slowly over 145 years-the time since oil was
discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859. Over this time, the entire world
shifted to oil as the foundation of industrial civilization. It
invested over one hundreds trillion dollars in a physical
infrastructure and an economic system run entirely on oil. But oil
production is now at its peak and the right hand side of the curve is
a virtual drop off. Known reserves are being drawn down at 4 times the
rate of new discoveries.
The reason for the drop off is that not only have all the "big"
discoveries already been made, the rate of consumption is increasing
dramatically. Annual world energy use is up five times since 1945.
Increases are now driven by massive developing countries-China, India,
Brazil-growing and emulating first or at least second world
consumption standards. Fixed supply. Stalled discoveries. Sharply
increased consumption. This is the formula for global oil depletion
within the next few decades.
The situation is especially critical in the US. With barely 4%
of the world's population, the US consumes 26% of the world's energy.
But the US produced only 9 MBD in 2000 while consuming 19 MBD. It made
up the difference by importing 10 MBD, or 53% of its needs. By 2020,
the US Department of Energy forecasts domestic demand will grow to 25
MBD but production will be down to 7 MBD. The daily shortfall of 18
MBD or 72% of needs, will all need to be imported.
Perhaps it goes without saying but it deserves repeating anyway:
oil is the sine qua non of "industrial" civilization-the one thing
without which such civilization cannot exist. All of the world's 600
million automobiles depend on oil. So do virtually all other
commodities and critical processes: airlines, chemicals, plastics,
medicines, agriculture, heating, etc. Almost all of the increase in
world food productivity over the past 50 years is attributable to
increases in the use of oil-derived additives: pesticides;
herbicides; fungicides; fertilizers; and machinery.
When oil is gone, civilization will be stupendously different.
The onset of rapid depletion will trigger convulsions on a global
scale, including, likely, global pandemics and die-offs of significant
portions of the world's human population. The "have" countries will
face the necessity kicking the "have-nots" out of the global lifeboat
in order to assure their own survival. Even before such conditions are
reached, inelastic supply interacting with inelastic demand will drive
the price of oil and oil-derived commodities through the stratosphere,
effecting by market forces alone massive shifts in the current
distribution of global wealth.
If the US economy is not to grind to a halt under these
circumstances it must choose one of three alternate strategies:
dramatically lower its living standards (something it is not willing
to do); substantially increase the energy efficiency of its economy;
or make up the shortfall by securing supplies from other countries.
President Bush's National Energy Policy published in March 2001
explicitly commits the US to the third choice: Grab the Oil. It is
this choice that is now driving US military and national
security policy. And, in fact, the past 60 years of US policy in the
Middle East can only be understood as the effort to control access to
the world's largest supply of oil.
Witness, for example, the deep US embrace of Saudi Arabia since
World War II. One quarter of all US weapons sales between 1950 and
2000 went to Saudi Arabia despite its horrifically repressive,
literally medieval tribal nature. The CIA's overthrow of Mohamed
Mosadegh in Iran in 1953 after he nationalized his country's oil is
another example. So, too, was the US strategic embrace of Israel
during the 1967 Six Day War. The US was deeply mired in Vietnam but
needed a "cop on the beat" to challenge Arab states-Egypt, Iraq,
Syria, Yemen-that were "going Soviet." It has stuck with that
relationship ever since.
More recent examples of national strategy in bondage to the
compulsion for oil include US support for Saddam Hussein in the
Iran/Iraq War; its support for Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan War
against the Soviet Union; and, of course, the most recent invasion of
Iraq to seize its oilfields and forward position US forces for an
invasion of neighboring Saudi Arabia when it is inevitably destroyed
by internal civil war. And under a Grab the Oil strategy,
militarization of US society will only deepen.
The reason is that a very major portion of the world's oil is,
by accident of geology, in the hands of states hostile to the US.
Fully 60% percent of the world's proven reserves of oil are in the
Persian Gulf. They lie beneath Muslim countries undergoing a religious
revolution that wants to return the industrial world to a pre-modern
order governed by a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. Saudi Arabia
alone controls 25% of all the world's oil, more than that of North
America, South America, Europe and Africa combined. Kuwait, Iran and
Iraq, each control approximately 10% of the world's oil.
Another 15% of the world's oil lies in the Caspian Sea region,
also a dominantly Muslim region. It includes a group of post-Soviet,
satellite and buffer states that lack any semblance of legal or market
systems. They are extraordinarily corrupt, really just Gangster
Thugocracies masquerading as countries. Think Afghanistan. Both Russia
and China consider this region part of their "sphere of strategic
influence" portending significant clashes for the US over coming
decades.
As long as the US chooses the Grab the Oil alternative, the
implications for national policy are inescapable. The combination of
all these facts-fixed supply, rapid depletion, lack of alternatives,
severity of consequences, and hostility of current stockholding
countries-drive the US to HAVE to adopt an aggressive (pre-emptive)
military posture and to carry out a nakedly colonial expropriation of
resources from weaker countries around the world.
This is why the US operates some 700 military bases around the
world and spends over half a trillion dollars per year on military
affairs, more than all the rest of the world-its "allies"
included-combined. This is why the Defense Department's latest
Quadrennial Review stated, "The US must retain the capability to send
well-armed and logistically supported forces to critical points around
the globe, even in the face of enemy opposition." This is why
Pentagon brass say internally that current force levels are inadequate
to the strategic challenges they face and that they will have to
re-instate the draft after the 2004 elections.
But the provocation occasioned by grabbing the oil, especially
from nations ideologically hostile to the US, means that military
attacks on the US and the recourse to military responses will only
intensify until the US is embroiled in unending global conflict. This
is the perverse genius of the Grab the Oil strategy: it comes with its
own built-in escalation, its own justification for ever more
militarization-without limit. It will blithely consume the entire US
economy, the entire society, without being sated. It
is, in homage to Orwell, Perpetual War for Perpetual Grease.
In his first released tape after 9/11, Osama bin Laden stated
that he carried out the attacks for three reasons: 1) to drive US
military forces from Saudi Arabia, the most sacred place of Islam; 2)
to avenge the deaths of over half a million Iraqi children killed,
according to UNICEF, as a result of the US-sponsored embargo of the
1990s; and, 3) to punish US sponsorship of Israeli oppression against
the Palestinian people. Oil and the need to control it are critically
implicated in all three reasons.
But now comes the sobering part. In response to the 9/11
attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated that the US was
engaged in ".a thirty to forty year war (!) against fundamentalist
Islam." It is the fever of War, of course, that becomes the
all-purpose justification for the rollback of civil liberties. Lincoln
used the Civil War to justify the suspension of habeas corpus.
Roosevelt used the cover of World War II to inter hundreds of
thousands of Japanese Americans. And now Bush is using the
self-ratcheting "War on Terror" to effect even more sweeping, perhaps
permanent rescissions of civil liberties.
Under the Patriot Act, a person can be arrested without probable
cause, held indefinitely without being charged, tried without a lawyer
or a jury, sentenced without the opportunity to appeal, and put to
death-all without notification of.anybody. This is simply a Soviet
Gulag and it has been rationalized by the hysterical over-hyping of
the War on Terror. The fact that it is not yet widespread does not
diminish the more important fact that it has been put in place
precisely in anticipation of such procedures needing to be being
carried out on a mass scale in the future.
The broader implications of the Patriot Acts go far beyond the
abusive treatment of criminals or terrorists. Their portent can be
glimpsed in the language used to justify them. When Attorney General
John Ashcroft testified on behalf of the Act, he stated, ".those who
oppose us are providing aid and comfort to the enemy." These are
carefully chosen words. "Aid and comfort to the enemy" are the words
used in the Constitution to define Treason, the most fateful of crimes
against the state. In other words, protest against the government-the
singular right without which America would not even exist-is now being
defined as trying to overthrow the government.
And by the internal logic of a global Oil Empire, this is
entirely reasonable. The needs of the people of any one country must
be subordinated to the larger agenda of Empire itself. This is what
the Romans learned in 27 B.C. when Augustus proclaimed himself
Emperor. It was the end of the Roman Republic and the disappearance of
representative government on earth for almost 1,700 years, until the
English Civil Wars in the 1600s. That is the reality we are
confronting today-offering up our democracy in propitiation
to an Empire for Oil. It will be a fateful, irreversible decision.
Returning to Pirsig's metaphor, the choice of a Grab the Oil
strategy
is the equivalent of the monkey holding onto the handful of food,
remaining
trapped by the coconut. It is an ironclad guarantee of escalating
global
conflict, isolation of the US in the world, unremitting attacks on the
US by
those whose oil is being expropriated and whose societies are being
dominated, the militarization of the US economy, the irreversible
rescission
of civil liberties, and the eventual extinguishment of American
democracy
itself. It is the conscious, self-inflicted consignment to political
and
economic death.
But the coconut metaphor, remember, involves a choice-food or
freedom.
What, then, is the alternative, the letting go of the paltry handful
of food
in conscious preference for the life of continued freedom?
The alternative to Grab the Oil is to dispense with the hobbling
dependency on oil itself and to quickly wean the country off of it.
Call it
the path of Energy Reconfiguration. It is to declare a modern day
Manhattan
Project aimed at minimizing the draw down in the world's finite stocks
of
oil, extending their life, and mitigating the calamity inherent in
their
rapid exhaustion. It means building a physical infrastructure to the
economy
that is based on an alternative to oil. And it means doing this, not
unilaterally or militarily as the US is doing now, but in peaceful
partnership with other countries of the world, the other counties in
our
shared global lifeboat that are also threatened by the end of oil.
In more specific terms, energy reconfiguration means
retrofitting all
of the nation's buildings, both commercial and residential, to double
their
energy efficiency. It means a crash program to shift the
transportation
system-cars, trucks-to a basis that uses perhaps half as much oil per
year.
This is well within reach of current technology. Energy
Reconfiguration
means using biotechnology to develop crops that require much less
fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and machinery to harvest. It means
refitting industrial and commercial processes-lighting, heating,
appliances,
automation, etc.-so that they, too, consume far less energy than they
do
today. It means increasing efficiency, reducing consumption, and
building
sustainable, long-term alternatives in every arena in which the
economy uses
oil.
Such a program would return incalculable benefits to national
security, the economy, and to the environment.
In terms of national security, Energy Reconfiguration greatly
reduces
the county's susceptibility to oil blackmail. It reduces the need for
provocative adventurism into foreign countries in pursuit of oil. As
such,
it reduces the incentive for terrorism against the US. And by reducing
such
threats, it reduces the need for a sprawling, expensive military
abroad and
a repressive police state at home. Savings in military costs-perhaps
on the
order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year-could well pay for
such a
program. The saving of democracy, of course, is priceless.
The economic benefits are at least equally impressive. By
reducing
energy imports, the US would reduce its hemorrhaging trade deficit and
the
mortgaging of the nation's future that such borrowing implies. A
national
corps of workers set to retrofitting the nation's homes and businesses
for
energy efficiency would address employment problems for decades in a
way
that could not be outsourced to Mexico or India or China. And a more
efficient industrial infrastructure would make all goods made in
America
more competitive with those made abroad. In all of these ways, Energy
Reconfiguration raises, not lowers, the average standard of living
while
increasing the resilience of the economy as a whole.
Energy Reconfiguration also delivers enormous-perhaps
incalculable-benefits to the environment. By reducing energy
intensity, it
reduces the impact on the biotic carrying systems of any level of
economic
activity. Global warming may be the single most potent threat to
global
stability today. A recently leaked Pentagon report predicted that
rapid
climate change may well set off global competition for food and water
supplies and, in the worst scenarios, spark nuclear war. If the US did
no
more than change from being the most energy inefficient economy in the
industrial world to being of only average efficiency, it would
dramatically
slow the environmental destruction that hangs like a sword over the
entire
world.
Are there any precedents for such an ambitious vision? In the
1980s
China adopted a nationwide energy efficiency program. Within a decade,
overall energy intensity fell by 50% while economic growth led the
developing world. Also in the 1980s, Denmark began a crash program in
wind-generated electricity. Today, wind provides 10% of Denmark's
electricity while Denmark makes 60% of all the wind turbines sold in
the
world. India's Renewable Energy Development Agency used a similar set
of
programs beginning in 1987 to reduce oil based electricity usage.
Today,
India is the largest user of photovoltaic systems in the world.
Even within the US there are ample precedents for optimism. The
US
economy was 42% more energy efficient in 2000 than it was in the 1970s
when
the Arab oil embargoes shocked the country into action. Corporate
Average
Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards more than doubled the average mileage of
US
automobiles between 1975 and 1985 before being effectively abandoned
in the
late 1980s. The National Research Council has reported that efficiency
programs sponsored by the Department of Energy returned $20 for every
$1
invested, making them arguably one of the best investments in the
economy
even before a change in national energy strategy.
We should harbor no illusions, however, that adopting such a
strategy
will be easy. The military and energy industries in which the Bush
family is
so heavily invested will vigorously resist such a policy. And the
energy
bill now making its way through Congress is nothing so much as a
testament
to the death grip the energy industry holds on the American people. It
provides tens of billions of dollars of subsidies and giveaways to
energy
companies while actually encouraging more intensive energy use. As the
poster boy of these leviathans, President Bush expressed their
sentiments
best: "We need an energy policy that encourages consumption." What
more need
be said?
In the end, the choice of these two alternatives-Grab the Oil or
Energy Reconfiguration-is much bigger than oil alone. It is a choice
about
the fundamental ethos and, in fact, the very nature of the country.
Most
immediately, it is about democracy versus empire. In economic terms,
it is
about prosperity or poverty. In engineering terms, it is a matter of
efficiency over waste. In moral terms this is the choice of
sufficiency or
gluttony. From the standpoint of the environment, it is a preference
for
stewardship over continued predation. In the ways the US deals with
other
countries it is the choice of co-operation versus dominance. And in
spiritual terms, it is the choice of hope, freedom and purpose over
fear,
dependency and despair. In this sense, this is truly the decision that
will
define the future of America and perhaps the world.
A final word on Pirsig's monkey. The monkey is doomed but not
tragic.
For the monkey cannot really comprehend the fateful implications of
its
choice: that its greed assures its doom. In the case of people and a
country, however, that is not the case. It is no accident that
President
Bush has not asked any sacrifices of the country for his War on
Terror. That
is part of the seduction, like the candy a drug pusher uses to lure an
unsuspecting child.
But we cannot, like the monkey, claim to be unaware of the
choice we
are making. Awareness of such choices is part of the burden of mature
citizenship. Nor can we feign ignorance of the consequences. Simply
put, our
present course will cost us our country. And our doom will be
compounded by
incalculable tragedy and what Lincoln once called "the last best hope
for
mankind" will, indeed, perish from this earth. Unless, that is, we
find the
vision, the wisdom and the courage to let go that handful of paltry
treats
and choose freedom instead.
Robert Freeman writes about economics and education. He can be
reached
at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.
--
"I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat
what they
killed, there would be no more wars."
-- Abbie Hoffman (died 1989)
.
|
|
| User: "Michael Johnathan McDonald" |
|
| Title: Re: Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America? |
02 Jun 2004 10:07:32 PM |
|
|
(Grantland) wrote in message news:<40b67da6.947078587@ct-news.iafrica.com>...
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
tells the story of a South American Indian tribe that has devised an
ingenious monkey trap. The Indians cut off the small end of a coconut
and stuff it with sweetmeats and rice. They tether the other end to a
stake and place it in a clearing.
Soon, a monkey smells the treats inside and comes to see what it
is.
Monkey and a Coconut seems your speed Grantland. Stick with it you may
discover something unique about yourself.
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "Leigh_Bee" |
|
| Title: Re: Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America? |
05 Jun 2004 04:14:01 PM |
|
|
(Grantland) wrote in message news:<40b67da6.947078587@ct-news.iafrica.com>...
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0301-12.htm
Published on Monday, March 1, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America?
by Robert Freeman
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
tells the story of a South American Indian tribe that has devised an
ingenious monkey trap. The Indians cut off the small end of a coconut
and stuff it with sweetmeats and rice. They tether the other end to a
stake and place it in a clearing.
SNIP
Usually the Africans use a Gourd not a coconut coconuts are only
coastal.
The monkey is caught because, he will not let go of the bait.
SNIP
Robert Freeman writes about economics and education. He can be
reached
at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.
The oil situation goes like this, if the US represents 5% of the
planets population which uses 30% of the resources, now the oil is
getting to the half empty stage. ie it is getting harder to extract
oil at the same rate as before except more folk are using oil, and the
one of the first things that happens in a war is to harry the
logistics, so oil becomes scarce.
http://www.oilcrisis.com/midpoint.htm
LB
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "Lone Ranger" |
|
| Title: Re: Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America? |
02 Jun 2004 05:18:45 PM |
|
|
On Thu, 27 May 2004 23:59:22 GMT, (Grantland)
wrote:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0301-12.htm
Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America?
End of oil? When? Won't happen in our lifetime. Worldwide, the
oil-shale reserves could be as large as 14,000 billion barrels - more
than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/2599065
--
Hi-Yo, Silver! Away!
.
|
|
|
| User: "Never anonymous Bud" |
|
| Title: Re: Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America? |
02 Jun 2004 07:53:04 PM |
|
|
Fresh from an Iraqi prisoner interrogation snowball2002@bigfoot.com.spamalamadingdong (Lone Ranger) smirked:
End of oil? When? Won't happen in our lifetime. Worldwide, the
oil-shale reserves could be as large as 14,000 billion barrels - more
than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.
You need to check your math.
And so does the person who wrote the story headline...
:By 2000, 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced.
:If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate
:of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered and
:no improvements are made in the technology used to recover oil,
:the world's presently known supply will not be exhausted until 2056.
2056 is only 50 years away, not 500.
AND, that's assuming that usage doesn't increase (never a safe bet).
--
To reply by email, remove the XYZ.
Lumber Cartel (tinlc) #2063. Spam this account at your own risk.
This sig censored by the Office of Home and Land Insecurity....
.
|
|
|
| User: "Lone Ranger" |
|
| Title: Re: Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America? |
05 Jun 2004 07:27:21 AM |
|
|
On Thu, 03 Jun 2004 00:53:04 GMT, Never anonymous Bud
<newskat@katxyzkave.net> wrote:
End of oil? When? Won't happen in our lifetime. Worldwide, the
oil-shale reserves could be as large as 14,000 billion barrels - more
than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.
You need to check your math.
And so does the person who wrote the story headline...
Nothing wrong with my math. Read the entire article!
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/2599065
:By 2000, 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced.
:If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate
:of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered and
:no improvements are made in the technology used to recover oil,
:the world's presently known supply will not be exhausted until 2056.
2056 is only 50 years away, not 500.
AND, that's assuming that usage doesn't increase (never a safe bet).
You left out the following:
"These estimates do not include unconventional oil resources that
require additional processing to extract liquid petroleum.
Oil production from tar sands in Canada and South America would add
600 billion barrels to the world's supply, and rocks found in
Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone contain 1,500 billion barrels of oil.
Worldwide, the oil-shale reserves could be as large as 14,000 billion
barrels - more than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production
rates."
--
Hi-Yo, Silver! Away!
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "DavidK" |
|
| Title: Re: Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America? |
04 Jun 2004 11:08:37 PM |
|
|
that was brilliant... thanks
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
