End of the world as we know it

You might feel fine, but high oil cost, scarcity mean American Empire is about to come crashing down.

Guy R. McPherson
University of Arizona professor

Peak oil spells the end of civilization. And, if it’s not already too late, perhaps it will prevent the extinction of our species.

M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist employed by Shell Oil Co., described peak oil in 1956. Production of crude oil, like the production of many non-renewable resources, follows a bell-shaped curve. The top of the curve is termed “peak oil,” or “Hubbert’s peak,” and it represents the halfway point for production.

The bell-shaped curve applies at all levels, from field to country to planet. After discovery, production ramps up relatively quickly. But when the light, sweet crude on top of the field runs out, increased energy and expense are required to extract the underlying heavy, sour crude. At some point, the energy required to extract a barrel of oil exceeds the energy contained in barrel of oil, so the pumps shut down.

Most of the world’s oil pumps are about to shut down.

We have sufficient supply to keep the world running for 30 years or so, at the current level of demand. But that’s irrelevant because the days of inexpensive oil are behind us. And the American Empire absolutely demands cheap oil. Never mind the 3,000-mile Caesar salad to which we’ve become accustomed. Cheap oil forms the basis for the 12,000-mile supply chain underlying the “just-in-time” delivery of plastic toys from China.

There goes next year’s iPod.

In 1956, Hubbert predicted the continental United States would peak in 1970. He was correct, and the 1970s gave us a small, temporary taste of the sociopolitical and economic consequences of expensive oil.

We passed the world oil peak in 2005, and we’ve been easing down the other side by acquiring oil at the point of a gun – actually, guns are the smallest of the many weapons we’re using – paying more for oil and destroying one culture after another as the high price of crude oil forces supply disruptions and power outages in Third World countries.

The world peaked at 74.3 million barrels per day in May 2005. The two-year decline to 73.2 million barrels per day produced a doubling of the price of crude. Later this year, we fall off the oil-supply cliff, with global supply plummeting below 70 million barrels/day. Oil at merely $100 per barrel will seem like the good old days.

Within a decade, we’ll be staring down the barrel of a crisis: Oil at $400 per barrel brings down the American Empire, the project of globalization and water coming through the taps. Never mind happy motoring through the never-ending suburbs in the Valley of the Sun. In a decade, unemployment will be approaching 100 percent, inflation will be running at 1,000 percent and central heating will be a pipe dream.

In short, this country will be well on its way to the post-industrial Stone Age.

After all, no alternative energy sources scale up to the level of a few million people, much less the 6.5 billion who currently occupy Earth. Oil is necessary to extract and deliver coal and natural gas. Oil is needed to produce solar panels and wind turbines, and to maintain the electrical grid.

Ninety percent of the oil consumed in this country is burned by airplanes, ships, trains and automobiles. You can kiss goodbye groceries at the local big-box grocery store: Our entire system of food production and delivery depends on cheap oil.

If you’re alive in a decade, it will be because you’ve figured out how to forage locally.

The death and suffering will be unimaginable. We have come to depend on cheap oil for the delivery of food, water, shelter and medicine. Most of us are incapable of supplying these four key elements of personal survival, so trouble lies ahead when we are forced to develop means of acquiring them that don’t involve a quick trip to Wal-Mart.

On the other hand, the forthcoming cessation of economic growth is truly good news for the world’s species and cultures. In addition, the abrupt halt of fossil-fuel consumption may slow the warming of our planetary home, thereby preventing our extinction at our own hand.

Our individual survival, and our common future, depends on our ability to quickly make other arrangements. We can view this as a personal challenge, or we can take the Hemingway out. The choice is ours.

For individuals interested in making other arrangements, it’s time to start acquiring myriad requisite skills. It is far too late to save civilization for 300 million Americans, much less the rest of the planet’s citizens, but we can take joy in a purpose-filled, intimate life.

It’s time to push away from the shore, to let the winds of change catch the sails of our leaky boat.

It’s time to trust in ourselves, our neighbors and the Earth that sustains us all.

Painful though it might be, it’s time to abandon the cruise ship of empire in exchange for a lifeboat.

Guy R. McPherson is a professor of conservation biology at the University of Arizona.

Tibet: Will the USA Launch a New Secret War

“Under the Roof of the World”?

Andrei ARESHEV

The current unrest in the Tibetan autonomy of the Chinese People’s Republic (seemingly unexpected) has continued for over a week. Manifestations organised by Buddhist monks on the occasion of an anniversary of Tibet’s annexation by China led to mass clashes with police, violence, fires and robbery. The tragic events coincided with the regular session of the All-China Assembly of People’s Representatives, acquiring a dramatic scale and have already led to deaths, forcing Beijing to use active army to crack down on the riots.

Western sources report the spread of unrest in the provinces neighbouring with Tibet (in particular Sichuan) and mass repressions by the Chinese authorities, holding them up in an utterly negative aspect. And here we have an evident parallel with the way western media covered the activities of the Yugoslav army and police in Kosovo in 1998, immediately before the NATO aggression. Primary sources of information whose precision is hard to verify, are chiefly Tibetan émigrés in the neighbouring countries and western human rights NGOs. For example, according to Thubten Sampkhel, a representative of the Tibetan “government–in-exile” 80 protestors were killed and 72 wounded. He says eyewitnesses in Tibet who did the actual counting verified the figures. Official Chinese sources say that 10 people died. Some pro-Tibetan reports are deliberately over dramatising the situation. For example there are reports about the involvement of Chinese troops in mass killings of Tibetans; others say the “Tibetans in Amdo province have no intention of surrendering and are resolute to continues protests till the start of this year’s Olympic Games in Beijing”1.

The current developments can indeed do great harm to China taking place shortly before the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Demonstrators in Lhasa have become the gravest challenge to the Chinese rule in Tibet over the past two decades, raising a worldwide wave of protests, and holding China up in an unfavourable light on the eve of the Olympics,” – the Associated Press puts it flatly. However the current events in that mountainous district have also an even greater geopolitical significance.

Experts on events in different continents and nations including Africa, Latin America, Myanmar, the Central Asia, the Middle East or Pakistan constantly stress the presence of elements of Chinese and American confrontation that is not always evident but nevertheless not less tense. In particular, one of the causes of the intervention in Iraq and the incessant threats to Iran can be accounted for by the striving to give China very poor energy rationing2.

It can be confidently argued that the present-day troubles faced by Washington’s chief geopolitical rival would be completely taken advantage of with an eye to pushing their development in a favourable direction. U.S. State Secretary Condoleezza Rice has already called on China to exert “moderation” in order to overcome the current political crisis in the Tibetan autonomy. Having said she was sad over the unrest in the Tibetan administrative centre, Lhasa that followed protests and caused deaths, Condozleezza Rice said she was worried over reports about the growing police and army presence in Lhasa, calling on both sides to refrain from violence. Mrs. State Secretary preferred not to say that setting shops and buildings on fire and robbery did not fit well in the picture of peaceful protesting. She rather recalled that president Gorge W.Bush “has consistently called on China’s government to have a constructive dialogue” with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists both directly or negotiating with his representatives…” On behalf of the U.S. administration Mrs. Rice called on Beijing to modify those aspects of its Tibetan policies that “have led to tension caused by their impact on the local religion, culture and sources of subsistence.”

It can be assumed that over the past several years the Tibetan national movement has become significantly more radical, so Beijing would find it hard to see eye to eye with it. In the oblique way this is evidenced by the scope and the skill of organisation of protests, as well as the wave of anti-China manifestations simultaneously sweeping over many countries from the United States and France to Nepal and Australia. The Kosovo independence issue could not fail to inspire supporters of complete Tibet’s independence from China either. Washington realises this and for the time being continues to make a stake of the Dalai Lama, the champion of “peaceful non-violent forms of protest”, some sort of the “Tibetan Ibrahim Rugova.” The Tibetan spiritual leader enjoys a wide public support in the West, suffice it to recall his meeting with G.Bush, Sr. at the ceremony of awarding the Dalai Lama with the Gold Medal of U.S. Congress in October of 2007.

The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists has already called for an international inquiry into China’s crackdown. His statement in Dharamsala3 says: ”The relevant international organisations should look into the Tibetan situation to clarify its causes.” The Dalai Lama has called the activities of Chinese authorities as “cultural genocide.”4

The Dalai Lama – willingly or not – is effectively preparing starting grounds for more radical forces that are about to launch an attack, enjoying political, propaganda and other sorts of support primarily from forces across the Atlantic.

The U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of Tibet and its relations with China have developed for several decades. After China annexed Tibet in 1949 and after the annexation of Hamand and Amdo provinces in 1956, on the initiative of the U.S. government the CIA started its “secret war” in the mountains of Tibet. In October of 1957, an aeroplane with no identification marks took off from a field aerodrome near Dakka carrying the first two Tibetans the CIA had trained for a month. Landing in the designated location close to Lhasa they soon established contacts with the leader of local insurgents. The Lhasa uprising started soon after, and the Dalai Lama fled. In 1958, in total secrecy, over 30 Tibetans began their training at the Camp Hale base in Colorado. Overall, more than 300 Tibetans were trained there. Starting from July, 1958 the CIA began flying C-130 aircraft from its secret base in Thailand, delivering weapons, ordnance and trained militants. More than 400 tonnes of cargo were delivered in 1957 through 1960. In one of the sabotage operations by Tibetans Chief of the Western Tibetan military district was killed, having on him vitally important documents of the Chinese Communist party. Langley obtained priceless information about China’s domestic situation, the state of its army, the PRC nuclear programmes and the rifts between Peking and Moscow that began to take place. By the early 1960s U.S. secret services spent an annual $1.7 million a year in Tibet with about $500,000 allocated for the support of 2,100 guerrillas (including 800 armed militants), mainly based in Nepal, and some $180,000 for the Dalai Lama’s personal needs. When later relations between Washington and Beijing improved, the activities of Tibetan agents were temporarily suspended. Tibetans paid a death toll of 87,000 in crackdowns of uprisings and armed clashes only…

It is to be noted that the then role of China and its economy in world affairs was not very big, but Washington was adamantly pursuing its policies of interference in Chinese internal affairs in one of its “problem outskirts.” This has become even more evident in modern times when the global struggle for influence and resources has become fiercer than ever. With the Dalai Lama completing his mission one day, he will be replaced by other people who, with the support of external forces would attempt to challenge China’s national unity as a state. There will also appear other points of “application of force” aside from Tibet, for example Xiangyang-Uigur autonomy and Inner Mongolia… External policy complications would not take long to arrive. It can be assumed that the current situation would dramatically affect relations between China and India, whom Washington is aggressively trying to draw into its orbit, and more than that.

Unrest in Tibet can unforeseeably echo in Russia, especially in the territories with a sizeable number of Buddhist population. Shows of support of Tibetan manifestators can happen in Kalmykia, Buriatia and Tuva. Ch. Budaev, Chairman of “Lamrim” Buddhist community and the Central Spiritual Buddhist Authority has already expressed hope that the developments in Tibet would lead the way for democratic changes in the Chinese society. According to him, democracy in Russia was consolidated after the well-known events of the 1990s that were given broad international coverage.

“I’d like to believe,” – Ch.Budaev said, “that the alarming developments in Tibet we are now witnessing would in the long run lead to democratisation of the Chinese society.”5

Thus, attempts of the external forces to propose a Gorbachev-Yeltsin scenario of China’s “democratisation” directly bring the developments in Tibet into the realm of Russia’s foreign and domestic policies.

The article uses excerpts from Melinda Lou’s “CIA Under the «Roof of the World». (Newsweek, July 1999)

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1 Eight dead bodies were brought into the Tibetan monastery of Ngaba Kirti (Amdo, Tibet) // http://savetibet.ru/2008/03/16/people_killed_in_tibet.html

2 Details in: K.Simonov. Global Energy War. M. Algorithm, 2007. p.130, and others

3 By the way, Levon Ter-Petroisan also called for an international inquiry into the tragic events in Armenia March 1 and 2, provoked by his own supporters. Similarities in the character of these claims as well as the tactics of “peaceful manifestators” in both cases give reasons to suggest a similarity of tools with which some people attempt to arrange a “controlled chaos” in regions as different as the southern Caucasus and Eastern Asia.

4 To recall the propaganda campaign in the wake of the destruction by the Taliban of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan in 2001 that ushered in a NATO military operation in that country.

5 http://savetibet.ru/2008/03/16/buryatia_and_tibet.html

http://en.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=1289

Secret plans for US troops to stay in Iraq

By Damien McElroy 

A secret draft agreement is being drawn up to allow United States forces to remain in Iraq indefinitely, it has been reported.

Iraqi Shia leader wants to disband Mahdi army
The document, which was written a month ago and is and marked “secret” and “sensitive”, is intended to replace the United Nations mandate for coalition troops, including British forces, to remain in Iraq, which expires at the end of the year.

advertisementThe draft authorisation would allow for the US to “conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security”.

It does not set a time limit, but describes the arrangement as temporary and points out that the US does not want “permanent bases or a permanent military presence” in the country. It also states that the US does not seek to use Iraq as a base to launch operations against other states.

The draft agreement is unlikely to emerge unscathed from political scrutiny in Baghdad or Washington. There appears little appetite in the US for a drawn-out occupation of Iraq. In Baghdad, both Shia and Sunni political groups opposed to the American presence are likely to oppose the agreement in its draft form.

Moqtada al-Sadr, a vocal critic of the occupation, said yesterday that he would consider disbanding his powerful Mahdi army – but only after consulting the ayatollahs, or religious leaders.

Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said that if the militia, which has battled American and government forces in Basra and Baghdad for the past two weeks, was not disbanded its political wing would be barred from provincial elections.

“They no longer have a right to participate in the political process or take part in the upcoming elections unless they end the Mahdi army,” said Mr Maliki.

Sadr said he would consult religious figures, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the moderate Shia leader who is revered as a “source of emulation”.

By putting the fate of his powerful militia in the hands of the religious hierarchy, the cleric appears to be gambling that he will establish his credentials as a figure capable of unifying Iraq’s majority Shia community under his leadership.

However, Sadr said ayatollahs in the Iranian city of Qom, home to his spiritual mentor Grand Ayatollah Kazim al-Haeri, a known hard-liner, would also have a say.

The cleric’s supporters will tomorrow attempt to mount a “million-strong” march in Baghdad to mark the fifth anniversary of the city’s fall. It will follow a report on Iraq to the US Congress in Washington by General David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the ambassador to Baghdad.

Link

Food riots in Yemen, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Mauritania…

http://www.inteldaily.com/?c=148&a=5876

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Côte d’Ivoire: Food Price Hikes Spark Riots

Abidjan

At least a dozen protestors were wounded during several hours of clashes with police on 31 March as they demanded government action to curb food prices.

“We have so far registered eight people wounded at the hospital in Yopougon and four others in Cocody,” said Thomas Kacao of the Ivorian Consumers Association (ACCI), one of the civil society groups behind the march.

The demonstrations took place in Cocody, where Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo has a residence, and in Yopougon, a thriving area for shopping and nightlife.

Ivorian police used tear gas and batons to disperse protestors who were burning tires and overturning parked cars.

At the height of the demonstration, before riot police started firing tear gas, IRIN saw around 1,500 protestors chanting “we are hungry” and “life is too expensive, you are going to kill us.”

“A kilo of beef has increased from 700 CFA (US$1.68) to 900 CFA (US$2.16) in just three days,” one of the protestors, Amélie Koffi, told IRIN. “One litre of oil has increased from 600 CFA (US$1.44) to 850 CFA (US$2.04) in the same time.”

“We only eat once during the day now,” said another protestor, Alimata Camara. “If food prices increase more, what will we give our children to eat and how will they go to school?”

Kacao said the ACCI has recorded an “unending” rise in the cost of basic foodstuffs over the last three months. Some goods have increased by as much as 30 percent and 60 percent from one week to the next.

“When women go to the market they don’t stop complaining about how much more expensive things have become,” he said. “Today, with 2,000 CFA (US$4.80) they cannot buy enough food to feed even a family of five,” Kacou complained.

Marcellin Kpangui, who has formed a new civil society organisation called No-to-the expensive-life, said the cause of the food price hikes in Cote d’Ivoire is rising petrol prices that are being passed on to consumers.

“We have called on the government many times [to do something] but we have the impression that no-one wants to give a response on this issue,” Kpangui said.

IRIN’s requests for comment from the Ivorian ministry of commerce, to which the Kpangui’s NGO had addressed its criticisms, were declined.

But a member of the commerce minister’s cabinet told IRIN, “I think the government will intervene by making a television announcement to calm things down,” he said.

Yacouba Fandio, a taxi driver in Abidjan said he like many people in the city are interested in taking part in protests but have not done so so far. “Many times we hear that a protest will take part against the cost of living but it has been called off at the last minute. Next time a demo is called, the turn out will be so huge [the government] will have to listen,” he said.

The World Food Programme says high global fuel prices coupled with an increased demand for food in wealthier Asian and Latin American markets and an increased demand for bio-fuel are behind food price rises around the world.

So far the worst instability resulting from high prices has been felt in West Africa, which is where many of the poorest countries in the world are found.

In Senegal and Mauritania the high price of imported wheat and rice products brought people onto the streets in late 2007.

Protestors again clashed with police in the Senegal capital on 30 March, prompting the police to temporarily take a television broadcaster which was reporting on the clashes off the air.

In Cameroon protests against food prices in late February turned violent and in Burkina Faso this year there have been food riots in all the major towns in the country in which hundreds of protestors have been arrested.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200803311850.html

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4 killed as Haitians riot over soaring food prices

Violent protesters storm U.N. compound and open fire on peacekeepers

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Four people were killed in Haiti when demonstrators protesting the high cost of living clashed with security forces, a local official said on Friday.

The United Nations said protesters rioted in the southern town of Les Cayes on Thursday, burning shops, shooting at peacekeepers and looting containers at a U.N. compound.

“At least four people have been killed and about 20 others wounded,” said Gabriel Fortune, a senator from the southern region, who condemned the violent behavior of the demonstrators.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23965087/

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Food Prices, Food Eaters Run Riot

Michael Pollan says we are all made of corn, and that means we are also all made of fossil fuels, that drive the tractors, that make the fertilizer, that bring it to market. As fuel prices go through the roof, food prices are following, and people around the world are not happy. Today in the news:

Food Prices Follow Fuel Through The Roof …high gas and diesel fuel prices are hiking the cost of everything from growing food to transporting it, and consumers are paying the price. “Wheat commodity prices have almost doubled in the last six months,” says USDA economist Ephraim Leibtag, “and there’s been a big push for those products across the globe.” Such demand pushes prices up.::CBS News

Clashes over food prices trouble political leaders: Anger over high food and fuel costs in recent months has spawned violent unrest across the world. Surging food prices due to global supply concerns and heady world futures markets have posed a particular risk to poor economies, especially in Africa, where food makes up a disproportionately large part of household spending and imports. ::Reuters

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/04/food-prices-run-riot.php