Hubbert's Oil Peak and Petropolitics
By Bill Gibsons
Al-Jazeerah, 12/17/03
How about looking at US involvement in Iraq truthfully?
“If you knew about Hubbert's Peak a decade ago - as oilmen Bush and Cheney surely did - perhaps you would regard occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as an ugly but necessary price to pay in order to secure sufficient time for the U.S. economy to convert?
”Invading Iraq, writes Heinberg, ‘was more understandable - if no less morally and tactically questionable - when viewed in light of a single piece of information to which the administration was privy, but which was obscure to the vast majority of the world's population. That crucial fact was that the rate of global production was about to peak.’"
Monte Paulsen The Age of Oil is Over alternet.org
Isn't this a more plausible way of telling the Iraq story? Doesn’t it open chilling vistas of our common future?
Mr. Paulson is reviewing two books by disciples of Marion King Hubbert who predicted the peak of oil production in North America in 1970. These books are part of a literature debating when global oil production will peak. The crucial fact debated is that oil production will either soon peak or even has peaked.
Those in the oil patch will know about Mr. Hubbert and his disciple's work. About the bell curve of discovery and production. That we are not going to run out of oil tomorrow, but that for the first time global production has fallen for the past three years in a row; that four barrels of crude are now being pumped for every one new barrel discovered.
Is anybody preparing for the end of oil?
Is the Bush Administration preparing for the end of oil? Those Bush Administration former oil execs and global strategic policy wonks collectively known as neocons have through out the 90’s advocated an aggressive use of US military power in a unipolar strategic foreign policy to secure resources, especially oil, needed by the US.
These key people in the Bush Administration - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz – have used the war on terrorism as an excuse to try and subdue Afghanistan and to establish US military and increasing economic ties with former Soviet Union states around the oil rich Caspian Basin. Planning for the Iraqi invasion began before 9/11.
Although rarely talked about by either politicians or the media in the States except by Chomsky et al, Iraq is widely understood by informed observers globally as a premeditated aggression to set up a client state for US ends, especially oil. There were no WMDs; Saddam was a minor, local threat at best; and there was no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Could Afghanistan and Iraq be first steps in a global endgame over oil; an endgame begun by the world’s only superpower over its economy’s life blood; an endgame conceived and implemented in secret, with further military moves already planned?
The events in Iraq, understood in this way, require quite a different reaction then just polite displeasure at being shut off from bidding for contracts in Iraq.
Will any World leader reject appeasement and try and tell the real story to Americans - the only court that matters - about Iraq as an illegal war to set up a client state in order to better control oil?
Who can make the case that this cowboy behavior is unacceptable in our complex, global society?
And make the case that the only realistic path forward - given not only the challenge of building a post-oil economy, but of the present strains of economic growth on a finite planet – has to be co-operation not imperialism?
If the age of oil is coming to an end and the Bush Administration has begun this endgame in their name - Do Americans really want global military walls protecting the flow of resources to a privileged few from the dying hordes? Do they believe this is possible?
(For more information and an extensive bibliography of the politics of oil check out
staff.washington.edu and petropolitics.org )
Bill Gibsons is a Canadian from British Columbia. |
