21st Century Vision

The oil crunch is coming

The blog of Sept 21st promised you a continuation on the question of Peak Oil and what happens when we reach it, and this is it.

In that blog I suggested that the right question was not "when will the oil run out?" but "when do we get to Peak Oil?". Now I want to shift the goalposts again and suggest that really the right question is "when do the markets realise we have hit or are about to hit Peak Oil?".

The historical signs for what happens then are not encouraging. When the Saudis turned off the taps - or rather turned them down, by as little as 9% of the then level of demand - for a few months back in 1973 the world went into panic mode. The USA imposed a 55mph speed limit, the UK (hit simultaneously by the miners strike) went onto a 3-day week, Germany banned driving on Sunday, and the world headed into a serious recession. It was saved from outright depression by the return to full production. In 1979 the Shah of Iran fell and Iranian production was affected. The situation was worsened when Saddam Hussein decided to invade, but even then the fall in production was only about 4% of the global total; prices shot up from $13 a barrel to $34. Panic was responsible again, and the situation was only saved when the Saudis upped their production to compensate. Then there was our own "fuel crisis" of autumn 2000, when a few disgruntled truckers almsot brought the country to a standstill, aided by the oil companies who ordered their drivers not to cross picket lines. The truckers finally backed off rather than initiate a full-blown economic disaster.

When oil supplies are threatened, people panic. It's as simple as that. When the idea that the moment of Peak Oil has arrived, or is about to, you can expect a market panic of monumental proportions. And this time there will be no relief from the Saudis - or anybody else - opening the taps further. By definition, that will not be possible. A stock market crash and a depression at least as severe as 1929 can be confidently expected.

The other thing that will finally happen, of course, will be a search for 'new' sources of energy to replace the flagging oil supplies. We will, at much the same time, be struggling to come to terms with the increasingly obvious effects of and threat from climate change, so there will inevitably be a struggle between those who want to switch to coal as a readily-available source of energy - with known reserves sufficient for many years - and those who recognise the climate disaster that that would bring.

As earlier blogs have pointed out, the threat from climate change is not yet quantifiable, but the worst-case scenario would see the demise of the human race along with most other species, and each new scientific report published makes the prospects look darker. We don't yet know how bad it's going to get, but we can be pretty sure it will be bad. A switch to coal will ensure that we discover just how bad it can get. Switching to renewable sources, and - perhaps more important - strictly limiting how much energy we use in the first place will still leave us suffering some serious ill-effects from climate chaos, but with at least a chance of escaping the worst.

There will be positive benefits, too, if we can weather the storm. No more wars fuelled by the desperate need for oil. A concomitant reduction in hatred and fundamentalism. A dramatic improvement in air quality. The necessary spread of localisation should defuse the rampant inequality we now see between countries, and betweem the rich and poor within countries.

In a couple of hundred years, maybe sooner, we will either have a planet worth living on or we won't be around at all. All vote now!

Fighting The Wrong War

Jeffrey Sachs comments in The Guardian that George Bush's battle to control the world's oil supply has cost billions of dollars, much more than it would have cost to discover new sources of energy.

It always comes back to oil. The continuing misguided interventions in the Middle East by the United States and the United Kingdom have their roots deep in the Arabian sand. Ever since Winston Churchill led the conversion of Britain's navy from coal to oil at the start of the last century, the Western powers have meddled incessantly in the affairs of Middle Eastern countries to keep the oil flowing, toppling governments and taking sides in wars in the supposed "great game" of energy resources. But the game is almost over, because the old approaches are obviously failing.

It is ironic that an administration fixated on the risks of Middle East oil has chosen to spend hundreds of billions - potentially trillions - of dollars to pursue unsuccessful military approaches to problems that can and should be solved at vastly lower cost, through R&D, regulation, and market incentives. The biggest energy crisis of all, it seems, involves the misdirected energy of a US foreign policy built on war rather than scientific discovery and technological progress.

See full article

A Statement of the Obvious

The British government has been at great pains to deny that the Iraq war has contributed to the growth of terrorist organizations worldwide, and hence to the insecurity of the Western countries involved. 

Not so the US National Intelligence Council, which is charged with providing long-term assessments on strategic issues for the president and senior policymakers in the form of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs).  According to their April NIE (reported here from the Washington Post, 24th September 2006, but picked up by the British press next day) the war in Iraq has become "a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the US and its allies can reduce the threat".

The NIE document cites the "centrality" of the US invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda.  It concludes that, rather  than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the US position.

The Post quotes an unnamed US intelligence official as saying:  "It's a very candid assessment.  It's stating the obvious."  Obvious to anyone who cares to look, you might say, but apparently not obvious to the British government.

Nor is it as if this outcome was unforeseen:  readers might be interested to note that on 13th September 2002 the Enfield and the Barnets United Nations Association asked the three local MPs a series of questions about war in Iraq, then six months away.  Among the questions was:  "Do you agree that military action is likely to prove counterproductive because it will provide the motivation for a new generation of terrorist activity?"

But the Post's story raises another issue in its comment that "both Bush and Bin Laden now consistently describe the Iraq war as the 'central front' of the global war, and both are depending on victory there to set the direction of future struggles far afield".  Not, please note, poverty or climate change, not the millennium development goals or a just settlement to the Palestininan question.  What Bush and Bin Laden have in common is their attempt to lever us into taking sides between imperialism and Islamism in the war on the "central front".

We beg to demur.  We are, as we were in September 2002, for patience, respect and above all debate in building the international community.

Geneva Convention? How many divisions have the Swiss?

In yet another outrage against internationally-accepted norms of behaviour, President Bush and his 'opponents' in Congress have cut a deal which will permit the US jailers at Guantanamo Bay to do whatever they like to their unfortunate prisoners.

The deal is described by Senator John McCain as "giving the President the tools he needs" but that at the same time "there is no doubt that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved". Presumably he means "preserved" as in a museum, as a reminder of the quaint ideas people used to have in the days before the Pax Americana brought its benefits to all mankind. In fact the agreement reverses the Supreme Court decisions that first gave detainees the right to bring suits in US courts, then declared Bush's military tribunals unlawful.

That second ruling declared that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applied even in Guantanamo (a no-brainer most of us would have said), and in principle this will continue to be adhered to. In practice, though, the decision on whether whatever goes on in Guantanamo does or does not contravene Common Article 3 will be the President's alone.

Amnesty International will no doubt set up a howl of protest, but at a stroke all legal hope for the Guantanamos detainees has been emasculated.

See today's Observer for a fuller write-up.

When will the oil run out?

Well for a start, that's the wrong question. The physics of oil extraction mean that it is not a question of carrying on pumping however much we feel like until suddenly there's a horrible gurgle and the flow stops, like a car running out of petrol. As each field gets to the point where about half of the extractable oil has been pumped, the maximum pumping rate begins to drop, gradually tailing off in a pretty bell curve.

The right question, therefore, is "when do we get to Peak Oil?" - the moment when the overall pumping rate of all the world's oil fields begins to drop.

There is a sharp dichotomy of opinion on that question. Those within the oil industry, economists and the establishment generally will tell you it is many years away - the "late toppers". The "early toppers" are fewer in number and much lesser in global influence, but most of them, too, have worked in the oil industry though they are now outside it, blowing whistles furiously. They would have us believe that Peak Oil will happen sometime within the next five years, or maybe even has happened already.

How come the disparity? Surely the oil industry has a pretty good idea how much oil they've found? Well for one thing there is an unknown in the equation: how much is there still left to find? The late toppers are happy that technology will continually improve so that ever deeper wells can be drilled in ever more inhospitable locations (e.g. deep sea) and that more oil will continue to be found. The early toppers point to the technology that already exists for identifying likely oil-bearing rocks and to the fact that there is very little of the surface of the globe not already explored. They also point to the graph of year-by-year discoveries, which declines steadily, with occasional spikes, since the 1970s. Even the spikes are getting lower.

They point, too, to the work of a geologist of an earlier era, M. King Hubbert. He drew a graph in 1956 showing that Peak Oil production in the "lower 48" states of the USA would arrive in 1971. Just as now, the oil industry of the time was not amused, claiming they had many years of growth ahead of them. Well, Hubbert got it wrong: the peak was a year earlier than he'd predicted, in 1970. His predictions worked forward from the peak of oil discovery, to draw the bell curve of oil production; in the USA the peak of oil discovery was 1930 and it took 40 years to reach the production peak. For the world, the peak of oil discovery was - well, what would you guess? 1990s? 1980s? Actually it was 1965. We've been on the downward slide that long, though demand has been increasing steadily.

So how much has already been discovered, then? How long will that last? The primary source of data for that figure is the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which has lists of proven national oil reserves which add up to a reassuring total. But what does that word "proven" mean? BP, in a footnote, wash their hands of all responsibility, ascribing the data to a host of third parties. Looking closer, we discover that the figures of "proven" oil reserves shot up by 300 billion barrels between 1985 and 1990 - though the new discoveries in that period amounted only to 10 billion barrels! It all came down to OPEC's rule for deciding which country could pump how much: quotas were allocated according to the amount of reserves each country had, so it became profitable to "discover" that you had "underestimated" your reserves. Amazingly, too, the reserves of each OPEC country have stayed steady ever since then, despite the huge number of barrels pumped out of the ground in the interim.

Beginning to be worried? Well now let's look at the other great white hope for the future (possibly an inappropriate simile when we're talking about oil): "unconventional oil", which means tar sands, bitumen and oil shale. There may be as much as 2.7 trillion barrels of oil locked up in tar sands, mostly in Canada. But getting the oil out of those is a lot harder than pumping it out of the ground. Harder, more expensive, far more energy-consuming and it produces severe environmental problems, including needing vast amounts of water. Canada hasn't been getting very far in extracting the oil: just a million barrels a day in 2004, forecast to rise to 2.6 million by 2015. Bitumen and oil shale pose similar problems.

So there is cause for concern. The late toppers may yet be proved right, but their arguments look shaky. Maybe there is a new Saudi Arabia about to be discovered somewhere, though it is hard to guess where. If the early toppers are right, then oil production will soon start to decline, just as demand is getting ever stronger as China and India join the tiger economies. We will discuss the consequences of that in a later blog, and consider the ramifications of a Peak Oil crisis hitting us at the same time as global warming. Maybe it's a good thing if the oil runs out??

Meanwhile, you can see a Guardian report of a conference (in October 2005) by clicking here. Recommended reading is Jeremy Leggett's "Half Gone" (Portobello books, 2005)

Iranian Atom - Global Atom

The 61^st UN General Assembly is underway.  President Ahmadinejad, stepping in for an unwell Fidel, accuses the US and the UK of using the Security Council for their own power purposes, of breaking International Law and manipulating other countries to support their purpose.  Would we disagree?  The problem is whether any other country with such power would do it differently.  Perhaps the sad fact is that the only thing that power recognises is power.

But spare a thought for the UN itself.  The US distrusts it as an organ of opposition to the US ambitions for pax Americana.  The rest of the world distrusts it for being the pawn of the US.  When in doubt blame the messenger, for the UN is only the collective voice of the Nations of the World.  Little surprise then it is full of mistrust.

Meanwhile the US congress, keen to crank up the pressure on Iran, published a report last month on the Iranian nuclear programme which the IAEA has criticised; not least because the US report claims that Iran is enriching uranium to weapons grade whilst the IAEA has said this is not the case.  Does this remind us of the Hans Blix affair, when he was chief weapons inspector for the UN in Iraq?  So who will the security council believe, if belief has anything to do with it.

Maybe, in the four years since that episode, the power balance has shifted a little with Russia and China becoming a bit more confident, perhaps because they have more significant oil interests than before and see the US/UK Anglo-Saxon hegemony bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, clearly having taken a wrong path to protect themselves against terrorism, but now unable to extricate themselves.  So Iran may not be so condemned in the Security Council, perhaps no sanctions will be made, not because the US power-people have learned anything, but simply because their power is less.

Even more surprising is the news through UPI this week that Donald Rumsfeld has declared himself uncertain about a military strike against Iran, citing amongst other reasons that they may not know where all the important sites are (meaning their intelligence is not up to it) and that Iran could make the situation in Iraq for the 130,000 US troops there very difficult.  This startling insight surely suggests things may be on the up, but Dick Cheney that well known Armageddonist and architect for the New American Century is still up for the fight, despite Russia equipping Iran with a new $700 million missile defence system.  Could the cold war be returning?

Other nuclear news includes a piece from the Indian Prime Minister’s own website that “President General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh had a cordial, frank and detailed exchange of views on all aspects of India-Pakistan relations”.  Could it be that Mutually Assured Destruction has got the tongues moving?

Lastly Agence France-Presse reports: “World Powers Propose Nuclear Fuel Scheme To Avoid Proliferation” in which UN (for or against US interests?) controlled supply centers could keep nations from enriching uranium and learning how to make atomic weapons, by providing non weapons grade enriched uranium U-235 for civilian nuclear reactors.  Surely the logic of the India Pakistan dialogue is that this UN supply centre should be giving out weapons grade U-235 so that MADness can bring us all to peace. 

Deadly harvest: The Lebanese fields sown with cluster bombs

Lebanese villagers must risk death in fields 'flooded' with more than a million Israeli cluster bombs - or leave crops to rot

By Patrick Cockburn in Nabatiyeh

Published: 18 September 2006

The war in Lebanon has not ended. Every day, some of the million bomblets which were fired by Israeli artillery during the last three days of the conflict kill four people in southern Lebanon and wound many more.

The casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon's farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to rot in the fields.

In a coma in a hospital bed in Nabatiyeh lies Hussein Ali Ahmad, a 70-year-old man from the village of Yohmor. He was pruning an orange tree outside his house last week when he dislodged a bomblet; it exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel into his brain, lungs and kidneys. "I know he can hear me because he squeezes my hand when I talk to him," said his daughter, Suwad, as she sat beside her father's bed in the hospital.

At least 83 people have been killed by cluster munitions since the ceasefire, according to independent monitors.

Some Israeli officers are protesting at the use of cluster bombs, each containing 644 small but lethal bomblets, against civilian targets in Lebanon. A commander in the MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) unit told the Israeli daily Haaretz that the army had fired 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying 1.2 million bomblets over houses and fields. "In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs," he said. "What we did there was crazy and monstrous." What makes the cluster bombs so dangerous is that 30 per cent of the bomblets do not detonate on impact. They can lie for years - often difficult to see because of their small size, on roofs, in gardens, in trees, beside roads or in rubbish - waiting to explode when disturbed.

The bomblets may be small, but they explode with devastating force. On the morning of the ceasefire, Hadi Hatab, an 11-year old boy, was brought dying to the hospital. "He must have been holding the bomb close to him," Dr Wazni said. "It took off his hands and legs and the lower part of his body."

We went to Yohmor to find where Hussein Ali Ahmad had received his terrible wounds while pruning his orange tree. The village is at the end of a broken road, six miles south of Nabatiyeh, and is overlooked by the ruins of Beaufort Castle, a crusader fortress on a ridge above the deep valley along which the Litani river runs.

"The cluster bombs all landed in the last days of the war," said Nuhar Hejazi, a surprisingly cheerful 65-year-old woman. "There were 35 on the roof of our house and 200 in our garden so we can't visit our olive trees." People in Yohmor depend on their olive trees and the harvest should begin now before the rains, but the trees are still full of bomblets. "My husband and I make 20 cans of oil a year which we need to sell," Mrs Hejazi says. "Now we don't know what to do." The sheer number of the bomblets makes it almost impossible to remove them all.

Frederic Gras, a de-mining expert formerly in the French navy, who is leading the MAG teams in Yohmor, says: "In the area north of the Litani river, you have three or four people being killed every day by cluster bombs. The Israeli army knows that 30 per cent of them do not explode at the time they are fired so they become anti-personnel mines."

Why did the Israeli army do it? The number of cluster bombs fired must have been greater than 1.2 million because, in addition to those fired in rockets, many more were fired in 155mm artillery shells. One Israeli gunner said he had been told to "flood" the area at which they were firing but was given no specific targets. M. Gras, who personally defuses 160 to 180 bomblets a day, says this is the first time he seen cluster bombs used against heavily populated villages.

An editorial in Haaretz said that the mass use of this weapon by the Israeli Defence Forces was a desperate last-minute attempt to stop Hizbollah's rocket fire into northern Israel. Whatever the reason for the bombardment, the villagers in south Lebanon will suffer death and injury from cluster bombs as they pick their olives and oranges for years to come.

This is a shortened version of the front page story in today's Independent. For the full article click here

A document has come into our possession ....

PRESS RELEASE

EMBARGOED:  for publication on 31st September 2006
_____________________________________________________________________________________

London School of Economics and Political Science

LSE is delighted to announce the launch of the Tony Blair School of Government (TBSG).  Welcoming the news the Director of the LSE said:  "This exciting and prestigious development comes after the recent inauguration at LSE of the Enron Foundation for Business Accounting and its move into medical sciences with the Harold Shipman Institute of Geriatric Medicine.  It confirms our position as a world class leader and global player at the cutting edge of a wide range of high value-added academic disciplines."

TBSG will have the advantage of three endowed chairs at its launch:  the Peter Goldsmith Chair of the International Law of War; the Rupert Murdoch Chair of Corporate Media Responsibility; and the John Bolton Chair of United Nations Studies.  Applications for these posts are not invited, as they will be filled by modern methods.

Courses to be offered by the TBSG (fees set by market demand) include -

BSc War on Terror

This undergraduate program is guaranteed to exclude any study of the history of Western imperialism, exploitation and corporate interests, and also to avoid analysis of non-violent critical voices from the Muslim world.  Options include:  the role of torture in international relations (year 2) and extra-legal detention studies (year 3).  Set text:  "The Collected Speeches of George W. Bush"

MA in Refugee Studies

Entry requirements:  first degree (optional); experience in the security services (essential).  The focus of the course will be on techniques for excluding asylum seekers from advanced countries, including deterrence through pauperization of those claiming asylum and threats of repatriation to unsafe environments.  Research options are available on forced removals, detention of children and razor wire evaluation.  Guest lecturer Mr David Blunkett.  Students wishing to study the legal background, including the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, are very strongly advised to go elsewhere

Endowments for the new school demonstrate strong international support for this academic initiative, and donors bring access to an unrivalled pool of knowledge and field experience.  They include Halliburton and Bechtel in the United States, with their deep understanding of post-conflict social engineering; DHL in Germany, recently identified as leaders in the field of health service economics; and in the UK both Amey, who have so successfully demonstrated the tranferability of railway engineering techniques to the field of secondary education, and Octagon, who have showed their mastery of health service accounting in the refinancing of the Norwich and Norfolk PFI deal.

The new school will have the power to confer "honorary" degrees.

A representative of the University and College Union speaking for teaching and research staff of the LSE said:  "We strongly believe that the creation of this school is a [censored] day for the LSE and will [censored] its reputation in the academic world".

ENDS

Today the Guardian comments on a report on Climate change that lambastes successive governments for misleading the public on what has been achieved and what needs to be done. It goes on,

In the first big study of what households, business and government may have to do to cut carbon emissions, the leading climate change research body has revised upwards by 50% the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that need to be achieved by 2050.

The government-funded Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says this is necessary because successive governments have failed to include aviation or shipping emissions in their calculations.

At the moment, the government's estimate is that a 60% cut in emissions is needed to avoid a 2C increase in temperatures by 2050. But the authors of today's study conclude that a 90% cut in emissions is needed. Their data suggests that when aviation and shipping is factored in, UK carbon emissions have not fallen at all since 1990.

In a scathing report commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Cooperative Bank, the Tyndall Centre academics lambast successive governments for misleading the public on what has been achieved and what needs to be done.”

See full article ….

“Drastic action is needed if Britain is to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, a ground-breaking environmental report warns today.

The diseases are winning

The old scourges still kill millions

Forget bird flu, which, for all the hype, has killed only a few dozen people so far. We have more pressing worries when it comes to killer diseases - and things are getting worse, not better.

First polio, which has been the target of a concerted eradication campaign which almost succeeded - but not quite. It has broken free of the nooses being pulled tight around, it in two separate epidemics, one in Nigeria and one in Uttar Pradesh, India. The numbers look small: just 785 cases in Nigeria and 249 in India, but they represent the risk of an international epidemic and the rolling back of all the gains of the last few years. Click here for the report in the National Geographic.

Then there is TB, which this blog has mentioned before, but there is a new and worrying aspect: a major outbreak in South Africa of XDR-TB - that's Extreme Drug Resistant TB. That means it is resistant not just to the frontline drugs normally used to treat TB, but also to at least three of the six second-line drugs - which are in any case less effective or have serious side-effects - making it virtually incurable. The South African outbreak has had a 98% mortality rate, and that within 25 days. There have been 53 cases, a worryingly high number. To make matters worse, one patient refused treatment and discharged herself from hospital before the results of her tests were known, and is now walking around potentially infecting anyone she meets. This is not something we in the developed world can afford to ignore (though we probably will). One of those people the bolshie patient infects might be about to catch a plane to London. In any case it is madness to leave a pool of infection of a highly-infectious and incurable disease. If we had shown an appropriate degree of urgency towards treating normal TB while we had the chance this would not have happened; let's not make the same mistake again. Click here for the BBC's coverage, or here for the South African Broadcasting Corporation News.

Last but not least we have malaria. That is also developing drug resistance, while new research shows that there is a synergy with HIV. Unlike TB, which launches an opportunistic attack on the HIV-positive, Aids sufferers are no more likely than anyone else to catch malaria, but once they've got it the research shows that they become much more vulnerable to its depradations, putting the HIV-positive into a similar category to children and pregnant women. Click here for a report in Medical News Today, a US magazine.

Now let us look into the future, a future dominated by the threat of global warming. Scientists have already predicted that some tropical diseases, including malaria, will spread beyond their current boundaries as the world warms up. Throw in the pressure and dislocation (at the least) that climate change will bring to bear on civilisation. Let us be optimistic and assume that civilisation will manage to survive, at least in the developed world - it surely won't in Africa. We are going to be too hard pressed keeping our own heads above water (literally in some cases!) - and fighting off the millions of eco-refugees who want to cling to our liferaft - to worry much about polio, TB, Aids or malaria. They're going to have a field day.