Why are the oligarchic elites trying so hard to push their climate change policies through right now?
December 9, 2009 by Notsilvia Night
Why are the political and financial elites and their obedient servants in the their faith – sorry scientific community – pushing so madly for a final decision on a global Carbon Tax legislation at this very moment?
Why don´t they just wait until the scandal of “climate gate” has blown over?
Because those elites know they are wrong on the issue of human caused climate change.
They know that their lies are being revealed to the public piece by piece, faster and faster.
Most of all, they know that the planet is at the moment once again in a cooling phase as occurs every thirty or forty odd years.
Looking at the current lack of solar activity, this cooling phase might even be a more severe one than the one that ended 40 years ago, possibly as severe as during what is called the Maunder Minimum, a cooling phase lasting several decades during the 17. and 18. century.
In a couple of years their claims would no longer be tenable at all. The cooling trend would be obvious to even the most ideologically blinded environmentalist on earth.
The scheme of taxing global population, creating new revenue streams for the world´s financial markets establishing a central control over the world economy and preventing the rise of developing countries out of poverty, would lose out.
The political leaders of all less powerful countries are being bullied at the moment into signing a treaty which gives away their country’s national sovereignty to the leadership of the powerful ones, namely Britain and United States – and more to the point to the shadow leadership behind them, the world´s financial elites of Goldman Sachs and Co.
So why are so many decent people on the left fighting hand and foot for the profits in carbon trading of Goldman Sachs and Al Gore´s Generation Investment Management (GIM) company?
It´s a psychological problem; most people, especially on the left, want to be on the side of the good and caring people.
For over 40 years now we have been told that being environmentally minded means being a good person. It means we care about nature, wild animal life, about future generations of human beings.
Being environmentally minded means we are opposed to polluting the air and the water;
we are opposed to deforestation (especially in the rain-forest regions);
we are opposed to dumping our own poisonous waste unto the developing world;
we are opposed to rampant consumerism, in which driven by the advertisement industry we keep on buying and buying. Buying things we actually don´t need, things which do not make us either happier or more comfortable, just more indebted.
All those nice middle class people who want to feel good about themselves, they all support these ideas as part of the program for the left. And yes, there are plenty of real environmental issues we should be concerned about. But while marginalizing these real issues for the environment, the financial and right-wing ideological elites have – with the help of the media they control – succeeded to infiltrate their own agenda into the “green” movement with the bogus Anthropogenic Global Warming ideology.
The propaganda has been very successful indeed. People who want with all their heart to be “good” and decent are now supporting the agenda of the most selfish and anti-humanist forces on the planet.
The propaganda has created a belief-system which is hard to break. In Europe this belief-system is even more entrenched, since it has been developed for a over a few more years, hence it may be harder to break among Europeans than in the United States.
But after the “climate-gate” revelations chances aren’t so bad any more. A global storm is brewing against the liars (which include most of the mainline media) and their masters. No matter how bad it looks when we listen to the sound-bites of the top-level political hacks, down on the bottom, in the population, minds are changing en masse.
In just a little while, those who honestly strive to be the “good” guys (and girls) will realize that being good and caring about future generations means not caring for the Goldman Sachs carbon credits scheme.
The truth will indeed set us free from global tyranny:
Watch also:
Lord Monckton on Climategate at the 2nd International Climate Conference
on Vimeo.
Experts voice doubt about efficacy of Tamiflu
Press TV – December 9, 2009 13:43:15 GMT
While Tamiflu has been used to ward off swine flu and its complications in the current pandemic, an expert panel has voiced doubts about its efficacy.
The use of the antiviral drug, also known as oseltamivir, has increased by a huge number since the onset of the A/H1N1 flu in April, as the drug is considered as the most effective treatment against the flu.
According to a study published in the British Medical Journal, there is no clear evidence regarding the efficacy of Tamiflu in preventing swine flu complications such as pneumonia in healthy individuals.
A review of published studies revealed that Tamiflu reduces flu symptoms in less than a day; it, however, has no dramatic influence on reducing the complications of the flu.
“We now conclude there is insufficient evidence to describe the effects of Tamiflu on complications of influenza or the drug’s toxicity,” said lead researcher Tom Jefferson.
“Governments around the world have spent billions of pounds on a drug that the scientific community now finds itself unable to judge,” said BMJ’s editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee.
Roche, the manufacturer of the drug, stressed that there are sufficient studies reporting the benefits of Tamiflu in protecting individuals against the fatal swine flu.
“We fully stand behind the robustness of the data and the integrity of that data, particularly the efficacy and safety of Tamiflu, the conduct of our clinical studies and the publication process,” said David Reddy, Roche’s pandemic taskforce leader.
Guru Of Science Czar Holdren Called For Doubling CO2 Emissions
Paul Joseph Watson
December 8, 2009
The guru of President Barack Obama’s science advisor, John P. Holdren, who in his 1977 book Ecoscience called for draconian population control measures including sterilizing the water supply and introducing forced abortions, wrote that large amounts of carbon dioxide should be pumped into the atmosphere in order to aid plant growth and solve the food crisis.
Lamenting on page 140 of his 1954 book The Challenge of Man’s Future, Harrison Brown – a geochemist who supervised the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project, wrote that “the earth’s atmosphere contains only a minute concentration – about 0.03 percent” – Brown observed, “It has been demonstrated that a tripling of carbon-dioxide concentration in the air will approximately double the growth rates of tomatoes, alfalfa, and sugar beets.”
Brown was a guru to White House science czar John Holdren, who co-edited a 1986 book in his honor.
“There are between 18 and 20 tons of carbon dioxide over every acre of the earth’s surface,” Brown noted on page 142. “In order to double the amount in the atmosphere, at least 500 billion tons of coal would have to be burned – an amount six times greater than that which has been consumed during all of human history.”
The fact that Holdren was a disciple of Brown again goes to show how dramatically Holdren’s convictions about climate change have flip-flopped in order to accommodate whatever scientific fad holds sway at the time.
In the 70’s, Holdren was busy talking up the drastic threat of global cooling, warning that it would produce giant tidal waves and environmental devastation.
In a 1971 essay entitled “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide,” Holdren and his co-author Paul Ehrlich wrote that global cooling would ensue as a result of , “a reduced transparency of the atmosphere to incoming light as a result of urban air pollutions (smoke, aerosols), agriculture air pollution (dust), and volcanic oil.”
Holdren and Ehrlich predicted, “a mere 1 percent increase in low cloud cover would decrease the surface temperature by .8C” and that “a decrease of 4C would probably be sufficient to cause another ice age.”
They continued: “Even more dramatic results are possible, however; for instance, a sudden outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap, induced by added weight, could generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.”
Of course, Holdren and his ilk were spectacularly wrong with their doomsday predictions about global cooling, but almost entirely the same crowd are now telling us that global warming is a gargantuan threat and that only a carbon tax paid directly to the World Bank can stop it.
Deja Vu all over again: climate worries of today also happened in the 20’s and 30’s
We could all learn a little bit from our weather history. We could all step back a bit and look at what previously happened in our climate changes before we make a rush to judgement to try to “fix” a problem that is very likely just another natural variance on the upswing, soon to be followed by a downturn.
There are quite a number of articles on “climate change” in the past, for further reading, try looking at some of these article links submitted by readers of this forum from the New York Times newspaper archives. Just click on the date. Thanks to Tim Blair for compiling the list below from our reader submitted links as well as his own research.
• 1923:
Glaciers have disappeared and land once covered with field ice is bare.
• 1924:
Glaciers are moving from their age-old beds, pouring greater quantities of ice into the sea than recorded history has known. Broad areas of land are sinking to new levels. A number of islands have disappeared.
• 1930:
The Alpine glaciers are in full retreat. Out of 102 glaciers observed by Professor P.L. Mercanton of the University of Lausanne and his associates more than twothirds have been found to be shrinking.
• 1935:
The great glaciers of the West, last remnants of the Ice Age on continental United States, have been retreating from their strongholds in the mountains at double time since last year.
• 1947:
A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a “serious international problem,” Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist, said today.
There are also many reports of the climate turning colder:
• 1895:
The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.
• 1961:
Winters Since ‘40 Found Colder In Studies by Weather Bureau; Data Indicate, a Reversal of a Warming Trend That Began in 1881
• 1961:
After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.
• 1975:
Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate Is Changing; a Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable
• 1978:
An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.
Thus nature, and the NYT, balances itself. The paper really should return to the Grandfather Index of climate judgment:
• 1934:
America is believed by Weather Bureau scientists to be on the verge of a change of climate, with a return to increasing rains and deeper snows and the colder Winters of grandfather’s day.
• 1936:
The recent severely cold weather, following, in the main, many mild Winters, has caused people throughout the country to ask: “Does this portend a return to the reputed cold Winters of ‘granddad’s day’ years ago?”
Yep; all over the US, that’s exactly what people were asking. But listen to folks from the actual Granddad’s Day era and they’ll tell you the real cold was earlier still:
• 1890:
Is our climate changing? … The older inhabitants tell us that the Winters are not as cold now as when they were young …
Also, there are fewer mastodons. Last word to the ominously-named, but perfectly sensible, Mr Scarr:
• 1924:
Some People Always Think the Climate Is Changing, But Mr. Scarr Says There Is Nothing in His Records to Justify the Notion
There Is No ‘Consensus’ On Global Warming
By Prof Richard S. Lindzen – Wall Street Journal – 2006-06-26
According to Al Gore’s new film “An Inconvenient Truth,” we’re in for “a planetary emergency”: melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms — unless we change the way we live now.
Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore’s gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush’s obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that “the debate in the scientific community is over.”
That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this “debate” actually is in the first place.
The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists “don’t have any models that give them a high level of confidence” one way or the other and went on to claim — in his defense — that scientists “don’t know… They just don’t know.”
So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the “consensus.” Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore’s preferred global-warming template — namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore’s movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.
They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don’t know why.
The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia — mosquitoes don’t require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.
Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can’t attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can’t think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.
A general characteristic of Mr. Gore’s approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended — at least not in terms of the actual science.
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early ’70s, increased again until the ’90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.
There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatsoever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas — albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the infamous “summary for policy makers” reported ambiguously that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument — e.g., we can’t think of an alternative — to support human attribution. But the “summary for policy makers” claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that “In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that “The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.” This was sufficient for CNN’s Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a “unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room.” Well, no.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words “global climate change” produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration’s coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.” This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: “Case closed.” What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.
So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists — especially those outside the area of climate dynamics.
Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a “moral” crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce — if we’re lucky.
Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.
Australia: Resurrected emissions scheme appears doomed
December 3, 2009
The Federal Government’s third attempt at getting its emissions trading scheme through Parliament already appears to be heading for defeat.
The Government says it wants to give the Opposition another chance to support the legislation.
It plans to reintroduce the scheme in February, even though the Senate yesterday rejected it for a second time.
But Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says he expects the Coalition’s position to harden over the summer break.
He has ruled out taking an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax to the next election as Coalition policy and says there is “very little” chance the Coalition would vote for one in February.
Nationals Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce does not think the public will be impressed by the idea of a third vote.
“The Australian people will just get furious with you. We’ve made our decision, you’re playing a game and we’re sick of it,” he said.
DuPont Accused of Massive Water Pollution
December 2, 2009
By SONYA ANGELICA DIEHN
COLUMBUS, Ohio (CN) – DuPont has been covering up and refusing to take responsibility for its toxic pollution of the Ohio River for a quarter of a century, and the poisons it uses to make Teflon stay in the environment for 2,000 years, a nonprofit water association claims in Federal Court.
The Little Hocking Water Association says that air and water emissions of perflourinated compounds from DuPont’s Washington Works Plant have been polluting its wellfields since 1984.
These chemicals, which DuPont uses to make Teflon products, stay in the environment for up to 2,000 years, and accumulate in the tissue of living things, causing developmental and immunological problems, the water group says.
It claims at least four wells on 45 acres along the Ohio River were polluted by DuPont’s disposal of hazardous waste in landfills, injection wells and burn pits.
The water association claims that DuPont hid the threats of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, despite knowing of its risks – including the birth of deformed babies to its employees in 1981.
DuPont allegedly acknowledged the contamination by buying out one local water supplier, but refused to extend such an offer to Little Hocking. DuPont for many years also refused to allow the single laboratory with the ability to test for such substances to do so, the group says.
Little Hocking claims that in 1991 DuPont set a “community exposure guideline” for the chemical, a liver toxin, at 1 part per billion. Sampling from the water association’s wellfields in 2001 showed levels of 7.69 ppb, the complaint states. Current tests put that figure as high as 78 ppb.
A March 2009 level of .4 ppb, set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is not enough to protect the water association’s 12,000 consumers, it says, due to their chronic exposure and potential “synergistic” effects with other perflourinated compounds in the water.
The group cites a 2003 class action in which the court determined that DuPont’s release was active and intentional. Little Hocking says that an EPA consent order does not adequately protect its customers.
The Water Association says it has suffered financial hardship since 2001, when it began to address the problem on its own. This includes funding a bottled water program, for which it claims DuPont promised to it; it says DuPont stopped doing so in 2007.
The water association wants DuPont ordered to stop polluting, clean up what it has done, and conduct a scientific study on the effects of PFOA. It is represented by David Altman of Cincinnati.
Are They Really Oil Wars?
By Ismael Hossein-zadeh
July 9, 2008
A most widely-cited factor behind the recent U.S. wars of choice is said to be oil. “No Blood for Oil” has been a rallying cry for most of the opponents of the war. While some of these opponents argue that the war is driven by the U.S. desire for cheap oil, others claim that it is prompted by big oil’s wish for high oil prices and profits. Interestingly, most antiwar forces use both claims interchangeably without paying attention to the fact that they are diametrically-opposed assertions.
Not only do the two arguments contradict each other, but each argument is also wanting and unconvincing on its own grounds; not because the U.S. does not wish for cheap oil, or because Big Oil does not desire higher oil prices, but because war is no longer the way to control or gain access to energy resources. Colonial-type occupation or direct control of energy resources is no longer efficient or economical and has, therefore, been abandoned for more than four decades.
The view that recent U.S. military adventures in the Middle East and the broader Central Asia are driven by energy considerations is further reinforced by the dubious theory of Peak Oil, which maintains that, having peaked, world oil resources are now dwindling and that, therefore, war power and military strength are key to access or control of the shrinking energy resources.
In this study I will first argue that the Peak Oil theory is unscientific, unrealistic, and perhaps even fraudulent. I will then show that war and military force are no longer the necessary or appropriate means to gain access to sources of energy, and that resorting to military measures can, indeed, lead to costly, not cheap, oil. Next, I will demonstrate that, despite the lucrative spoils of war resulting from high oil prices and profits, Big Oil prefers peace and stability, not war and geopolitical turbulence, in global energy markets. Finally, I will argue a case that behind the drive to war and military adventures in the Middle East lie some powerful special interests (vested in war, militarism, and geopolitical concerns of Israel) that use oil as an issue of “national interest”—as a façade or pretext—in order to justify military adventures to derive high dividends, both economic and geopolitical, from war.
Has Oil Really Peaked—and Is It Running Out?
Peak oil thesis, as noted above, maintains that world oil reserves, having reached their maximum capacity, are now dwindling—with grave consequences of oil shortage and high energy prices. While this has led many to call for more vigorous conservation, it has led others to argue in favor of unrestrained exploration and extraction of oil reserves, especially those located in the Alaskan Wildlife regions.
Significant policy and/or political implications follow from the view that oil is running out. For one thing, this view provides fodder for the cannons of war profiteering militarists who are constantly on the look out to invent new enemies and find new pretexts for continued war and escalation of military spending. For another, it tends to disarm many antiwar forces that accept this thesis and, therefore, “internalize responsibility for U.S. foreign policy every time they fill their gas tank. Thus they own the wars.”[1]
The Peak Oil thesis serves as a powerful trap and a clever manipulation in that it lets the real forces of war and militarism (the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby) “off the hook; it is a fabulous redirection. All evils are blamed on a commodity upon which we are all utterly dependent.”[2]
The fact, however, is that there is no hard evidence that oil has peaked, or that global oil reserves are shrinking, or that the current skyrocketing price of oil is due to a supply shortage. (As shown below, there is actually an oil surplus, no shortage.)
Peak oil theory is not altogether new. It was originally floated around in the 1940s, arguing that world oil reserves would be exhausted within the next two decades or so. It then resurfaced in the 1970s and early 1980s in reaction to the oil price hikes of those years—which were, incidentally, precipitated not by oil shortages but by international political convulsions, revolutions and wars. But it died down once the price of oil fell back to pre-crises levels.
As recent geopolitical convulsions in the Middle East (especially the U.S. war on Iraq, and the resultant booming speculation in oil markets) have triggered a new round of oil price hikes, Peak Oil theory has once again become fashionable. The theory is being promoted not only by war profiteers and proponents of an unbridled domestic oil exploration and extraction, especially in Alaska, but also by some apparently antiwar liberals such as Michael T. Klare and James H. Kunstler.[3]
Peak oil theory is based on a number of assumptions and omissions that make it less than reliable. To begin with, it discounts or disregards the fact that energy-saving technologies have drastically improved (and will continue to further improve) the efficiency of oil consumption. Evidence shows that, for example, “over a period of five years (1994-99), U.S. GDP expanded over 20 percent while oil usage rose by only nine percent. Before the 1973 oil shock, the ratio was about one to one.”[4]
Second, Peak Oil theory pays scant attention to the drastically enabling new technologies that have made (and will continue to make) possible discovery and extraction of oil reserves that were inaccessible only a short time ago. One of the results of the more efficient means of research and development has been a far higher success rate in finding new oil fields. The success rate has risen in twenty years from less than 70 percent to over 80 percent. Computers have helped to reduce the number of dry holes. Horizontal drilling has boosted extraction. Another important development has been deep-water offshore drilling, which the new technologies now permit. Good examples are the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and more recently, the promising offshore oil fields of West Africa.[5]
Third, Peak Oil theory also pays short shrift to what is sometimes called non-conventional oil. These include Canada’s giant reserves of extra-heavy bitumen that can be processed to produce conventional oil. Although this was originally considered cost inefficient, experts working in this area now claim that they have brought down the cost from over $20 a barrel to $8 per barrel. Similar developments are taking place in Venezuela. It is thanks to developments like these that since 1970, world oil reserves have more than doubled, despite the extraction of hundreds of millions of barrels.[6]
Fourth, Peak Oil thesis pays insufficient attention to energy sources other than oil. These include solar, wind, non-food bio-fuel, and nuclear energies. They also include natural gas. Gas is now about 25 percent of energy demand worldwide. It is estimated that by 2050 it will be the main source of energy in the world. A number of American, European, and Japanese firms have and are investing heavily in developing fuel cells for cars and other vehicles that would significantly reduce gasoline consumption.[7]
Fifth, proponents of Peak Oil tend to exaggerate the impact of the increased oil demand coming from China and India on both the amount and the price of oil in global markets. The alleged disparity between supply and demand is said to be due to the rapidly growing demand coming from China and India. But that rapid growth in demand is largely offset by a number of counterbalancing factors. These include slower growth in U.S. demand due to its slower economic growth, efficient energy utilization in industrially advanced countries, and increases in oil production by OPEC, Russia, and other oil producing countries.
Finally, and perhaps more importantly, claims of “peaked and dwindling” oil are refuted by the available facts and figures on global oil supply. Statistical evidence shows that there is absolutely no supply-demand imbalance in global oil markets. Contrary to the claims of the proponents of Peak Oil and champions of war and militarism, the current oil price shocks are a direct consequence of the destabilizing wars and geopolitical insecurity in the Middle East, not oil shortages. These include not only the raging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the threat of a looming war against Iran. The record of soaring oil prices shows that anytime there is a renewed U.S. military threat against Iran, fuel prices move up several notches.
The war also contributes to the escalation of fuel prices in indirect ways—for example, by plunging the U.S. ever deeper into debt and depreciating the dollar, or by creating favorable grounds for speculation. As oil is priced largely in U.S. dollars, oil exporting countries ask for more dollars per barrel of oil as the dollar loses value. Perhaps more importantly, an atmosphere of war and geopolitical instability in global oil markets serves as an auspicious ground for hoarding and speculation in commodity markets, especially oil, which is heavily contributing to the recently soaring oil prices.
As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. . . . Since the advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts, control of oil prices has left OPEC and gone to Wall Street. It is a classic case of the ‘tail that wags the dog.’[8]
Wall Street financial giants that created the Third World debt crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the tech bubble in the 1990s, and the housing bubble in the 2000s are now hard at work creating the oil bubble. By purchasing large numbers of futures contracts, and thereby pushing up futures prices to even higher levels than current prices, speculators have provided a financial incentive for oil companies to buy even more oil and place it in storage. A refiner will purchase extra oil today, even if it costs $115 per barrel, if the futures price is even higher.[9]
This has led to a steady rise in crude oil inventories over the last two years, “resulting in US crude oil inventories that are now higher than at any time in the previous eight years. The large influx of speculative investment into oil futures has led to a situation where we have both high supplies of crude oil and high crude oil prices. . . . In fact, during this period global supplies have exceeded demand, according to the US Department of Energy.”[10]
The fact that the skyrocketing oil prices of late have been accompanied by a surplus in global oil markets was also brought to the attention of President George W. Bush by Saudi officials when he asked them during a recent trip to the kingdom to increase production in order to stem the rising prices. Saudi officials reminded the President that “there is plenty of oil on the market. Iran has put some 30 million barrels of oil that it can’t sell into floating storage. ‘If we produced more oil, it wouldn’t find buyers,’ says the Saudi source. It wouldn’t affect the price at all.”[11]
And why producing more oil “wouldn’t affect the price at all”? Well, because what is driving the soaring oil prices is not shortage but speculation: “with so much investment money sloshing around in the commodities markets, the Saudis calculate they have no hope of controlling short-term price fluctuations. They blame the recent price run-ups on speculation and fear of shortages [not real shortages], factors they say are beyond their control.”[12]
War for Cheap Oil?
The widely-shared view that the U.S. desire for access to abundant and cheap oil lurks behind the Bush administration’s drive to war in the Middle East rests on the implicit but dubious assumption that access to energy resources requires direct control of oil fields and/or oil producing countries. There are at least three problems with this postulation.
First, if control of or influence over oil producing countries in the Middle East is a requirement for access to cheap oil, the United States already enjoys significant influence over some of the major oil producers in the region—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and a number of other smaller producers. Why, then, would the U.S. want to bring about war and political turmoil in the region that might undermine that long and firmly-established influence?
Let us assume for a moment that the neoconservative militarists are sincere in their alleged desire to bring about democratic rule and representational government in the Middle East. Let us further assume that they succeed in realizing this purported objective. Would, then, the thus-emerging democratic governments, representing the wishes of the majority of their citizens, be as accommodating to U.S. economic and geopolitical objectives, including its oil needs, as are its currently friendly rulers in the region? Most probably not.
Secondly, and more importantly, access to oil no longer requires control of oil fields or oil producers—as was the case in times past. For more than a century, that is, from the early days of oil extraction in the United States in the 1870s until the mid-1970s, the price of oil was determined administratively, that is, by independent producers operating in different parts of the world without having to compete with each other. Under those circumstances, colonial or imperial wars of conquest and occupation were crucial to the control of oil (and other) resources.
Beginning with the 1950s, however, that pattern of local, non-competitive price determination began to gradually change in favor of regional and/or international markets. By the mid 1970s, an internationally competitive oil market emerged that effectively ended the century-old pattern of local, administrative pricing. Today, oil prices (like most other commodity prices) are determined largely by the forces of supply and demand in competitive global energy markets; and any country or company can have as much oil as they wish if they pay the going market (or spot) price.[13]
To the extent that competitive oil markets and/or prices are occasionally manipulated, such subversions of competitive market forces are often brought about not so much by OPEC or other oil producing countries as by manipulative speculations of financial giants in New York and London. As was discussed earlier, gigantic Wall Street financial institutions have accomplished this feat through “innovative” financial instruments such as establishment of energy hedge funds and speculative oil futures markets in New York and London.[14]
It is true that collective supply decisions of oil producing countries can, and sometimes does, affect the competitively determined market price. But a number of important issues need to be considered here.
To begin with, although such supply manipulations obviously affect or influence market-determined prices, they do not determine those prices. In other words, competitive international oil markets determine its price with or without oil producers’ supply manipulations. Such supply managements are, however, designed not to create volatility in energy markets, or chronic oil price hikes. Instead, they are designed to stabilize global oil prices because oil exporting countries prefer stability, predictability and long-term planning for their economic development and industrialization projects. Here is how Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo describe this relationship:
As a result, we conclude that the global oil market is the prime mover [i.e., prime determinant of oil price] and OPEC indeed follows its trajectory accordingly and consistently. . . . When market price (both spot and futures) is falling, OPEC decreases its output; when market price is rising, OPEC attempts to increase its output; and when market price is steady, OPEC keeps its output unchanged. . . . And, this is a kind of oil market we have experienced after the dust settled following the crisis of de-cartelization and globalization of oil industry in the 1970s.[15]
Producers’ policy to sometimes curtail or limit the supply of oil, the so-called “limited flow” policy, is designed to raise the actual trading price above the market-determined price in order to keep high-cost U.S. producers in business while leaving low-cost Middle East producers with an above average, or “super,” profit. While for low-cost producers this limited flow policy is largely a matter of making more or less profits, for high-cost U.S. producers it is a matter of survival, of being able to stay in or go out of business—an important but rarely mentioned or acknowledged fact.
A hypothetical numerical example might be helpful here. Suppose that the market-determined, or free-flow, price of oil is $30 per barrel. Further, suppose this price entails an average rate of profit of 10 percent, or $3 per barrel. The word “average” in this context refers to average conditions of production, that is, producers who produce under average conditions of production in terms of productivity and cost of production. This means that producers who produce under better-than-average conditions, that is, low-cost, high productivity producers, will make a profit higher than $3 per barrel while high-cost, low efficiency producers will end up making less than $3 per barrel. This also means that some of the high-cost producers may end up going out of business altogether. Now, if the limited flow policy raises the actual trading price to $35 per barrel, it will raise the profits of all producers accordingly, thereby also keeping in business some high-cost producers that might otherwise have gone out of business.
Furthermore, supply manipulation (in pursuit of price manipulation) is not limited to the oil industry. In today’s economic environment of giant corporations and big businesses, many of the major industries try, and often succeed in controlling supply in order to control price. Take, for example, the automobile industry. Theoretically, automobile producers could flood the market with a huge supply of cars. But that would not be good business as it would lower prices and profits. So, they control supply, just as do oil producers, in order to manipulate price. During the past several decades, the price of automobiles, in real terms, has been going up every year, at least to the tune of inflation. During this period, the industry (and the economy in general) has enjoyed a many-fold increase in labor productivity. Increased labor productivity is supposed to translate into lower costs and, therefore, lower prices. Yet, that has not materialized in the case of this industry—as it has in the case of, for example, pocket calculators or computers.
Another example of price control through supply manipulation is the case of U.S. grain producers. The so-called “set aside” policy that pays farmers not to cultivate part of their land in order to curtail supply and prop up price is not different—nay, it is worse— than OPEC’s policy of supply and/or price manipulation.
It is also necessary to keep in mind that OPEC’s desire to sometimes limit the supply of oil in order to shore up its price is limited by a number of factors. For one thing, the share, and hence the influence, of Middle Eastern oil producers as a percentage of world oil production has steadily declined over time, from almost 40 percent when OPEC was established to about 30 percent today.[16] For another, OPEC members are not unmindful of the fact that inordinately high oil prices can hurt their own long-term interests as this might prompt oil importers to economize on oil consumption and search for alternative sources of energy, thereby limiting producers’ export markets.
OPEC members also know that inordinately high oil prices could precipitate economic recessions in oil importing countries that would, once again, lower demand for their oil. In addition, high oil prices tend to raise the cost of oil producers’ imports of manufactured products as high energy costs are bound to affect production costs of those manufactured products.
War for Expensive Oil?
Now let us consider the widely-shared view that attributes the Bush administration’s drive to war to the influence of big oil companies in pursuit of higher oil prices and profits. As noted, this is obviously the opposite of the “war for cheap oil” argument, as it claims that Big Oil tends to instigate war and political tension in the Middle East in order to cause an oil price hike and increase its profits. Like the “war for cheap oil” theory, this claim is not supported by facts. Although the claim has an element of a prima facie reasonableness, that apparently facile credibility rests more on precedent and perception than reality. Part of the perception is due to the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were “oil men” before coming to the White House. But the fact is that George W. Bush was never more than an unsuccessful petty oil prospector and Dick Cheney headed a company, the notorious Halliburton, that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon.
The larger part of the perception, however, stems from the fact that oil companies do benefit from oil price hikes that result from war and political turbulence in the Middle East. Such benefits are, however, largely incidental. Surely, American oil companies would welcome the spoils of the war (that result from oil price hikes) in Iraq or anywhere else in the world. From the largely incidental oil price hikes that follow war and political convulsion, some observers automatically conclude that, therefore, Big Oil must have been behind the war.[17] But there is no evidence that, at least in the case of the current invasion of Iraq, oil companies pushed for or supported the war.
On the contrary, there is strong evidence that, in fact, oil companies did not welcome the war because they prefer stability and predictability to periodic oil spikes that follow war and political convulsion: “Looking back over the last 20 years, there is plenty of evidence showing the industry’s push for stability and cooperation with Middle Eastern countries and leaders, and the U.S. government’s drive for hegemony works against the oil industry.”[18] As Thierry Desmarest, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of France’s giant oil company, TotalFinaElf, put it, “A few months of cash generation is not a big deal. Stable, not volatile, prices and a $25 price (per barrel) would be convenient for everyone.”[19]
It is true that for a long time, from the beginning of Middle Eastern oil exploration and discovery in the early twentieth century until the mid-1970s, colonial and/or imperial powers controlled oil either directly or through control of oil producing countries—at times, even by military force. But that pattern of colonial or imperialist exploitation of global markets and resources has changed now. Most of the current theories of imperialism and hegemony that continue invoking that old pattern of Big Oil behavior tend to suffer from an ahistorical perspective. Today, as discussed earlier, even physically occupying and controlling another country’s oil fields will not necessarily be beneficial to oil interests. Not only will military adventures place the operations of current energy projects at jeopardy, but they will also make the future plans precarious and unpredictable. Big Oil interests, of course, know this; and that’s why they did not countenance the war on Iraq: “The big oil companies were not enthusiastic about the Iraqi war,” says Fareed Mohamedi of PFC Energy, an energy consultancy firm based in Washington D.C. that advises petroleum firms. “Corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco want stability, and this is not what Bush is providing in Iraq and the Gulf region,” adds Mohamedi.[20]
Big Oil interests also know that not only is war no longer the way to gain access to oil, it is in fact an obstacle to gaining that access. Exclusion of U.S. oil companies from vast oil resources in countries such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and a number of central Asian countries due to militaristic U.S. foreign policy is a clear testament to this fact. Many of these countries (including, yes, Iran) would be glad to have major U.S. oil companies invest, explore and extract oil from their rich reserves. Needless to say that U.S. oil companies would be delighted to have access to those oil resources. But U.S. champions of war and militarism have successfully torpedoed such opportunities through their unilateral wars of aggression and their penchant for a Cold War-like international atmosphere.
When Vladimir Putin first became president of Russia he was willing to allow American energy companies to continue with the one-sided contracts they had drawn up during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. Putin built a seemingly trusting relationship with George Bush who looked into Putin’s soul and liked what he saw. The two leaders grew even closer in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon—when Russia provided “help for America’s invasion of Afghanistan.” Soon after this generous cooperation, however, “Bush repudiated the anti-ballistic missile treaty in the belief that America could develop the technology for winning a nuclear war. This posed a huge strategic threat to Russia.”[21]
Describing the heavy-handed, imperial U.S. policy toward Russia, Stephen F. Cohen writes: “The real US policy has been very different—a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia’s post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington’s approach to Soviet Communist Russia.”[22]
Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM treaty not merely posed an existential threat to Russia but was almost a betrayal of the trust that Putin had put in him. This led to Putin’s disenchantment with America. “Eventually he seems to have decided that every time America transgressed against Russian interests he would retaliate by stopping another American company from exploiting Russian resources.”[23]
During the past few decades, major oil companies have consistently opposed U.S. policies and military threats against countries like Iran, Iraq, and Libya. They have, indeed, time and again, lobbied U.S. foreign policy makers for the establishment of peaceful relations and diplomatic rapprochement with those countries. The Iran-Libya Sanction Act of 1996 (ILSA) is a strong testament to the fact that oil companies nowadays view wars, economic sanctions, and international political tensions as harmful to their long-term business interests and, accordingly, strive for peace, not war, in international relations.
On March 15, 1995 President Clinton issued Executive Order 12957 which banned all U.S. contributions to the development of Iran’s petroleum resources, a crushing blow to the oil industry, especially to the Conoco oil company that had just signed a $1 billion contract to develop fields in Iran. The deal marked a strong indication that Iran was willing to improve its relationship with the United States, only to have President Clinton effectively nullify it. Two months later, sighting “an extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the U.S.,” President Clinton issued another order, 1259, that expanded the sanctions to become a total trade and investment embargo against Iran. Then a year later came ILSA which extended the sanctions imposed on Iran to Libya as well.
It is no secret that the major force behind the Iran-Libya Sanction Act was the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main Zionist lobby in Washington. The success of AIPAC in passing ILSA through both the Congress and the White House over the opposition of the major U.S. oil companies is testament to the fact that, in the context of U.S. policy in the Middle East, even the influence of the oil industry pales vis-à-vis the influence of the Zionist lobby.[24]
ILSA was originally to be imposed on both U.S. and foreign companies. However, in the end it was the U.S. companies that suffered the most due to waivers that were given to European companies after pressure from the European Union. In 1996 the EU pursued its distaste of ILSA by lodging complaints with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the U.S. and through adopting “blocking legislation” that would prevent EU companies from complying with ILSA. Meanwhile, the contract that Iran had originally signed with Conoco was awarded to TotalFinaElf of France for $760 million; the deal also left the door open for Total to sign an additional contract with Iran for $2 billion in 1997 with their partners Gazprom and Petronas.
In May of 1997 major U.S. oil companies such as Conoco, Exxon, Atlantic Richfield, and Occidental Petroleum joined other (non-military) U.S. companies to create an anti-sanction coalition. Earlier that same year Conoco’s Chief Executive Archie Dunham publicly took a stance against unilateral U.S. sanctions by stating that “U.S. companies, not rogue regimes, are the ones that suffer when the United States imposes economic sanctions.” Texaco officials have also argued that the U.S. can be more effective in bringing about change in other countries by allowing U.S. companies to do business with those countries instead of imposing economic sanctions that tend to be counterproductive.
Alas, Washington’s perverse, misguided and ineffectual policy of economic sanctions for political purposes—often in compliance with the wishes of some powerful special interests—continues unabated. “Even with the increased pro-trade lobbying efforts of the oil industry and groups like USAEngage, whose membership ranges from farmers and small business owners to Wall Street executives and oilmen, the lack of support from Washington and the Bush administration could not allow them [major oil companies and other non-military transnational companies] to overtake or counteract the already rolling momentum of AIPAC’s influence on Middle East policy or the renewal of ISLA.”[25]
Despite the fact that oil companies nowadays view war and political turmoil in the Middle East as detrimental to their long-term interests and, therefore, do not support policies that are conducive to war and militarism, and despite the fact that war is no longer the way to gain access to oil, the widespread perception that every U.S. military engagement in the region, including the current invasion of Iraq, is prompted by oil considerations continues. The question is why?
Behind the Myth of War for Oil
The widely-shared but erroneous view that recent U.S. wars of choice are driven by oil concerns is partly due to precedence: the fact that for a long time military force was key to colonial or imperialist control and exploitation of foreign markets and resources, including oil. It is also partly due to perception: the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were “oil men” before coming to the White House. But, as noted earlier, George W. Bush was never more than an ineffective minor oil prospector and Dick Cheney was never really an oil man; he headed the notorious Halliburton company that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon.
But the major reason for the persistence of this pervasive myth seems to stem from certain deliberate efforts that are designed to perpetuate the legend in order to camouflage some real economic and geopolitical special interests that drive U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. There is evidence that both the military-industrial complex and hard-line Zionist proponents of “greater Israel” disingenuously use oil (as an issue of national interest) in order to disguise their own nefarious special interests and objectives: justification of continued expansion of military spending, extension of sales markets for military hardware, and recasting the geopolitical map of the Middle East in favor of Israel.
There is also evidence that for every dollar’s worth of oil imported from the Persian Gulf region the Pentagon takes five dollars out of the Federal budget to “secure” the flow of that oil! This is a clear indication that the claim that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East is due to oil consideration is a fraud .[26]
While anecdotal, an example of how partisans of war and militarism use oil as a pretext to cover up the real forces behind war and militarism can be instructive. In the early stages of the invasion of Iraq, when the anti-occupation resistance in Iraq had not yet taken shape and the invasion seemed to be proceeding smoothly, two of the leading champions of the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, often boasting of the apparent or pre-mature success of the invasion at those early stages, gave frequent news conferences and press reports. During one of those press reports (at the end of an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore in early June 2003), Wolfowitz was asked why North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found. Wolfowitz’s response was: “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”[27]
Many opponents of the war jumped on this statement, so to speak, as corroboration of what they had been saying or suspecting all along: that the war on Iraq was prompted by oil interests. Yet, there is strong evidence—some of which presented in the preceding pages—that for the last several decades oil interests have not favored war and turbulence in the Middle East, including the current invasion of Iraq. Nor is war any longer the way to gain access to oil. Major oil companies, along with many other non-military transnational corporations, have lobbied both the Clinton and Bush administrations in support of changing the aggressive, militaristic U.S. policy toward countries like Iran, Iraq and Libya in favor of establishing normal, non-confrontational trade and diplomatic relations. Such efforts at normalization of trade and diplomatic relations, however, have failed time and again precisely because Wolfowitz and his cohorts, working through AIPAC and other war-mongering think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) oppose them.
These think tanks, in collaboration with a whole host of similar militaristic lobbying entities like Center for Security Affairs (CSA) and National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), working largely as institutional façades to serve the defacto alliance of the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby, have repeatedly thwarted efforts at peace and reconciliation in the Middle East—often over the objections and frustrations of major U.S. oil companies. It is a well established fact that Wolfowitz has been a devoted champion of these jingoistic think tanks and their aggressive unilateral policies in the Middle East. In light of his professional record and political loyalties, his claim that he championed the war on Iraq because of oil considerations can be characterized only as demagogic: it contradicts his political record and defies the policies he has been advocating for the last several decades; it is designed to divert attention from the main forces behind the war, the armaments lobby and the pro-Israel lobby.
These powerful interests are careful not to draw attention to the fact that they are the prime instigators of war and militarism in the Middle East. Therefore, they tend to deliberately perpetuate the popular perception that oil is the driving force behind the war in the region. They even do not mind having their aggressive foreign policies labeled as imperialistic as long as imperialism implies some vague or general connotations of hegemony and domination, that is, as long as it thus camouflages the real, special interests behind the war and political turbulence in the Middle East.
The oil and other non-military transnational corporations’ aversion to war and military adventures in the Middle East stem, of course, from the logical behavior of global or transnational capital in the era of integrated world markets, which tends to be loath to war and international political convulsions. Considering the fact that both importers and exporters of oil prefer peace and stability to war and militarism, why would, then, the flow of oil be in jeopardy if the powerful beneficiaries of war and political tension in the Middle East stopped their aggressive policies in the region?
Partisans of war in the Middle East tend to portray U.S. military operations in the region as reactions to terrorism and political turbulence in order to “safeguard the interests of the United States and its allies.” Yet, a close scrutiny of action-reaction or cause-effect relationship between U.S. military adventures and socio-political turbulence in the region reveals that perhaps the causality is the other way around. That is, social upheavals and political convulsions in the Middle East are more likely to be the result, not the cause, of U.S. foreign policy in the region, especially its one-sided, prejudicial Israeli-Palestinian policy. The U.S. policy of war and militarism in the region seems to resemble the behavior of a corrupt cop, or a mafia godfather, who would instigate fights and frictions in the neighborhood or community in order to, then, portray his parasitic role as necessary for the safety and security of the community and, in the process, fill out his deep pockets.
No matter how crucial oil is to the world economy, the fact remains that it is, after all, a commodity. As such, international trade in oil is as important to its importers as it is to its exporters. There is absolutely no reason that, in a world free of the influence of the beneficiaries of war and militarism and their powerful lobbies (the armaments and the pro-Israel lobbies), the flow of oil could not be guaranteed by international trade conventions and commercial treaties.
Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of the recently published The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.
References
[1] Ron Andreas, reporter/researcher, e-mail correspondence with the author.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Holt paperbacks 2002); James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Grove/Atlantic, 2005).
[4] Eliyahu Kanovsky, “Oil: Who’s Really Over a Barrel?” Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2003).
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Wall Street Journal (17 May 2001); cited in Eliyahu Kantovsky, Ibid.
[7] The Wall Street Journal (10 March 1998); cited in Eliyahu Kantovsky, Ibid.
[8] F. William Engdahl, “Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price Is Pure Speculation,” financialsense.com (2 May 2008)
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Stanley Reed, “Help from the House of Saud: Why the leading oil producer wants to cool off the market,” Business Week (29 May 2008)
[12] Ibid.
[13] Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo, “OPEC in the Epoch of Globalization: An Event Study of Global Oil Prices,” Global Economy Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2007); for a discussion of the theory and history of oil price determination see also, Cyrus Bina, “The Rhetoric of Oil and the Dilemma of War and American Hegemony,” Arab Studies Quarterly 15, no. 3 (Summer 1993); also Cyrus Bina, “Limits of OPEC Pricing: OPEC Profits and the Nature of Global Oil Accumulation,” OPEC Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 1990).
[14] F. William Engdahl, “Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price Is Pure Speculation,” financialsense.com (2 May 2008),
[15] Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo, “OPEC in the Epoch of Globalization: An Event Study of Global Oil Prices,” Global Economy Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2007).
[16] Gary S. Becker, “Why War with Iraq Is Not about Oil,” Business Week (17 March 2003): 30.
[17] Johnathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. The Global Political Economy of Israel (London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002).
[18] Melinda K. Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” unpublished Senior thesis, Dept. of Economics and Finance, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa (spring 2004), 10.
[19] As quoted in Ruby, Ibid., P. 13.
[20] As cited by Roger Burbach, “Bush Ideologues vs. Big Oil: The Iraq Game Gets Even Stranger,” CounterPunch.
[21] Israel Shamir, The Writings of Israel Shamir, Contributor 45
[22] Stephen F. Cohen “The New American Cold War,” The Nation (10 July 2006); as quoted in Shamir, Ibid.
[23] Shamir, Ibid.
[24] Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” pp. 14-15; see also Herman Franssen and Elaine Morton, “A Review of U.S. Unilateral Sanctions Against Iran,” Middle East Economic Survey 45, no. 34 (26 August 2002), pp. D1-D5 (D section contains op eds. as opposed to staff-written articles).
[25] Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” pp. 16-17; see also David Ivanovich, “Conoco’s Chief Blasts Sanctions,” Houston Chronicle (12 February 1997).
[27] The statement was widely reported by many news papers and other media outlets. See, for example, The Guardian (4 June 2003)
Oil and the Israel Lobby
Reknowned economist M. Shahid Alam
offers this excellent critique of Noam Chomsky’s defective analysis of the relative influence of Oil versus the Israel lobby over US foreign policy:
In the slow evolution of US relations with Israel since 1948, as the latter mutated from a strategic liability to a strategic asset, Israel and its Jewish allies in the United States have always occupied the driver’s seat.
President Truman had shepherded the creation of Israel in 1947 not because the American establishment saw it as a strategic asset; this much is clear. “No one,” writes Cheryl Rubenberg, “not even the Israelis themselves, argues that the United States supported the creation of the Jewish state for reasons of security or national interest.”(1) Domestic politics, in an election year, was the primary force behind President Truman’s decision to support the creation of Israel. In addition, the damage to US interests due to the creation of Israel – although massive – was not immediate. This was expected to unfold slowly: and its first blows would be borne by the British who were still the paramount power in the region.
Nevertheless, soon after he had helped to create Israel, President Truman moved decisively to appear to distance the United States from the new state. Instead of committing American troops to protect Israel, when it fought against five Arab armies, he imposed an even-handed arms embargo on both sides in the conflict. Had Israel been dismantled [at birth], President Truman would have urged steps to protect the Jewish colonists in Palestine, but he would have accepted a premature end to the Zionist state as fait accompli. Zionist pressures failed to persuade President Truman to lift the arms embargo. Ironically, military deliveries from Czechoslovakia may have saved the day for Israel.
Once Israel had defeated the armies of Arab proto-states and expelled the Palestinians to emerge as an exclusively Jewish colonial-settler state in 1949, these brute facts would work in its favor. Led by the United States, the Western powers would recognize Israel, aware that they would have to defend this liability. At the same time, the humiliation of defeat had given an impetus to Arab nationalists across the region, who directed their anger against Israel and its Western sponsors.
This placed Israel in a strong position to accelerate its transformation into a strategic asset. In tandem with the Jewish lobby in the United States, Israel sought to maximize the assistance it could receive from the West through policies that stoked Arab nationalism; and as Israel’s military superiority grew this emboldened it to increase its aggressive posture towards the Arabs. Israel had the power to set in motion a vicious circle that would soon create the Arab threat against which it would defend the West. As a result, at various points during the 1950s, France, the United States, and Britain began to regard Israel as a strategic asset.
America’s embrace of Israel did not begin in 1967. Israel’s victory in the June War only accelerated a process that had been underway since its creation – even before its creation. Indeed, the Zionists had decided in 1939 to pursue the United States as their new mother country; they knew that they could use the very large and influential population of American Jews to win official US backing for their goals.
This paid off handsomely in 1948; but thereafter, the United States sought to contain the damage that would flow from the creation of Israel. However, these efforts would be self-defeating; the die had been cast. Israel – not the United States – was in the driver’s seat; and Israel would seek to maximize the negative fallout from its creation. As Israel succeeded in augmenting – within limits – the Arab threat to itself and the United States, the Jewish lobby would regain confidence; it would re-organize to reinforce Israel’s claim that it was now a strategic asset.
We have here another vicious circle – virtuous, for Israel. The Jewish lobby would gain strength as the Arab-cum-Soviet threat to the Middle East grew. When Israel scaled back the Arab threat in 1967, the Jewish lobby would step in to spend the political capital the Jewish state had garnered in the United States. The Israeli capture of Jerusalem in 1967 also energized the Christian Zionists, who, with encouragement from Jewish Zionists, would organize, enter into Republican politics, and soon become a major ally of the Jewish lobby. The sky was now the limit for Israel and the Zionists in the United States. The special relationship would become more special under every new presidency.
Several writers on the American left have pooh-poohed the charge that the Jewish lobby has been a leading force shaping America’s Middle East policy. They argue that the United States has supported Israel because of the con-vergence of their interests in the region. (2) Oil, primarily Saudi Arabian oil, they maintain correctly, is “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”(3) Incorrectly, however, they insist that this is what has driven US policy towards the Middle East.
A priori, this is an odd position to maintain, since Britain – up until 1948 – had managed quite well to maintain complete control over Middle Eastern oil, a dominance the United States could not sustain ‘despite’ the ‘strategic support’ of Israel. Successively, they argue, Western control over oil came under threat from Arab nationalism and militant Islamism. Israel has demonstrated its strategic value by holding in check and, later, defeating, the Arab nationalist challenge. Since then, Israel has fought the Islamist challenge to US hegemony over the region.
It may be useful to examine Noam Chomsky’s analysis of this relationship, since he enjoys iconic status amongst both liberal and leftists in the United States. Chomsky frames his analysis of ‘causal factors’ behind the special relationship as essentially a choice between “domestic pressure groups” and “US strategic interests.” He finds two limitations in the argument that the “American Jewish community” is the chief protagonist of the special relationship between Israel and the United States.
First, “it underestimates the scope of the “support for Israel,” and second, it overestimates the role of political pressure groups in decision-making.” Chomsky points out that the Israel lobby is “far broader” than the American Jewish community; it embraces liberal opinion, labor leaders, Christian fundamentalists, conservative hawks, and “fervent cold warriors of all stripes.”(4) While this broader definition of the Israel lobby is appropriate, and this is what most users of the term have in mind, Chomsky thinks that the presence of this “far broader” support for Israel diminishes the role that American Jews play in this lobby.
Two hidden assumptions underpin Chomsky’s claim that a broader Israel lobby shifts the locus of lobbying to non-Jewish groups. First, he fails to account for the strong overlap – barring the Christian fundamentalists – between the American Jewish community and the other domestic pressure groups he enumerates. In the United States, this overlap has existed since the early decades of the twentieth century, and increased considerably in the post-War period. It is scarcely to be doubted that Jews hold – and deservedly so – a disproportionate share of the leadership positions in corporations, the labor movement, and those professions that shape public discourse. Starting in the 1980s, the ascendancy of Jewish neoconservatives – together with their think tanks – gave American Jews an equally influential voice in conservative circles. Certainly, the weight of Jewish neoconservative opinion during the early years of President Bush – both inside and outside his administration – has been second to that of none. The substantial Jewish presence in the leadership circles of the other pressure groups undermines Chomsky’s contention that the pro-Israeli group is “far broader” than the American Jewish community.
There is a second problem with Chomsky’s argument. Implicitly, he assumes that the different pro-Israeli groups have existed, acted and evolved independently of each other; alternatively, the impact of the lobbying efforts of these groups is merely additive. This ignores the galvanizing role that Jewish organizations have played in mobilizing Gentile opinion behind the Zionist project. The activism of the American Jews – as individuals and groups – has operated at several levels. Certainly, the leaders of the Zionist movement have directed a large part of their energies to lobbying at the highest levels of official decision-making. At the same time, they have created, and they orchestrate, a layered network of Zionist organizations who have worked very hard to create support for their aims in the broader American civil society.
American Jews have worked through several channels to influence civil society. As growing numbers of American Jews embraced Zionist goals during the 1940s, as their commitment to Zionism deepened, this forced the largest Jewish organizations to embrace Zionist goals. In addition, since their earliest days, the Zionists have created the organizations, allies, networks and ideas that would translate into media, congressional and presidential support for the Zionist project. In addition, since Jewish Americans made up a growing fraction of the activists and leaders in various branches of civil society – the labor, civil rights and feminist movements – it was natural that the major organs of civil society came to embrace Zionist aims. It makes little sense, then, to maintain that the pro-Israeli positions of mainstream American organizations had emerged independently of the activism of the American Jewish community.
Does our contention fail in the case of the Christian Evangelicals because of the absence of Jews in their ranks? In this case, the movement has received the strongest impetus from the ingathering of Jews that has proceeded in Israel since the late nineteenth century. The dispensationalist stream within Protestant Christians in the United States – who believe that the ingathering of Jews in Israel will precede the Second Coming – has been energized by every Zionist success on the ground. They have viewed these successes – the launching of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, the creation of Israel, the capture of Jerusalem, ‘Judea’ and ‘Samaria’ in 1967 – as so many confirmations of their dispensationalist eschatology. The movement expanded with every Zionist victory. At the same time, it would be utterly naïve to rule out direct relations between the Zionists and the leaders of the evangelical movement. The Zionists have rarely shrunk from accepting support even when it has come from groups with unedifying beliefs.
Noam Chomsky raises a second objection against the ability of the Jewish lobby to influence policy on its own steam. “No pressure group,” he maintains, “will dominate access to public opinion or maintain consistent influence over policy-making unless its aims are close to those of elite elements with real power (emphases added).”(5) One problem with this argument is easily stated. It pits the Jewish lobby as one “pressure group” – amongst many – arrayed against all the others that hold the real power. This equation of the Jewish lobby with a narrowly defined “pressure group” is misleading. We have argued – a position that is well supported by the evidence – that Jewish protagonists of Zionism have worked through many different channels to influence public opinion, the composition of political classes, and political decisions. They work through the organs that shape public opinion to determine what Americans know about Israel, how they think about Israel, and what they can say about it. This is no little Cuban lobby, Polish lobby or Korean lobby. Once we recognize the scale of financial resources the Jewish lobby commands, the array of political forces it can mobilize, and the tools it commands to direct public opinion on the Middle East, we would shrink from calling it a lobby.
Chomsky quickly proceeds to undermine his own argument about “elite elements with real power.” He explains that the “[elite] elements are not uniform in interests or (in the case of shared interests) in tactical judgments; and on some issues, such as this one [policy towards Israel], they have often been divided.”(6) Yet, despite the differences in their interests, their tactics, and their divisions, Chomsky maintains that these “elite elements” have “real power.” Oddly, these “divided” elites – whoever they are – exercise the power of veto over the multi-faceted Jewish lobby with its deep pockets, hierarchical organizations, and influence over key organs of civil society, campaign contributions, popular votes, etc.
Chomsky’s argument shifts again – a second time in the same paragraph – away from “elite elements” to “America’s changing conceptions of its political-strategic interests” in the Middle East.(6) This suggests a new theory of the chief determinant of US policy towards Israel. At the heart of these “political-strategic interests” is the oil wealth of the Middle East – and the twin threats to American control over this oil wealth from Arab nationalists and the Soviets. Presumably, Israel protects these “political-strategic interests” by holding the Arabs and the Soviets at bay. Chomsky conveniently forgets that the Arab nationalist threat to US interests in the Middle East was – in large part – the product of Israel’s insertion into the region, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its aggressive posture towards Arabs since its creation. It is unnecessary to account for the Soviet threat, since they entered the region on the back of Arab nationalist discontent. Indeed, had Israel never been created, it is more than likely that all the states in the Middle East – just like Turkey and Pakistan – would have remained firmly within the Western sphere of influence.
In another attempt to convince his readers that oil has driven US policy towards the Middle East, Chomsky claims that the United States was “committed to win and keep this prize [Saudi oil].” Presumably, the United States could not keep this “prize” without help from Israel.
This argument fails because it ignores history. Starting in 1933, American oil corporations – who later merged to form Aramco – gained exclusive rights to explore, produce and market Saudi oil. Saudi Arabia first acquired a 25 percent ownership stake in Aramco in 1973. Had there emerged an Arab nationalist threat to US control over Saudi oil in the 1950s – in the absence of Israel – the United States could have handled it by establishing one or more military bases in Saudi Arabia or, preferably, in one of the Emirates, since American military presence in Saudi Arabia might inflame Islamic sentiments. Far from helping entrench American control of Saudi oil, Israel, by radicalizing Arab nationalism, gave Saudi Arabia the excuse to first gain a 25 percent stake in Aramco and then nationalize it in 1988.
Chomsky claims that the United States was committed to winning and keeping the “stupendous” oil prize. This claim is not supported by the results that America’s Middle Eastern policy has produced on the ground over the years. If the United States was indeed committed to this goal, it would have pursued a Middle East policy that could be expected to maximize – with the lowest risks of failure – the access of US oil corporations to exploration, production and distribution rights over oil in this region. This is not the case.
In creating, aiding and arming Israel, the United States has followed a policy that could easily have been foreseen to produce, as it did produce, exactly the opposite effects. It gave a boost to Arab nationalism, radicalized it, and led within a few years to the Arab nationalist takeover of three of the four key states in the Arab world. In turn, this contributed to the nationalization of oil wealth even in those Arab countries that remained clients of the United States, not to speak of countries that were taken over by Arab nationalists , who excluded the US oil corporations from this industry altogether. In addition, America’s Middle Eastern policy converted the Middle East into a leading arena of wars. It also became a source of deep tensions between the US and the Soviets, since US partisanship of Israel forced the Arab nationalist regimes to ally themselves with the Soviet Union. In the October War of 1973, the United States provoked the Arab nations – because of its decision to re-supply the Israeli army during the war – to impose a costly oil embargo against the United States. In opposition to the pleadings of its oil corporations, the United States has also prevented them from doing business with three oil-producing nations in the Middle East – Iran, Iraq and Libya.(8)
If oil had been driving America’s Middle East policy, we should have seen the fingerprints of the oil lobby all over this policy. In recent decades, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, the oil lobby has directed its efforts “almost entirely on their commercial interests rather than on broader aspects of foreign policy.” They focus most of their lobbying efforts on getting the best deals on tax policies, government regulations, drilling rights, etc. Even the AIPAC bears witness to this. In the early 1980s, Morris J. Amitay, former executive director of AIPAC, noted, “We rarely see them [oil corporations] lobbying on foreign policy issues…In a sense, we have the field to ourselves.”(9)
Why does it matter whether it is oil or the Jewish lobby that determines US policy towards Israel and the Middle East?
The answer to this question has important consequences. It will determine who is in charge, and, therefore, who should be targeted by people who oppose Israel’s war mongering and its destruction of Palestinian society. If US policy is driven by America’s strategic interests – and Israel is a strategic US asset – opposing this policy will not be easy. If Israel keeps the oil flowing, keeps it cheap, and keeps down the Arabs and Islamists – all this for a few billion dollars a year – that is a bargain. In this case, opponents of this policy face an uphill task. Sure, they can document the immoral consequences of this policy – as Noam Chomsky and others do. Such moral arguments, however, will not cut much ice. What are the chances that Americans can be persuaded to sacrifice their “stupendous prize” because it kills a few tens of thousands of Arabs?
On the other hand, if the Jewish lobby drives US policy towards the Middle East, there is some room for optimism. Most importantly, the opponents of this policy have to dethrone the reigning paradigm, which claims that Israel is a strategic asset. In addition, it is necessary to focus attention on each element of the real costs – economic, political and moral – that Israel imposes on the United States. Winning these intellectual arguments will be half the battle won; this will persuade growing numbers of Americans to oppose a policy because it hurts them. Simultaneously, those who seek justice for the Palestinians must organize to oppose the power of the Israel lobby and take actions that force Israel to bear the moral, economic and political consequences of its destructive policies in the Middle East.
M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Challenging the New Orientalism (2007). Send comments to alqalam02760@yahoo.com. Visit the author’s website at http://aslama.org/ .
References
- “Virtually every professional in the for-eign affairs bureaucracy, including the secretaries of state and war (later, defense) and the joint chiefs of staff, opposed the creation of Israel from the standpoint of US national interests (Rubenberg: 1986, 9-10).”
- For criticisms of Chomsky, see James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006): 168-81; and Jeff Blankfort, Damage control: Noam Chomsky and the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
- This assessment comes from a 1945 re-port of the State Department (Chomsky: 1999, 17).
- Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle: 13.
- Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle: 17.
- Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle:: 17.Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle:: 17.
- Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel lobby and US foreign policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006): 143.
- Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel lobby: 145.
Video:The Great Global Warming Swindle
By Martin Durkin
In this documentary, shortlisted for the “Best Documentary Award” at the 2008 Broadcast Awards, scientists and commentators argue that CO2 produced by human activity is not the main cause of climate change.
Watch the whole documentary here:
Link: 
Video: 9/11 Mysteries
911 Mysteries Part 1 – Demolitions (Full – 1ed.)
When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
– Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr., creator of Sherlock Holmes.
If it’s important to you to believe that Western society is structured such that “good” always triumphs – at least in ‘big’ matters, that Kojak always ‘gets the bad guy’, and that the evildoers are a small minority of bad eggs eagerly exposed by the valiant press, this a critical principle to keep in mind.
911 Mysteries demolishes the ‘official’ 911 conspiracy theory more graphically than any movie previously released.
See for yourself what really happened in the 3 demolished buildings in the weeks before 9/11.
Since 9-11 the American public has shown a “remarkable indifference to being deceived” (George Soros).
But this is changing.
As Hugo Chavez put it:
“The world is waking up. It’s waking up all over. And people are standing up.”
Millions around the world are realizing that they are being lied to – not in a small, lazy way, but in a big way.
It’s time to ask hard questions, many of which 911 Mysteries helps to answer.
90 minutes of evidence and analysis, filled with eyewitness testimonials.
Point-by-point review of the official story set alongside clear science.
The question is not one of politics or nationalism or loyalty, but one of strict and simple physics.
Does steel melt in open air fires?
What caused the core to vanish in seconds?
No agenda.
No finger-pointing.
Just the facts and the questions.
A story of people:
Willie Rodriguez’s strange recollection of noises on the 34th floor.
Who was up there, bumping around?
Scott Forbes’ similar story, weeks before the towers fell.
Here’s how shaped charges slice through steel beams to control the way they fall.
For greater clarity, download the movie – or buy a DVD online at http://www.911weknow.com.
Finally, make sure you don’t miss the ending – minutes 1:26-1:30.
Absolutely the best part.
911 is a Keyhole into Consciousness.
If you make it through to the other side, everything looks different.
Do Not Be Afraid. Follow your curiosity, like Alice in the rabbit hole. You are becoming free.
Keywords:
World Trade Center, WTC, WTC7, NIST, FEMA, Controlled Demolition, Freedom to Fascism, Thermate, Thermite, 9-11, September 11th, George Bush, Dick Cheney, NORAD, FAA, FBI, CIA, NSA, Larry Silverstein, William Rodriguez, Alex Jones, Loose Change.
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From the Archives
Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo
Press TV – March 29, 2017
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.
Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.
“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.
He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.
Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.
“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.
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