CommUnity of Minds » Blog Archive

January 24th, 2003

As I have written elsewhere, humanity is facing an extinction level crisis in the rapidly approaching depletion of fossil fuels.

Capitalism and the Great Market are features of Neutrality. Neutrality requires unlimited resources. Humanity has had unlimited resources in our endless supply of fossil fuels.

Our present economic crash, which is now being compared to the Great Depression, is the result of approaching end of fossil fuels. As of August 2001, 23 out of 44 nations [representing 99% of world oil production in 2000] have passed their production peaks.

Most of humanity is unaware of this approaching crisis, but the governments of the world are aware and are now acting to control the last of the fossil fuel on the planet. This of course is the real purpose of America’s coming war with Iraq. Our leaders are trying to secure control of the Iraqi oil.

Saddam Hussein has threatened to set the Iraqi oil fields on fire if pressed too hard in the coming war. During the Persian Gulf War from the fall of late 1990 to early 1991, Iraq embarked on a systematic destruction of Kuwait’s oil industry, and Iraqi forces set fire to 789 individual Kuwaiti oil wells. It took Red Adair, hundreds of millions of dollars, and over 11 months to put out the fires. How many million barrels of oil were burned is unknown. The attendant results of the fires were catastrophic both from an economic and ecological standpoint.

Recently the workers of Venezuelan oil industry have gone on strike. Prior to the strike Venezuela was exporting 3 million barrels of oil a day to the United States. Now they are exporting none. They have even started to import gasoline because the autos and trucks of their nation are running dry.

This past friday oil closed at $33.03 a barrel. If things don’t go well in the new Gulf war, and Hussein does successfully torch the oil fields, the price of oil could triple.

This would mean gasoline at the pump could rise to over $5 a gallon and the cost of energy for powering our homes and businesses could triple. What would the effect of such a tripling have on the economy and our personal lives?

As I said at the top of this essay. Neutrality is obsolete. We humans need to move on the next stage of our evolution. We need to reorganize synergically. We all need air, water, food, shelter, security, love and meaning. We humans are all the same. We are the same species.

We need to make peace. If we humans won’t work together to solve our mutual problems, then we will perish separately fighting like animals.

The following is reposted from The Guardian.

America’s Plan to Secure Iraq’s Oilfields

Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow, Julian Borger in Washington,
Terry Macalister and Ewen MacAskill

The US military has drawn up detailed plans to secure and protect Iraq’s oilfields to prevent a repeat of 1991 when President Saddam set Kuwait’s wells ablaze.

The US state department and Pentagon disclosed the preparations during a meeting in Washington before Christmas with members of the Iraqi opposition parties.

Iraq has the second biggest known oil reserves in the world producing, in their current run-down state, about 1.5m barrels a day. But experts contacted by the Guardian predict this could rise to 6m barrels a day within five years with the right investment and control.

At the meeting, on the future of a post-Saddam Iraq – details of which have been disclosed to the Guardian – the state department stressed that protection of the oilfields was “issue number one”.

One of those at the meeting said the military claimed that a plan to protect the multibillion oil wells was “already in place”, hinting that special forces will secure key installations at the start of any ground campaign.

As well as immediate concern about the environmental impact of having hundreds of Iraqi wells on fire, US, British, Russian, French and other international oil companies are already taking soundings about Iraq’s multibillion pound oil supply.

The companies are reluctant to mention oil in public, fearing it will feed Arab suspicion that it is the main factor in the confrontation with Iraq.

Yet, with war looming, discussions in private have inevitably begun on the future of the world’s second biggest oil reserves.

The US and British governments deny that oil is a factor in the confrontation with Iraq.

The Foreign Office minister, Mike O’Brien, said yesterday: “The charge that our motive is greed – to control Iraq’s oil supply – is nonsense, pure and simple. It is not about greed: it is about fear [about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction].”

The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, told the Boston Globe yesterday: “If there is a conflict with Iraq, the leader ship of the coalition [will] take control of Iraq. The oil of Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people. Whatever form of custodianship there is … it will be held for and used for the people of Iraq. It will not be exploited for the United States’ own purpose.”

Asked whether US companies would operate the oilfields, Mr Powell said: “I don’t have an answer to that question. If we are the occupying power, it will be held for the benefit of the Iraqi people and it will be operated for the benefit of the Iraqi people.”

There is a debate within the US administration over whether some of Iraq’s oil revenues might be used to cover part of the costs of occupation, which is expected to last 18 months.

The office of the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and some officials at the Pentagon have reportedly advocated commandeering revenues from the oilfields to pay for the daily costs of the occupation force until a democratic government can be installed. The state and justice departments, meanwhile, have insisted that the money be held in trust.

“There are two competing needs here: the budgetary need for forces which will be extraordinary, and the need to get it up and running and show the Iraqi people some real results and some real improvement in life,” said Andrew Krepinevich, a Pentagon adviser, whose organisation, the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, carried out a study of the issue for the Pentagon.

The relationship between the oil industry and the US administration, from the president, George Bush, downwards, is the closest in American history.

The Wall Street Journal last week quoted oil industry officials saying that the Bush administration is eager to rehabilitate the Iraqi oil industry.

According to the officials, Mr Cheney’s staff held a meeting in October with Exxon Mobil Corporation, ChevronTexaco Corporation, ConcocoPhilips, Halliburton, but both the US administration and the companies deny it.

The BP chief executive, Lord Browne, said last year he was putting pressure on Mr Bush and Tony Blair not to allow a carve-up.

A Foreign Office source confirmed that the security of Iraq’s oilfields was of paramount concern.

“That is something that is being assessed across Whitehall,” said the source. “But whether or not the Iraqis manning the wells will blow their future livelihood upon an order from Baghdad remains another issue. A lot of that will be about getting there first. The importance of preventing an environmental catastrophe is right up there.”