Author Archive

Gandhi, but with guns – Part 1

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Sometimes a quotation is really all you need. This one is from the superintendent of police, in the tribal warfare area of central India.

“See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss: remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”
Gandhi, but with guns: Part One – Arundhati Roy

The problem, of course, is that multi-national raw material corporations want access to the minerals in the tribal jungles. You know, like the movie Avatar?

You can read part 2 here.

Format Change

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

I’ve re-organized the categories to be more straight forward.

Now all news, interviews, commentaries from outside sources, will go in the category Our World.

All items that are general commentaries will go into Reflections. If it’s a story about a specific news item, it will go in Our World, if it’s a general commentary, it will go in Reflections.

Since we’re now entering into the decline phase of many key global commodities, there’s no real point in pretending that an economic grind down event is separate from oil price spikes and other raw material instabilities.

But mostly I’ll be writing about things I like to do, like backpacking, being out in nature, and so on.

I will try to present more overviews now and then, and will try to tie things together a bit for readers who might find their way here.

Best of luck to you in the future, but don’t expect the present or past to reproduce, it’s just not in the cards. Stay out of debt, that’s the best advice at this point, live within your means, whatever you may feel you are entitled to have, what you can afford is what you actually should have today.

No doubt any longer the peak is here

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

With the required denials, a leak from the International Energy Administration (IEA) confirms that not only is that agency fully aware of peak oil, it is being pressured by the USA to deny it is here to avoid full spread panic.

Among some of the more choice quotes:

“The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year,” said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. “The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.

“Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources,” he added.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was “imperative not to anger the Americans” but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. “We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad,” he added.

And there you have it.

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Bad Money – Bill Moyer Interview

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Another good one, an interview with Kevin Phillips, author of Bad Money: RECKLESS FINANCE, FAILED POLITICS, AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM.

Like the previous links, this one is somewhat refreshing, because the author is an ex-Nixon White House person, who I think fairly accurately notes the serious problems with both the Democratic and Republican parties in the USA.

BILL MOYERS: So you have it — for this disaster has bipartisan parentage.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: But yet you say it’s come to an end. You say there’ll be no pretense any longer that the financial system is supreme.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Oh, there may be a pretense in some quarters. I mean, obviously people who were doing the bailouts are saying how important it is that we don’t rock or endanger the financial system. Some would say to the contrary that the best thing we could do would be to put its failings out there and let the making cure it.

Like so many he sees things fairly clearly, but also, sadly understands that it is now too late. The bubble has to burst, and pumping in hundreds of billions of dollars to keep it inflated, and to keep debt holders buying more, is just not going do anything but make it worse.

ASPO Newsletter 91: a Brief History of Petroleum Man

Sunday, July 6th, 2008

This is from the July Issue of the ASPO newsletter, Issue 91.

One of the more interesting articles in it was a decent timeline for what’s happened to us as a species, I’m quoting the whole section since they don’t mind reproduction of the material.

By odd coincidence, Nate Hagens from the theoildrum.com also just published a new article on human development and oil addiction, which fits in quite well with the following ASPO article, being largely historical/biologically oriented too.

1061. Peak Oil : A Turning Point for Mankind

The term Peak Oil now enters the dictionary as the importance of the issue finally hits the mainstream. The International Energy Agency, which is the OECD watchdog, has long been aware of it having issued a warning in 1998 that demand would outpace supply by 2010 save for the entry of a mysterious element, termed Unidentified Unconventional, which was evidently a coded term for shortage. But recent statements made to the Press suggest that it is finally going to come clean in the 2008 issue of the World Energy Outlook to be published in November, and explain the true position in no uncertain terms.

Given the central role of oil and gas in the modern economy, the peak of production is likely to be a turning point for mankind of almost unparalleled magnitude. It prompts consideration of the historical evolution of societies as a basis for evaluating what the reactions might be.

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