Even Al Jazeera is getting in on the act, in this recent feature on peak oil they did. Notice how they don’t give much credence to the ongoing denial of the Saudis that oil production is in any way problematic. Wouldn’t it be nice to see our own mainstream media stop giving credence to the nonsense that our political system is spouting in terms of oil, energy, financial problems, and so on? Dream on.

Imagine seeing something like this on American mainstream television, heh heh… some major peak oil theorists are interviewed, from the Energy Watch Group, ASPO, plus Robert Hirsch, author of the Hirsch Report (check out the pdf summary and full report), etc.

Hirsch, in case you don’t know, is the guy that Bush and company commissioned to do the research, then whose research they promptly chose to ignore when his findings didn’t fit with what the Bush group wanted to hear.

The show is cut into two parts:

Who said it’s all bad news? Globalization was always a totally false construct, built on a foundation of dirt cheap oil prices (around $10 a barrel until only 10 years or so ago), caused by a very temporary global oil glut.

So to see a story about globalization already collapsing at oil prices around 120 a barrel current really makes my day a bit more cheerful. Read on to see how rising oil prices are already impacting the US locally as well.

To summarize some other postings here, ship bunker oil, fuel oil, is from what I can gather basically Number 6 distillate, the heaviest, crappiest stuff, left over after they refine out gasoline, diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel. Read this nice overview in wikipedia if you want to learn the specifics. Check out this sample of current Los Angeles bunker fuel prices.

Noting there that all categories of bunker fuel prices are rising right along with crude oil futures, the following article now should be fairly easy to understand:

The rising price of oil is making international trade of heavy cargo prohibitively expensive, and acting as an incentive for importers to find products such as steel closer to home, new research by CIBC World Markets shows.
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If oil prices continue to rise, the soaring cost of global transport will act like a major tariff barrier and lead to a substantial slow down in international trade, they argue.

“Globalization is reversible,” they state.
High oil prices will hurt trade, report says, Globe and Mail, May 27, 2008

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Last week saw Barcelona receive it’s first shipments of water from France to alleviate it’s massive water shortage.

I’m going to follow this story for a while to see when the first major news source points to overpopulation coupled with the drought. Currently the best they seem able to do is tell us that Barcelona has about 5 million plus people, but it seems to be too much of reach for anyone to say that the arid land simply cannot support that population.

Barcelona is a preview of what’s going to happen in the American Southwest, with Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and many other large metropolitan areas built in the desert soon to face the same issues as their water supplies become increasingly impacted by global warming initiated snowpack loss, overpopulation, and of course, a lifestyle that is simply absurd to even consider realistically in a desert in the first place.

Barcelona is a dry city. It is dry in a way that two days of showers can do nothing to alleviate. The Catalan capital’s weather can change from one day to the next, but its climate, like that of the whole Mediterranean region, is inexorably warming up and drying out. And in the process this most modern of cities is living through a crisis that offers a disturbing glimpse of metropolitan futures everywhere.
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The political battles now breaking out here could be a foretaste of the water wars that scientists and policymakers have warned us will be commonplace in the coming decades. The emergency water-saving measures Barcelona adopted after winter rains failed for a second year running have not been enough. The city has had to set up a “water bridge” and is shipping in water for the first time in the history of this great maritime city.

A tanker from Marseilles with 36 million litres of drinking water unloaded its first cargo this week, one of a mini-fleet contracted to bring water from the Rhone every few days for at least the next three months. So humbled was Barcelona when prolonged drought forced it to ship in domestic water from Tarragona, 50 miles south along the Catalan coast, 12 days ago, that city hall almost delayed shipment and considered an upbeat publicity campaign to lift morale and international prestige.
Spain’s drought: a glimpse of our future?, independent.co.uk, 24 May 2008

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Well, I’d say the mainstream media’s main sources are all stumbling towards a part of the first step of realization. Seeing Kunstler featured in the Washington Post editorial pages is a pretty good sign in my opinion, although it’s a bit late, since from what I can see, we are now starting to bump our way down the back end of the global oil production peak.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the “peak oil” story. It’s not about running out of oil. It’s about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply.
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As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What’s more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.

And that’s the worst part of our quandary: the American public’s narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a “Hypercar” for years — inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don’t need to change.
GRAND DELUSION
Wake Up, America. We’re Driving Toward Disaster, May 25, 2008

Kunstler took good advantage of this opportunity, and I’m glad that the Washington Post is printing this story.
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