Are we There Yet? - A Peak Oil Snapshot

Where are we currently relative to peak oil? I do not like to track the progress of peak oil on a daily basis. I do, however, like to take a snapshot such as this every few months. That allows time to differentiate between anomalies and trends, time for the trends to develop, time for the euphoria over new discoveries and new technological developments to calm down in the cold light of reality.

This has been an interesting summer from a peak oil perspective. The hurricane season in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico did not materialize as expected and the disruption of Gulf of Mexico oil supply and the U.S. oil import infrastructure on the Gulf was minimal. This should have meant plenty of supply for the North American summer driving season and helped to disguise the current reality of supply shortages. It did not do that.

* Refined gasoline imports were up. Crude availability is of the type not suited to most western refineries.
* Oil-producing countries have begun investing heavily in local refineries to process crude oil not suited to established refineries, selling more finished product instead.
* We continue to have no new refinery capacity in North America and every news item talking about planned new refinery capacity have has a follow-up where that new capacity is delivered. They projects are often stopped because of poor economic outlooks and the reality of future shortages in crude oil supplies.
* Oil corporation reserves are steadily declining as a percentage of global reserves. Most reserves are now being held by national petroleum companies such as Saudi Aramco and Pemex.
* Strategic reserves are steadily declining as they are dipped into to make up input and production shortfalls. Increasingly the drawdowns are not replenished due to the high spot market price for crude oil.
* Saudi Arabian exports are still down, as they have been for two years, despite incessant promises to increase production in response to pleas and demands from oil-importing countries.
* Exports from oil-exporting countries are declining as those countries scramble to satisfy their own oil needs.
* Economists don't seem yet to allow for the reality that oil is like no other product in that all of the production is not for sale because producers are also consumers of their own product. The more they use, the less they have for sale.
* Increasing affluence in petroleum exporting countries due to the inflow of petroleum money, coupled with the increasing energy demands of extraction and processing, increases the hold-back to satisfy internal needs.
* Most production growth over the past three years has been made up from alternative sources like tar sands, oil sands, bio-fuels and synthetics from CTL and GTL.
* China and India, the two most populous nations on the planet, both continue to increase their oil imports by double digit rates each year. China, though very skeptical of western motivation behind globalization, continue to ride a tremendous wave of economic expansion that is rapidly pushing them toward becoming the world's largest economy.
* Russia, supposedly with the world's second largest oil reserves behind Saudi Arabia, despite their continued belief in the Abiotic oil theory, are having consistent problems maintaining production rates and may soon slip into irreversible decline.
* Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America, are already satisfying the bulk of their liquid fuel needs through bio-fuels made from sugar cane, thus effectively reducing global crude oil demand by the amount of their bio-fuel usage.
* Official oil statistics have been increasingly broadened to include alternative sources. Peak oil has always referred to peaking of conventional crude oil. Alternatives cannot keep up with demand.
* Lack of oilfield equipment and experienced workers is claimed to be holding back reserve expansion. Whether this is reality or a smoke-screen to hide declining reserves is unclear.
* Lack of oilfield workers grows as fewer people go into the business because they see no future in it. Many seasoned oilfield veterans were driven out of the business in oil production cutbacks in the 1990s.
* Official rhetoric in North America and Europe is increasingly leaning toward bio-fuels. This makes oil companies nervous (publicly) but they are all quietly diversifying into bio-fuels, wind and solar.
* The push for bio-fuels is already creating a global food crisis as global emergency food-grain reserves shrink to their lowest level in decades (53 days from 129 days in the past eight years) and poor nations and people are being priced out of the global food-grain markets.
* The supposed vast reserves of alternative fuels such as coal, natural gas, methane, uranium and even bio-fuels are increasingly seen as illusory as they are revealed to be incapable of replacing any more than a small portion of our oil consumption.
* Huge tracts of virgin forest continue to be cleared to make room to plant corn, soy, sugar cane, palm oil trees and anything else that can be turned into bio-fuel.
* Politicians continue to push the hydrogen economy and electric cars while the electricity infrastructure falls further into disrepair and runs steadily close to operating capacity. The majority of new power plants being constructed in countries like China and India employ old, dirty-coal technology, despite new technology being available. New technology power plants cannot be delivered fast enough to keep pace with rapidly increasing demand, nor at a price that governments are willing to pay.
* The government and corporate world have revitalized the nuclear rhetoric despite no new North American plants having been built in three decades. The rhetoric continues to ignore the yet-to-be-solved problem of safe, long-term disposal and storage of nuclear waste.
* There is a growing scarcity of the higher grades of uranium needed for nuclear power plants.
* More and more oil industry executives have recently been conceding the reality of peak oil but continue to claim it is decades in the future. At the same time they increasingly lump alternative sources into claimed reserves and push for new rules for reserve reporting to allow them to claim questionable reserves in their proven reserve numbers.
* Government commitments for decommissioning coal-fired power plants have been back off because of a lack of alternative fuel stocks like natural gas and "clean" coal.
May 2005 continues to be the month of highest global oil production and may very well prove to have been the point of peak oil.
* Mexico's oil production has fallen off a cliff over these past two years, largely due to production declines in their Cantarell field, with no apparent hope of recovery.
* Production in two of the three largest oil fields in the world - Burgan in Kuwait and Cantarell in Mexico - are now officially admitted to be past their peak of production and declining in production at double-digit rates.
* The largest oil field in the world - Gahwar in Saudi Arabia - relies on such heavy injections of water to maintain wellhead pressure that water-cut rates of more than 75% are being experienced, all of which suggests that that aging field is past its natural peak in production.
* Project after project in Canada's tar sands is being cut back, delayed or cancelled due to massive cost increases and overruns. They are now being beset by aggressive new environmental legislation that may, in time, cause tar sands production to be abandoned unless vastly superior and environmentally-friendly processing technology can be developed. This is being hidden behind the debate over aggressive new royalty demands from the Alberta government which has a bad habit of squandering royalties on buying votes rather than on environmental protection. Tar sands operators are now also having to look at new sources other than natural gas for the energy used in processing. The best option, nuclear, will be a hard sell.
* Fields and oil provinces that have peaked in recent years - North Sea, Indonesia, Alaska's North Slope for example - are experiencing double-digit production decline rates well in excess of those of 3-5% used in peak oil models. This suggests that the post-peak downslope will be much steeper than previously thought.
* Because of lack of transparency, production numbers for OPEC countries has generally been estimated based on shipments. The gap between production and shipments. because of internal use of their own oil to satisfy rising affluence, is growing year by year.
* The amount of oil available for export by producing countries and for import by importing countries is beginning to decline at a faster rate than production and is going to force rethinking of global oil markets. Production will need to increase at a rate faster than previously estimated just to keep import levels steady.

Has peak oil arrived yet? I would say so. The pattern in all of the above strongly supports that view.

Are we starting to feel it yet? The price of oil continues to hover around or above US$80. a barrel, despite no significant supply disruption, hurricane or other factors. The world price of food grains has increased as much as 60% and more over these past two years as more and more of those crops are being diverted into bio-fuels. Transport costs are rising steadily as carriers are forced to seek survival by passing on fuel costs to their customers. These and a thousand other signs say we are definitely beginning to feel it, and will feel it ever more over the coming years.

Has the average person on the street realized that we are at peak oil and started adjusting their life and their expectations accordingly? Of course not! As long as the official party line continues to be, "Don't worry, be happy and consume!" Why should they? Those who do recognize peak oil and have given consideration to the implications of what will follow still have a decided advantage and head start over their neighbours who continue to buy into the consumer/credit culture.

Deculturation: Mass Deprogramming of Global Society

This article is a continuation of a series that includes Mud pies and Dunce Caps - Part 2, Give me a Child Until......, and Waking up, Into the Nightmare!

Can the deprogramming techniques used on those rescued from cults or the mass deprogramming suggested in the "Social Reason" program be looked to as a means of achieving mass global deprogramming for the purpose of achieving a mass disassociation from the modern capitalist paradigm and a shift in worldview to stewardship and sustainability?

What is the source of a nation's culture? Who defines it? How is it transmitted through the nation's population such that it becomes so integrated into the individual worldview and mind set that it becomes "common knowledge", becomes the core of the national identity? There was a reason that large "nations" like China, India, the US, Russia and others did not exist earlier in our history, why nations that did exist were still loose collections of tribal enclaves much like we are finding Afghanistan still is today. The means to create and, most importantly, constantly reinforce a national identity did not exist. People do not inherently identify with "nation" but rather some smaller, more intimate grouping. The key to sustaining a national worldview is media; TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, music and movies. The extension of that reality is the growth of globalization and the establishment of key elements of a global mind set through the agency of global communications; through global television and radio aided through satellites, through globalization in the entertainment industry in music, magazines and movies, and, more recently and far more importantly, the rapid growth of global digital communications that brings into a common technology base not only broadcast media but telephone, the internet, facsimile transmission and image transmission.

One of the first and most important targets of the rebel forces in any revolution since the early part of the twentieth century, and earlier though in more limited fashion, is almost always the communications and media; the radio, TV, newspapers and printing presses. Control of the media, until then in the hands of the government being overthrown, is recognized as a critical part of gaining control of the hearts and minds of the people. Media is always, at least in modern society, at the heart of national culture. It is the means by which government and business mobilize the public support of their goals. As Robert W. McChesney outlines in The Political Economy Of Radio, "As a rule of thumb, if certain forces thoroughly dominate a society's political economy they will thoroughly dominate its communication system, and the fundamental questions of how the communication system should be organized and for what purposes are not even subject to debate. So it is and so it has been with the Communist Party in various "people's republics," and, for the most part, with big business interests in the United States."[(1)] And, in fact, it is the same with business control of the media in every free country on the planet.

We are bombarded by the reinforcing symbols and messages of our culturation and social indoctrination from cradle to grave. But beginning with the various means of mass communication, starting with radio, that culturation and indoctrination has been increasingly and insidiously commercial. Beginning in the 1920s capitalists and business leaders began to recognize the power in radio that they could use to improve their businesses and, more importantly, to "manufacture" and maintain public loyalty to their product and, increasingly, their political agenda. With that recognition, they set out to control these mass communication media. McChesney writes, "It was only in the late 1920s that capitalists began to sense that through network operation and commercial advertising, radio broadcasting could generate substantial profits. Through their immense power in Washington, these commercial broadcasters were able to dominate the Federal Radio Commission. As a result, the scarce number of air channels were effectively turned over to them with no public and little congressional deliberation on the matter."

The dangers inherent in commercial control of broadcast media were the rallying call of a reform movement through the 1920s. They argued that ".....if private interests controlled the medium and their goal was profit, no amount of regulation or self-regulation could overcome the bias built into the system." This reform movement essentially lost their battle with the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, which established the FCC. They did not lose in a fair fight, however. As McChesney explains, "The radio lobby dominated because it was able to keep most Americans ignorant or confused about the communication policy matters then under discussion in Congress through their control of key elements of the news media and their sophisticated public relations aimed at the remainder of the press and the public."

Commercial domination of broadcast media did not end with radio, of course. "When television came along in the 1940s," McChesney says, "the FCC effectively turned it over to the same networks that dominated radio. Almost from the beginning commercial broadcasting has generated criticism that it ignored or downplayed controversial political programming, or entertainment and cultural programming that would not attract huge audiences. In addition, advertisers served as powerful censors of broadcast content, and it was not in their interest to sponsor programming that might undermine their sales messages."[(1)]

After four generations of commercial control and manipulation of the broadcast media that is the central source of our cultural identity, plus two decades of escalating commercial intrusion into our public school systems, we have become so indoctrinated into a carefully orchestrated worldview that we have largely surrendered and lost both our ability and our desire for critical independent thought. In one of the many online sites called Deprogramming, put out by The Center for Human Deprogramming, it is put this way, "Everything we feel and know inside is gradually replaced with values originating from media and education until we have completely lost our ability for independent, creative, or critical thought. After years of this process, we lose our identities and internal equilibrium and become dependent on the external."[(6)] We have as a population largely fallen into a pattern of follow-the-leader, looking to government and business to solve our problems, satisfy our perceived needs, and to tell and show us where we are supposed to go. To quote myself, from my book Oilephant Down: Canada at the End of the Age of Cheap Oil, "the more you ask your government to do for you the more it will do to you without your asking." Just consider the wholesale erosion of civil liberties in legislation like The Patriot Act passed since 9/11. But we keep asking. As Carolyn Baker says in American Born, Addicted to Happiness, "Americans, even so-called Progressives it seems, appear to be fixated in an eternal adolescence that wants to repair adversity as quickly as possible without living it, or God forbid, learning from it. One facet of maturity is the awareness that the challenges of human existence are rarely simplistic, usually fraught with complexity, and typically last much longer than we ever dreamed we could endure them. ..... Like puerile MTV viewers, we demand that the right politician, the right book, the right motivational speaker, the right spiritual teacher, the right journalist tell us what to do and make it “all better” so that we can avoid suffering."[(2)]

That is not a national mind set and worldview that should give anyone comfort as we rapidly and aggressively push toward the global crises ahead of us, most importantly but not exclusively peak oil and climate change. A problem cannot be its own solution. We cannot expect to avoid, remedy or mitigate these crises with the same government and business leadership that has led us through a global sleepwalk to this cliff and seems to be intent on pushing us off into the abyss with their mindless pursuit of business-as-usual. They are aware of the crises before us. If the average citizen did not realize that with President Bush's "America is addicted to oil" statement in his 2006 State of the Union address, then they simply are not listening. They may, however, simply be incapable of hearing. As Laura Knight-Jadczyk says in Official Culture in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy?, "...how effective the "official culture" actually is in the US. It isn't just a question of ignorance, but a question of the long-term thoroughness of the propagandizing that began in the early days of the last century. It was proposed that this propaganda is so complete that not only are most people in the US ignorant of what is taking place on the US political scene, and in the world as a direct result of US policy, they are ignorant of the fact that they are ignorant."[(4)] But the solutions consistently put forward by President Bush, his administration, the US government and business leaders is to develop more new technology to solve the problems. It is technology that has brought us to this dangerous point. As Joseph Wilkerson put it in Energy and Psyche: Resource Addiction in the Technological Age, "....if the industrial relationship to petroleum and other energy sources is indeed an addiction, then it will take more than “technology … reliable alternative energy sources and … clean-energy research” (united) to facilitate our recovery." Knight-Jadczyk goes on to say, "...all of us who were raised in the US have been duped via this Official Culture mind control imposed through the educational system and the mass media." [(3)]

As long as those powerful government, institutional and business interests vested in the maintenance of the status quo remain in control of the legislation that creates the laws that govern our lives, in control of the education system that molds the mind and character of our children to their objectives, in control of that national media that creates, manipulates, controls and constantly reinforces the national cultural mind set supportive of their elitist interests, any broad-based, grass roots social movement for change will be very limited in its ability to affect that change. Even the most fervent social movements have been but small blips on the radar of those in control of our culture. Lip service is paid while passions are high and then it's back to business as usual, maybe with a new coat of disguising paint. With the media in the control of such powerful vested interests the opportunity simply will not be "granted" for any popular social change to get off the ground. In a paper titled Seizing the Media put out by a group called Immediast International, the frustration engendered by this reality is clear. "The time has come to veto, overwhelm, and subvert the messages of all airborne commercial broadcast media until they are returned to complete public direction, access, and control. How long should we wait to liberate public spaces from the blister of billboards and advertisements? The air is public domain, and the airwaves are ours to hear our own voices, see our own colors, enjoy our own conversations, and celebrate in the vast community of cultures. Remember: dialogue offsets the hegemony, and intimacy empowers. ..... The time has come to restore the democratic power and public space that have been co opted and colonized by commercial media."[(5)]

If our leaders remain focused on perpetuating business as usual and have no solution to the problems ahead other than ramping up the technology that has been such a key part of our destruction of the planet's biosphere, and if machinery of culturation and information remains firmly in their grasp, how are we to overcome our increasing sense of doom and have any hope of avoiding the crises ahead (Let's call them what they will be, disasters!)? How are we to prepare as a society for the most dramatic and traumatic transition in human history as the impact of peak oil, climate change and other looming global disasters befall us in quick succession? Somehow we have to find a way. This is how it was put in Knight-Jadczyk's article. "A picture is forming of a deliberately contrived society of televised conformity, literate and creative inadequacy, and social unrest and decadence. It is apparent that the media is in charge of propagating these conditions, and the media is controlled by what? ..... Capitalistic, competitive Economics."

Deprogramming is a technique developed and fine-tuned over this past half century originally intended as a program to undo the indoctrination and brainwashing of individuals rescued from cults of various descriptions. It is a very intense, one-on-one process that seeks to supplant inculcated beliefs, "truths", triggers and signals and replace them with a renewed affinity for the mainstream culture. The process uses, out of declared necessity, some of the same techniques of indoctrination and brainwashing that was used to draw the subject into the cult in the first place. Both the strength and the weakness of the technique is that it is one-on-one. If the masses are to be deprogrammed out of the mainstream culture in order to effect a change toward a post-energy sustainable world it is not likely to happen if it relies on intense, one-on-one reculturation of every individual. There is a technique called Social Reason developed by Milton W. Raymond and presented to the Ethical Society of Boston, School for Ethics. This paper purports to be a technique for broad social deprogramming during traumatic social changes such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-absorption of Hong Kong into Communist China and introduction of western Democracy into conservative Islamic states.[(6)] To my knowledge the theory presented in the paper has never been put into practice. Most practitioners and experts on deprogramming are quite insistent that it can only work on an intense one-on-one basis. I remain intrigued, however, whether Raymond's technique has any merit and whether it could be the key to effecting the social transition from our current high-energy, high-tech world into the sustainable world that must follow the collapse of the global energy bubble.
____________________________________________________________________________________

1) The Political Economy Of Radio by Robert W. McChesney
http://www.infoshop.org/texts/seizing/mches.html
2) American Born, Addicted to Happiness by Carolyn Baker / Research on Globalization (CRG)
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/American-Addicted-Happiness30nov04.htm
3) Energy and Psyche: Resource Addiction in the Technological Age By Joseph Wilkerson
http://www.ecopsychology.org/journal/ezine/archive3/addiction.pdf
4) Official Culture in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy? by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/official_culture.htm
5) Seizing The Media: The Immediast Underground Pamphlet Series
Immediast International - New York City / Amsterdam / Seattle (Looks quite good)
http://deoxy.org/seize_it.htm
6) Resolving "Irreconcilable" Differences by Milton W. Raymond
http://www.bostonethical.org/SocialReason.html

Give me a Child Until..........

How will we ever get a critical mass of awareness and willingness to change and prepare for a post-peak, post-meltdown, post-apocalyptic world when we are all indoctrinated from cradle to grave into supporting and being part of the current industrial/economic/capitalist societal paradigm?

Where is the line between information, education, culturation and indoctrination? What someone views as indoctrination would seem to be any attempted or, particularly, successful dissemination of an ideology or philosophy that differs markedly from those ideologies and philosophies that person holds and follows. Generally the person levelling the accusation of indoctrination seems not to understand that the ideology they adhere to was also acquired through indoctrination. Bertrand Russell, in The Impact of Science on Society, said, "....the populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated .. education should aim at destroying free will...." [(33)]

In an article titled, American Indoctrination -- The harsh reality of public school, in Liberty Forum it is summed up this way; "Indoctrination. Forced conformity. Government worship. A blending of Christianity with "patriotism." The wholesale assembly-line production of jingoistic, unquestioning drones, assaulted at their most impressionable time in life." [(14)] In Are Lady Liberty's Books for Education or Indoctrination? Guy T. Sturino states, "Probably most, by that time, have adopted the political party and social attitude of their parents or peers without a second thought. The result is that the majority of the working class does not have sufficient foundational education to even be concerned about what is happening around them – or to them." [(15)] In The Central Fallacy of Public Schooling, Daniel Hager states, "When parents send a child to a tax-funded school, they sacrifice their autonomy to alien interests. The state has goals of its own that are distinct from those of parents. The price of tax-funded schooling is that parents give up their children to become instruments of the state." [(16)] Such statements simply reinforce for me my belief that it is impossible to separate education, even at the most basic level, from indoctrination.

How can we expect or assume that students entering high school and university or, afterward, adult life, are prepared for critical assessment and constructive dissent and debate, reasoned thought and assessment, or independent thinking, when they have spent the first eight years or more of their education in an environment which neither fosters nor tolerates dissent, disagreement, questioning or debate, or independence of thought? In High School Indoctrination, Sol Stern claims, "The younger the students are, of course, the less likely are they able to withstand – or even detect – attempts at social and political thought control in the classroom." [(18)]

The K-8 public school system teaches and trains children by the strict rote of the school curriculum in which daily repetition and environmental manipulation reinforce in those children a belief that authority is right, that authority must be obeyed, that authorities decide what you will learn and when and how, that the student must respect, obey and rely and be dependent on that very authority. Many behavioral scientist favoring the "nurture" theory of character development "believe that people think and behave in certain ways because they are taught to do so." [(30)] American psychologist John Watson said, "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select...regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors." [(30)] The old Jesuit saying, "Give me a child..... until he is seven, and I will give you the man" [(6)], displays a clear recognition that the earlier you can gain access to a child's mind the stronger control you have over the formation of that child's character and beliefs. Could any person, after eight years of even the level of "brainwashing" and indoctrination in our public schools emerge from that process without being affected and without their character being molded to that desired by the system from which they are "graduating"? "After pupils have left school," Bertrand Russell adds in The Impact of Science on Society, "they will be incapable .. of thinking or acting otherwise than their schoolmasters would have wished." [(33)] One of the most insidious student control tools being employed in recent decades, of course, is Ritalin and similar psychological control drugs. In 18 Ways Public Schools Can Hurt Children and Parents and many other sources we are told "Public schools pressure many parents who have bright, normal children to give their kids potentially dangerous mind-altering drugs like Ritalin to make the bored kids "behave" in class. Over four million normal but allegedly "unruly" school children take Ritalin every day. Methylphenidate (sold as Ritalin) and cocaine are both listed on "Schedule II" of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's Controlled Substances Act (CSA)." [(28)]

In recent decades, with the ever-increasing outflow of jobs from the industrialized world to the lower cost job markets of developing nations like China, India, Taiwan and Indonesia, there has been an increasing, though perhaps confused, belief that the school systems in our industrialized nations are not turning out workers that are competitive with those graduating from school in developing nations. Much of this belief, however, is being fostered by corporations who are actively and energetically campaigning for an ever-increasing role in our public schools, institutions which came into being for the purpose of, and are still focused on, turning out standardized workers for business and industry. In Government Can’t Run Schools Like Businesses, Thomas L. Johnson, professor emeritus of biological sciences at University of Mary Washington takes a decidedly pro-business and anti-government stance in stating, "If freedom is to survive in America, it will be necessary to eliminate the psychologically crippling and mentally debilitating authoritarian socialist public-school system that inevitably inflicts upon all of its students a long and thorough indoctrination in authoritarianism and convinces them that government force is a valid and necessary means to achieve virtually any desired ends." [(13)]. He would, instead, have corporations doing the indoctrination.

In Nightmare Awaits Under Globalization - effects on public school system in Canada, Rick Sawa states "Corporations want governments to get out of the way of business when it comes to education. They feel that decisions must be taken by a school system for good business reasons, with a minimum of public intervention." [(17)] In Smaller Learning Communities: Preparing Workers for a State Planned Economy, Edwatch states, "Goal 6 of Goals 2000 states in part, “Every major American business will be involved in strengthening the connection between education and work." It is a philosophy, and it is the focal point of the new restructuring of American society. It is a means for appointed bureaucratic central planners to link government-directed education with government-directed economic development and government directed workforce preparation systems. Children are, in practice, human resources for a centrally planned economy." [(12)] It was not meant to be this way, of course. As we are reminded in the article Indoctrination and filtering, "The founders of our country saw that a well educated citizenry is essential to preserving Liberty. Yet they also knew that education ought not be centrally controlled. For no matter who is in power, those persons will inevitably impose their particular propaganda onto the schools. For this reason, the federal government was forbidden (by the Tenth Amendment) from involving itself in education." The article goes on to remind us, like so many others, "Rather than teaching honest self-reliance, the system seduces our children into dependency." [(19)] In Echoes of corporate influence, Dorothy Shipps, assistant professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University writes, "Corporate leaders have assumed the unrivalled moral authority to define the purposes and methods of public schooling in response to the new technology-driven global economy." [(4)] In Public Schools: Enforced Social Conversion & Parental Denial, tireless education and home schooling advocate, Nancy Levant, states, "Children all over the world are being converted to social compliancy and servitude. ..... No parent in the United States has any excuse, whatsoever, for ignoring the political-corporate take-over and manipulation of knowledge and learning." [(7)]

Such government and corporate manipulation of the education system is and will continue to be aimed at not just pushing corporate agendas on the school system but preventing opposing agendas from gaining a foothold in that same system. In Science a la Joe Camel Laurie David reports, "The producers of "An Inconvenient Truth," decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. Thanks but no thanks, they said. ..... Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp." [(1)] In Influencing future decision makers, Dr Sharon Beder states, "This strategy [of creating confusion by challenging scientific evidence] is now making its way into school science curricula as corporations supply "educational" materials that promote clear cutting of forests whilst casting doubt on phenomena such as global warming and ozone depletion. For example, Procter and Gamble argued in their package that disposable diapers are no worse for the environment than cloth diapers, a claim based on scientific studies funded by Procter and Gamble. The company just happens to be the world's largest manufacturer of disposable nappies although this wasn't mentioned in the package." [(3)]

But corporations, particularly large multinationals, have now seriously broadened their horizons. No longer content with having to push their agenda on a region by region, state by state, nation by nation basis, they have now set their sights on standardized global education. In an article titled United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development in Edwatch, the broad brushstrokes of international corporate control of globalized education standards are revealed: "The international community now strongly believes that we need to foster — through education — the values, behaviour and lifestyles required for a sustainable future." [(10)] In a counter article entitled Education for Sustainable Tyranny: The United Nations Plan for Our Children, Michael J Chapman writes, "At the September 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, so-called “representatives of the peoples of the world” adopted a document called, “Agenda 21,” the global roadmap for SD implementation. ..... The Chapter Titles of Agenda 21 reveal the extent of government control necessary to implement SD, including goals to: Change Consumption Patterns; Promote Sustainable Human Settlements; Plan & Manage All Land Resources, Ecosystems, Deserts, Forests, Mountains, Oceans, Fresh Water; Agriculture; Rural Development; Biotechnology; Ensuring Equity; an increased role for Non-Government Organizations (NGOs); and even defining the role of Business and Financial Resources. ..... The United States is pleased to return to UNESCO… There and here, we agree that we must make education a universal reality. Our governments have entrusted us with the responsibility of preparing our children to become citizens of the world." [(11)]

We who are involved in the peak oil movement have, as one of our greatest concerns, the apathetic lack of public awareness of the disasters that lie before us, not just peak oil but also human-induced global warming and a host of other potential or even probable catastrophes all the result of serious human overpopulation. We are all aboard a runaway train racing down the track toward a collapsed bridge, with the engineer and other staff on the train doing their damnedest to keep us ignorant of that reality. We are labeled as doomers because we insist on trying to push those future problems into the public consciousness. In reality, of course, we are trying to minimize the potential severity of those problems by raising public awareness and pushing society towards preparation. Is that ever likely to happen, however, with the current government and corporate control of our education system? We tend to focus our efforts on the adult population around us. But that adult population is a product of a school system that spent twelve years and more indoctrinating and brainwashing them into accepting and supporting the status quo. Only a small minority of the graduates of that system, I would suggest, are capable of breaking free of those years of mental programming.

Unless we can break the grip of senior governments and corporations on our school system neither the present generation of school students nor those yet to come will be able to break free and move away from the status quo and in a direction consistent with the needs for societal survivability in a post-peak, eventually post-energy, world. We know that our current resource-wasting society is not sustainable. We know that we are gradually but irrevocably destroying the earth's ability to support life, including our own species. And yet our children are spending their formative years in an education system that continues to reassure them that that is okay, that there will always be another technological solution, that it is okay for us to use up the last of the resources available because they are confident we will find other solutions when they have run out.

If we are ever to gain serious momentum toward ending our suicidal destruction of this planet - our home planet, the only one in the universe we know to support life - we must start with our children. We must stop allowing them to be brainwashed into supporting the societal norms that are responsible for our race to self-destruction. We must also reach our leaders and do what we can to get them to look ahead and realize that the bridge is out and get them to start leading in a different direction.

Is either likely to happen? Not likely, but we must keep trying. I think the long-term of our species is worth the effort.

For a more detailed review of the debate over the government and corporate indoctrination taking place in our public schools follow the links below.

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1) Science a la Joe Camel - By Laurie David
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112400789.html
2) Software business profits from influence, good timing
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-te.software20s2sep20,0,1461628.story?coll=bal-education-storyutil
3) influencing future decision makers by Dr Sharon Beder
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/beder/story.htm
4) Echoes of corporate influence
http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_11/uk/doss12.htm
5) How Business Gained Influence over Chicago Public Schools
http://www.children.smartlibrary.org/newinterface/segment.cfm?segment=2141
6) The Religious Policeman
http://muttawa.blogspot.com/2006/01/give-me-child.html
7) PUBLIC SCHOOLS: ENFORCED SOCIAL CONVERSION & PARENTAL DENIAL
http://www.newswithviews.com/Levant/nancy9.htm
8) Fifth Annual Report on Commercialism in Schools / The Corporate Branding of Our Schools
http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/CERU/Documents/CERU-0210-09-RW.doc
9) New Education Initiative: Public Education as Transnational Corporate Welfare
http://www.libertycoalition.net/new_education_initiative_public_education_as_transnational_corporate_welfare
10) United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (January 2005 – December 2014)
http://www.edwatch.org/
11) Education for Sustainable Tyranny: The United Nations Plan for Our Children
http://www.f21sc.net/site/downloads/chapman_sustainable_tyranny.pdf
12) Smaller Learning Communities: Preparing Workers for a State Planned Economyhttp://www.edwatch.org/
13) Government Can’t Run Schools Like Businesses
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0501f.asp
14) American Indoctrination -- The harsh reality of public school
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?&Number=1437055
15) Are Lady Liberty's Books for Education or Indoctrination?
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=5058
16) The Central Fallacy of Public Schooling By Daniel Hager
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4846
17) Nightmare Awaits Under Globalization - effects on public school system in Canada
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JQV/is_6_30/ai_76911355
18) High School Indoctrination
http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21563
19) Indoctrination and filtering
http://www.edaction.org/New/intr0006.htm
20) Political indoctrination seeping into private schools
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MattTowery/2006/08/24/political_indoctrination_seeping_into_private_schools
21) Political indoctrination in the curriculum during four periods of elementary school education in Taiwan.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3547/is_200305/ai_n8365087
22) FIRE Has Never Been ‘Sheepish’ on the Danger of Confusing Free Speech with Indoctrination
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/5377.html
23) The Road to Democracy Starts at the Schoolhouse Door; Teaching our Children Beyond the "Three Rs"
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legal_issues/legal_updates/other_noteworthy_cases/free_speech_rights_students.htm
24) Brainwashing and Thought Control in Scientology -- The Road to Rondroid
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/wakefield/us-14.html
25) Throw Out Your TV- Mass Mind Control
http://www.catholicintl.com/noncatholicissues/tv.htm
26) Public Schools Warned: Requiring Ritalin Is Unlawful
http://www.wildestcolts.com/safeEducation/release8_01.html
27) How Public Schools Coerce Parents Into Giving Mind-Altering Drugs To Their Children
http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com/adhd/mind_altering_drugs.asp
28) 18 Ways Public Schools Can Hurt Children and Parents
http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com/pspm/dangers.asp
29) Just Say Yes to Ritalin!
http://www.alternet.org/story/9838/
30) Nature vs. Nurture: Are We Really Born That Way?
http://genealogy.about.com/cs/geneticgenealogy/a/nature_nurture.htm
31) Freedom: Transcending Enculturation and Choosing for Ourselves
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/CY-FREED.html
32) Avatar and the Restoration of Free will
http://www.avataroverdrive.com/avatar_journal/vol13_1/freewill.htm
33) IS MANIPULATION REAL?
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/brain2.htm
34) Propaganda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
35) Pulling kids out of government schools
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24253
36) Central High School
http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/1/6.html
37) Education or Indoctrination?
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0807-06.htm
38) Bill Gates and the Corporatization of American"Public" Schools
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0406-31.htm
39) Schools With a Slant
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/hilde/Phl_325c/antienvironmentaled.html
40) A Citizens Guide to Adopting Commercial-Free School Board Policies In Your Community
http://www.ibiblio.org/commercialfree/policies.html
41) Curbing the Commercialization of Public Space
http://www.newrules.org/info/publicspace.html
42) Naming Rights Sold -- This Time, at High School Field
http://www.commercialalert.org/news/Archive/2002/08/naming-rights-sold-this-time-at-high-school-field

The Right to Pursue Powerdown: Seeking alternative lifestyles post-peak

Throughout history most societies have spawned groups within them that chose not to follow the norms and dictates of the mainstream society of which they were a part. Very often it is religious differences of some type that set these groups apart, e.g. Quakers, Shakers, Mennonites, Amish, Doukhobors, Acadians, Huguenots, Mormons, Christians in the Roman Empire and more. Mainstream cultures have never been very
tolerant of such so-called "dissidents". Such groups have been subjected to harassment, persecution, legal persecution and prosecution, even attacks and mass murder such as was the case with the Huguenots in France and the Doukhabors in Russia. Rules and laws are often ignored in the zeal to persecute such groups. Very often rules and laws are specifically altered to target such groups, to make it illegal for them to adhere to their own non-mainstream beliefs. In most cases large segments of those religious groups saw no option open to them other than leaving those societies and countries in which they were being persecuted.


Such harassment and persecution, of course, have not been limited to large groups of dissenters. Very often an individual who pursues a belief or practice contrary to the established mainstream will be similarly hounded, harassed and persecuted. Some of these in recent news in Canada include; Michael Schmidt for supplying raw unprocessed milk at the request of his several hundred customers; Percy Schmeiser for his seed saving practices that ran afoul of Monsanto when his crops became contaminated from nearby Monsanto crops; Ghislaine Lanctot for her constant campaigns against the medical establishment and her book The Medical Mafia; Doctor Krop of Toronto who had the audacity to practice environmental medicine and identify household chemicals as the source of patient illnesses and counsel his patients to get the chemical products out of their homes; and many more.


Those unwilling to adhere to the practices and tenets of mainstream society seem invariably to be considered a threat to that society, a threat that must be dealt with harshly. The presumed threat, however, generally exists only in the collective mindset of the mainstream society. Most often the splinter group seeks only to follow their own beliefs and practices in freedom. And almost invariably the mainstream society around them will not accept their right to do so. If existing laws are insufficient to stop such groups from pursuing their beliefs then very often the laws will be changed as required to stop them.

As we approach the global peak in oil production, and most certainly when we have gone beyond that point and start our slide down the depletion downslope, there is a
rapidly growing group of people who want to begin the process of preparing themselves, their homes, their neighbourhoods and communities for the self-sufficient and self-reliant lifestyle that will be necessary when energy decline has torn asunder our heavily energy-dependent global society. They recognize that achieving the required level of post-peak self-sufficiency may take decades and that waiting until we are already past peak and on the downslope means having waited too long. They recognition that such preparation needs to be started now while there is still the resources and energy to do the job.

People who are attempting to do such preparation now, however, are finding in their way roadblocks, hurdles and obstacles just as severe as the groups mentioned above. Many of the past practices that would have been consistent with that preparation are no longer permitted in "developed" societies such as in North America and Europe. One can no longer keep chickens and other food animals within municipal boundaries in most western cities, for example. You cannot turn your front lawn into a vegetable garden. You cannot produce, sell or buy raw milk. In markets of any type in most North American cities one can neither sell nor buy "live" food such as chickens. You cannot put manure on your lawn or urban garden, or even keep manure unless it is in a plastic bag labelled zoo-poo. In most urban jurisdictions in North America you are not allowed to have an outdoor clothesline, maintain a root cellar, put up a wind generator, use grey-water for crop irrigation, keep an open compost, etc. In most municipal jurisdictions you are not allowed to keep or graze large animals like horses, cows, bullocks, or even goats or sheep or geese or ducks or pigs.

All of these things and practices that will be critical for self-sufficiency when we get well down the energy decline slope are viewed today as threats to the aesthetic enjoyment urbanites have for their chemical lawns and GMO flower gardens. If you have ever run afoul of a neighbourhood committee you will have seen this conflict in glorious action.

How are those who have the courage to look ahead to the problems awaiting us ever to benefit from that foresight if they are not allowed to get started on preparation? When the masses begin to wake up to the problems when it becomes impossible to ignore them, who will they turn to for guidance in their preparation? The same politicians and bureaucrats and neighbourhood nazis that are standing in the way of that preparation today? Why is it that some people peacefully exercising a freedom of choice is a threat to mainstream society? Is freedom of choice only permitted when the choices you are allowed to pick come only from a select list of "approved" choices?

You may not be at the stage of wanting to begin your preparation yet. Just as well. You would find far too many roadblocks in the way. But if the majority of people continue to insist on those roadblocks and there are no dissenting voices
forcing politicians to awaken to the fact that we must begin to change municipal laws to not only allow but facilitate and foster this type of preparation, you will find when you are ready that the roadblocks are still there. Public pressure for change must begin now.

Western Hemisphere Deep Integration - Hemisphere as Empire - Part 2

Ever since the original statement of what has come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, there have been forces within the U.S. Federal government who have interpreted that Doctrine as "....shorthand for American colonialism in the Americas" and "a declaration of hegemony and a right of unilateral intervention over the nations of the Western Hemisphere". Those same forces have also tended to interpret the associated principle of "Manifest Destiny" as "a theoretical justification for U.S. expansion outside of North America."
There has, fortunately, been strong and continuous opposition to these interpretations that has kept such sentiment somewhat in check. Expansion has been subjugated through most of the past half-century to intervention. The operational unit that has been at the forefront of this intervention has been the CIA with its consistent involvement in the politics of Latin America.
With the current and increasing focus on global energy reserves, however, there is growing motivation to go beyond intervention. There have, even during that half century, been a number of cases of American military "intervention", the Bay of Pigs, Panama, Grenada, the drug wars in Colombia, the Iran/Contra involvement, the Cuban missile crisis being the major examples. Whether it be called intervention or otherwise, "In practice, the U.S used the Monroe Doctrine to side with whatever side of Caribbean conflicts favoured the United States". US interests, in its dealings with nations throughout the world, are increasingly and strongly focussed on energy. And the known and presumed energy resources of South America have very much captured the attention of the U.S. administration. The vast oil sand reserves of troublesome Venezuela, the natural gas reserves of troublesome Bolivia, the offshore oil reserves of troublesome Cuba, the offshore oil reserves of Brazil, the presumed reserves of oil and natural gas beneath Brazil's Amazonia region, all have the U.S. administration licking their lips as they face ever-dwindling domestic reserves and increasing geo-political problems in the middle east, Africa, Central Asia and other oil provinces. Even Canada, the now primary "foreign" supplier of both oil and natural gas, is already in decline on its natural gas and conventional oil supplies, and cannot ramp up oil sands production sufficient to satisfy America's future needs.
Through the efforts of the WTO, OECD, IMF, and World Bank the U.S. has gained considerable economic control over Latin America. But that is running into consistent political problems and serious defaults on major development loans. Latin America is costing a lot of money and, with various Latin American countries like Venezuela and Bolivia getting very uppity about sovereignty over their energy resources, the U.S. is getting less and less of what it needs and wants from those investments. The U.S. has attempted to increase its economic influence in South America through the OAS (Organization of American States) and through the proposed FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas). The FTAA proposals at this stage are floundering, partly through opposition to it being pushed by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. At this stage the administration are even considering the possibility of allowing U.S. companies to invest in Cuban oil development projects, something that would never have been considered just a couple of years ago. Such is the desperation of U.S. for oil and other energy sources over which they can have some hope of exercising any measure of control, with or without stability.
Heightening U.S. angst about Latin America, and even Canada to some extent, is the frantic pace at which China are getting involved in energy deals in the Americas. In fact, it is that Chinese activity and the expansion/intervention interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine and the principle of Manifest Destiny that are beginning to raise red flags in South America particularly. The ability of the U.S. to "control" the energy resources of South America to ensure meeting future U.S. energy needs are being severely compromised.
It is naive to assume that the U.S. administration and government are unaware of peak oil. With that awareness also comes the awareness that future trans-ocean transportation of energy supplies, whether oil, LNG, coal or other, will be severely compromised on the downslope of Hubbert's Peak. That awareness must lead to the awareness that ultimately beyond peak oil ones energy needs will have to be satisfied domestically or continentally. The easiest and most efficient means of transporting oil, natural gas and coal is by land, through pipelines or using railways. Both of these methods can be buffered against the decline in global oil supplies. But both require a continental base of energy supply.
If the U.S. cannot achieve continental/hemispheric energy security through economic control and political pressure it may feel that the other arm of diplomacy, the military, is the only means left open to them. It may not be enough to be able to isolate North America. The hegemonic aims of the nation may only be achievable with hemispheric energy control.

Western Hemisphere Deep Integration - Hemisphere as Empire - Part 1

Whatever borders and lines men arbitrailly draw on a map there are always powers in operation that wish to see them altered. All too often those powers are strong enough to attempt to do so. Borders separating peoples that have a natural affinity and relationship of language, colour, religion or otherwise are always being look at enviously by some power wishing to bring those divided peoples back together. One need only look at the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland, North and South Vietnam, North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, Pakistan India and Kashmir, Turkey Iraq and Kurdistan, Germany and the former east Germany, and more. In any large national area there are always those powers within the nation that seek to divide it, usually along lines of language or religion or ethnicity. Witness Canada and its factions for Quebec and Western separatism, the U.S. and its civil war and continuing separatism pressures in the south, in California, in the Pacific northwest, and others, the desires and attempts to divide Iraq into autonomous Sunni, Shia and Kurdish regions. The separatist pressures of areas like the Gold Coast in Australia. The frequent separatist efforts in the Normandy region of France, the Basque region of Spain. Pressures for autonomy in Brazils Amazonia region, Argentina's Pategonia region, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and of course the political implosion and break up of the former Soviet Union into independentent nations.
Not unexpectedly, whenever there is a serious difference in power - whether that be political, military or economic - between the different parties involved, and particularly when that power is gained due to an inordinate amount of external support, the party with that upperhand of power will generally use that power to have its way in the conflict. Ireland and Northern Ireland are still separate because of the disparity of power that Britain brings in its claims for and support of Northern Ireland. The Soviet Union broke up because it became economically and militarilly impotent against the powers working to destroy it. Quebec is still part of Canada, as is western Canada, because there is not sufficient support, both social and economic, to effectively push the desire for separation. Yugoslavia broke down because the powers seeking division strengthened and the external support from the Soviet Union for holding the nation together disintegrated. North and South Korea remained separated because of the balance of power between their separate supportes, China in the North and the US in the south. The falkland Islands are not part of Argenta because the passion and power that Britain chose to put into the defence of those islands could not be matched by Argentina, despite their proximity. Each such situation of desired union or separation can be analyzed to find out the reasons that it has either succeeded or failed.
The methods used to attempt to bring separate regions of cultural, ethnic or religious similarity together or to break down the unity of a country and drive the cause of separatism are as numerous as the examples. Two key constants to success, however, are money and military power. A well financed rebel army with passion and a will to fight for their cause, and a willingness to wait for the right opportunity, can achieve its aim, when the time is right, with relative ease and speed.
But I want to look at the opposite side of the coin, the building of a large nation or an empire from politically, ethnically, and culturally disparate entities. The building of a nation like Canada or the United States or China or India, or the building of an empire like the British Empire, the Roman Empire, The Soviet Union, the Spanish conquest of almost all of Latin America, save for Brazil. At various times in Human history a nation that has been a pre-eminent power on the planet (or at least the generally recognized "civilized" portion of it) succumbs to the desire to increase their national stature by building an empire. This generally, and unfortunately, is achieved by the invasion, capture, oppression or subjugation of other nations, states and peoples. The Roman Empire at its peak covered almost all of what then was recognized as "the known world". The British Empire was built on sea power, military power, cultural discipline and economic power and covered much of the planet. The Soviet Empire was built in much the same way as the Roman Empire, military conquest and cultural and financial domination of nations around them as they spread out from their core. Hitler attempted to do the same thing by turning Europe into an expanded German empire.
But empire building today is very different and very complex. The Soviet Empire disintegrated because the Soviet Union attempted to hold the empire together with military might, and the political, economic and cultural subjugation of the disparate peoples of the empire. It was probably the last empire where those methods would be used to try to hold the empire together. It was not, however, the last attempt at empire. There are at least three empires being built in the world today. One is relatively obvious, that being the European Union. It is an empire unlike any of the past.
The other two empire builders in operation today are, of course, the United States and China. Both are using very different empire building methods than have ever been employed in the past. Both are being driven by the same objectives: global economic domination and global control of energy resources. And both, I believe, will only pursue the present techniques as long as they gain them those objectives. When, not if, those techniques fail to deliver I believe both will then pursue more traditional and agressive means of achieving the empires they are trying to build. That will be the subject of part 2.

The Middle East Crisis and Peak Oil

There is an unfortunate tendency among many peak oilers to translate every global geopolitical event in terms of peak oil. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Those same people will, in the next breath, complain that the world's political leaders are unaware of peak oil and have no plans to deal with it. It has to be one or the other. It can't be claimed that politicians are ignorant of peak oil and at the same time claim that it is the motive force behind everything they do.
There is little question that the involvement of the nations of the western world in the events of the middle east are motivated by the presence of such large volumes of oil in that region. Western nations have been prepared to go to war in order to secure access to oil and other energy resources, and indeed non-energy resources, for decades and centuries. It can even reasonably be argued that most of the major wars of the past century have been a result of energy reserves and access to them.
To project this reality into a peak oil perspective and claim that current global geopolitical events have to do with political awareness of peak oil and the desire to secure the "last" of the world's energy reserves is misguided. The current middle east crisis, as with most previous middle east crises, is about religious bigotry and intolerance. It is about two different peoples seeing a completely different truth in the same set of facts. It is about the peculiarly human frailty of measuring each other by our differences than our commonalities. I have two cats, one a grey American Shorthair and the other a black/white/orange calico. It's odd how they seem not to bother about those obvious visible differences. I think all they see in each other is another cat. Yes, they will squabble sometimes over who eats off which dish at mealtime. But that has no basis in their physical differences. I do not, I must mit, know what their individual religious affiliations are.
I am not going to launch into a pointless polemic about learning to live together. I am not going to break into a few bars of "Ebony and Ivory". I am not above doing either, but they are not the point of this article.
My point here is a simple one. Do not draw connections between peak oil and world events that do not exist. The tendency is regretable that peak oilers looked to such a wide variety of world events as confirmation that their belief in peak oil is not misplaced. But it is a process of forcing those world events through a very narrow filter. The confirmation of political awareness of peak oil and political action to deal with peak oil will come when it comes. Whenever that happens it will be far earlier than the world is prepared to deal with it. Don't rush it.

Canada's Energy Sovereignty, or Lack Thereof

There is an unfortunate tendency in Canada to buy into the cornucopean vision offered by politicians and the media that we are an energy rich nation with sufficient energy reserves of all kinds to satisfy our needs decades or even centuries into the future. And with the simple statistics of reserves and production it is difficult to argue with that. But when you look deeper into those statistics and match that up with our energy needs and the nature of those needs and the realities of who has control over those energy reserves, you get a very different and unnerving picture. Our energy wealth begins to look very much like the American financial wealth which is all smoke and mirrors and built on a huge mountain of debt.

Our energy resources are not ours to do with as we please. We do not control them. Control over Canada's energy resources were put on the table in the NAFTA negotiations. They were quickly and gratiously grabbed off the table. In those negotiations Canada's negotiators accepted the inclusion of a proportionality clause into the NAFTA agreement. That proportionality clause requires Canada, in perpetuity, to make available to the US an amount of oil and natural gas equivalent to our own domestic usage. As Gordon Laxer writes in Will federal parties secure Canada's energy future?, "But, even the best environmental policies will not help much as long as Canada is locked into exporting 70% of its oil and 56% of its natural gas to the US. Under NAFTA’s proportionality rules, we must continue exporting at least the same proportion of energy to the US, even if we face shortages. If Canada conserves energy, as it must, we will export more of our dwindling supplies so that Americans can maintain their SUV ‘fix’." In fact, we are reducing our domestic natural gas usage. As Tom Adams reports in his Globe and Mail article, Natural-gas policy, "Average natural-gas use per Ontario household has dropped by about 10 per cent over the past 10 years." Canada alone, of the three participants in NAFTA, fell into that proportionality trap. As Gordon Laxer points out, "Mexico’s independent policy ensures public ownership and first access for domestic needs."
Both of our two primary energy resources, natural gas and conventional crude oil, are already in decline and that decline is escalating. To replace the reducing oil supply more and more of Canada's oil production is now coming from the tar sands. But, Laxer points out, "Alberta’s tar sands have plenty of oil, but it comes with horrific environmental damage." The extraction and processing of tar sands material requires a tremendous amount of fresh water, in excess of 1,000 litres per barrel of oil. The impact on the sensitive ecology of Northern Alberta will be a terrible price to be paid by many future generations of Albertans.

More important from an energy perspective, however, is the amount of natural gas, production of which is already rapidly in decline, used in the processing and distribution of tar sands oil. According to an article in TheOilDrum.com, "an industry rule of thumb is that it takes 1000 cubic feet of natural gas to produce one barrel of bitumen. The demand for mining recovery is a more modest 250 cubic feet per barrel. Current natural gas demand for upgrader hydrogen amounts to approximately 400 standard cubic feet per barrel. Future hydrogen additions for upgrading into higher quality SCO [synthetic crude oil], may reach another 250 cubic feet per barrel. In addition to this, if no coke burning is taking place, yet another 80 standard cubic feet of barrel for upgrader fuel is to be added. Therefore, a future barrel of in situ produced high quality SCO may require more than 1700 standard cubic feet of natural gas...."
Canada is already building several LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) plants, most thus far in the Maritimes, in order to facilitate the importation of natural gas to make up for our own declining supply. A proportional amount of that imported natural gas, however, is also destined for pipeline shipment to the US.
That use of natural gas to process tar sands oil presents Canada with a double whammy under the terms of NAFTA. All of that NG usage for tar sands processing (already 11% of our total NG usage) is counted in our domestic usage figures. NG usage for tar sands processing has been increasing by about 10% per year. And all of that increase requires us to make available to the U.S. a proportional additional amount of natural gas. Not only are we selling the bulk of our tar sands oil to the U.S. but that very activity further increases the amount of natural gas, an increasing amount of which we are importing, that we must make available to the U.S.
If we continue to allow ourselves to be obliged to increasingly deplete our energy resources to satisfy the insatiable energy appetite of the U.S., we will soon, as Colin Campbell suggested in the ASPO country review of Canada, "be freezing in winter while our natural gas runs the hair dryers in Houston."

Oil Tremors: The Global Oil Tremors Before the big Oil Quake

Peak Oil is The Big One!! The oil crises of the 1970s and 1980s were minor foreshocks. The warning tremors for the big one have been building for over a year now. The time for denial and complacence is over. It's time to make plans to save yourself!
Just like seismologists constantly trying to find ways to accurately forecast the most dangerous earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, peak oil experts and analysts are trying to find ways to forecast when we will reach global peak oil and begin the inevitable decline in availability leading inevitably to effective depletion and the end of man's energy age. Seismologists are working with hard data from increasingly sensitive, accurate and sophisticated electronic sensors. They only have to deal with political manipulation of the data after it has been gathered and modelled. Peak oil modellers must rely, unfortunately, on human generated data even the production of which is highly frought with political agendas and economic gamesmanship. When you can control the data going into the forecast models it is politically easy to discredit predictions built on even slight deviations from that "official" data.
There was a time, not that long ago, when seismologists enjoyed the same type of reputation peak oil experts do today. They had to privately fund their own research, were constantly under a microscope where every hint of being incorrect was treated as proof that they didn't know what the hell they were talking about, that they were crackpots and doom-and-gloomers trying to panic the population. The press loved to overstate their probability estimates, call them predictions then watch the experts squirm when that "prediction" was wrong. Every past inaccurate prediction was considered proof that the next one would be wrong as well or that any accurate "guess" would be strictly accidental. That same press always wanted to know the worst case scenario then characterized the seismologists as doom-and-gloomers wishing for a catastrophe so they could say "I told you so."
But that has been the stock and trade of big business and even governments toward any system established to try to provide forewarning of problems, of catastrophes, of disasters. Bad news is bad business. Denial makes the world go round. In big business there are no problems, only opportunities. Anything that threatens the foundations of corporate faith and denial must be met with force and quashed. Any attempt to bring to light a problem without a related solution cannot be tolerated.
Every warning system that has been established, whether for earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, blizzards, cyclones, global warming, flooding, droughts, all rely on an analysis of past patterns in an attempt to identify future patterns. The more data there is from past events the better will be the ability to identify the patterns that will signal the next event. There is, largely thanks to the improvement in available technology over the past few decades, a building pattern of reliability in the forecasting of hurricanes and cyclones and other potential disasters, and people have become far more ready to accept a margin of fallibility in such forecasts. Hurricane forecasters use a cone of uncertainty to forecast a hurricane's landfall that generally narrows as the hurricane gets ever closer to land. It is becoming increasingly common that people anywhere in that cone of uncertainty will begin evacuating well ahead of the hurricane's landfall.
Earthquake prediction, on the other hand, though steadilly improving, is not yet as accurate and not yet sufficiently believable to most people that they will evacuate an area on the basis of a warning. The difficulty with earthquake and volcanic eruption predictions, as with forecasting systems for any natural event, is nailing down the timing of such an event. Unlike hurricanes and other storms, the build-up to an earthquake is generally not visible, occuring, as it does, many miles underground. Seismologists can, based on what data they do have, be one hundred percent certain that a major earthquake is imminent or that a volcano is on the verge of blowing its top and yet still have to allow for a time variability of weeks, months, even years. The success in calling the eruption of Mount Pinetubo in the Phillipines in 1993 is still very rare. Because of this inability to declare a provable timing on the event the government, business and industrial vested interests in keeping the populace calm turns into a process of keeping them ignorant and depriving them of the information on which they can make their own decisions.
Like seismologists pouring over readings of tremors from their sensors, peak oil analysts know with absolute certainty today that the peak in global oil production is imminent. What they do not know is exactly when that most important event in world economic history will occur. It may be later this year, next year, five years from now. Or it may, as many believe, have already happened. The pattern we see, again like those seismologists do as the event horizon approaches, is that the frequency and severity of the oil tremors is increasing dramatically. Just as that is an indicator to seismologists and vulcanologists that a major earthquake is due or that there is about to be a major volcanic eruption, these tremors indicate that the peak is nigh. Unlike that earthquake and volcanic eruption, peak oil is not a physical event, not something you can film, not something you can see or feel. A constant in peak oil analysis is the belief that we will only know we have reached peak oil well after the event, probably five years or more.
Like with siesmology there are many hot spots that must be watched. There are numerous fault lines running through the peak oil story from which tremors are emanating. There is the infamous SA fault line: that's not San Andreas but rather Saudi Arabia. There's west Africa, OPEC, the Gulf of Mexico, Iraq, Iran, the South China Sea, the Caspian Sea, Russia, Venezuela and Bolivia, China, India, the U.S., and more.
Watching the price of oil alone tells much of the story. Like the sharp signatures on the seismograph paper, the swings in the price of oil on a day to day basis have been getting more extreme and more frequent over these past two years. Just in this past year alone the signs of peak oil have been getting increasingly difficult to ignore. Only a couple of brave peak oil experts however, like Ken Defeyres, have publically stated they believe we are already there. It is difficult to disagree with that view when one looks at all the details.
Like the spastic needle on a seismograph as the event horizon approaches, the price of oil can gain or lose as much as five percent on any given day only to reverse itself on the next. World events which would hardly have caused a midday ripple on the markets just three years ago can now throw the price into wild fluctuations for days on end. Peak oil, which wasn't even on the mainstream news radar three years ago, is now part of the everyday lexicon of mainstream news media. Every day items and articles appear in mainstream news and information journals that two years ago would have been restricted to oil insider magazines. Every day there are news quotes from OPEC officials or insiders in the Saudi Royal family or a senior executive of Saudi Aramco, the Saudi government owned oil company, that would have gone completely ignored and unreported two years ago. At least once a month some Saudi official repeats the promise that Saudi Arabia can produce as much oil as the market needs while at the same time another official is saying Saudi Arabia will no longer be able to meet the world's demand for oil. Every few days some television network in North America runs a half hour, one hour or longer piece on the oil crisis that even a year ago they would not even concede existed. Every day the number of online internet links about peak oil grows by thousands.
The U.S. SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve), which was required to be established by all participating countries by the IEA following the oil scare in the 1970s as a hedge against extreme supply disruptions, was then quickly forgotten by all but the most observant insiders. It is now being watched closely on a weekly basis by not just oil insiders but commodity analysts, stock traders, peak oil analysts and any other casual observers concerned about our energy future. China has just recently announced plans to go ahead with building their Strategic Petroleum Reserve, despite record high prices, in anticipation of a near term decline in global oil availability and anticipation of increased competition and even higher prices. Draws by several nations on their SPR reserves made last year to assist the U.S. following Hurricane Katrina have not been replaced. George Bush has committed to temporarilly suspend additions to the U.S. SPR in a vain attempt to control oil prices. Increased demand has removed any buffer there was in the world oil supply and has seen a general shrinking in the Strategic Petroleum Reserves below the levels required of the signatories to the IEA agreement governing those reserves.
Alternative energy options which were always treated as laughable science fiction curiosities are now being thrown about as the panacea for the nation's energy predicament. The US military have drawn up major plans for powering the military with bio-fuels in preparation for the decline in oil availability. Though there hasn't been a new nuclear power plant built in North America in thirty years nuclear is now being advanced as a necessity for answering our future energy needs. Shunned for decades because of its high production of Greenhouse Gases, coal is now being strongly looked at throughout the industrialized world, and particularly in the U.S. and Canada, as a critical part of future energy security. Natural Gas, on which the nation and the continent have become increasingly dependent over the last two decades, is in rapid decline in the US and now heading into decline in Canada. Governments at several levels are now rushing to construct expensive and dangerous LNG import terminals in an attempt to make up the shortfall in supply. The potential demand by countries worldwide that are building energy plans on LNG imports far exceeds the current global supply capability. It could take more than a decade to build the LNG infrastructure and transport ships to satisfy that demand. Almost half of the OPEC countries, such as Dubai, Kuwait, UAE and Bahrain are increasingly over the past year shifting their focus to natural gas, building LNG export terminals and other facilities to offset the expected decline in future oil revenues and to capitalize on the growing demand for LNG as natural gas reserves in industrialized countries slip into rapid decline. The Canadian tar sands, of which the average American was not even vaguely aware and most of whom could never locate Alberta, let alone the tar sands, on a map, are now cavalierly touted by a large share of the American citizenry and most of its politicians as the answer to America's oil woes. Even the optimists do not believe that tar sands production will ever exceed three million barrels a day. The anticipated increases in production for the forseeable future will not even keep pace with the increase in US import demand.
Government owned oil companies in China, India and several other countries are bypassing the oil markets in the past year and locking in long-term supply contracts with oil producing countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Canada, Chad, and Russia. In the past year the U.S. has passed legislation to allow drilling in the ANWR, have moved toward softening the environmental legislation that precludes drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the U.S. east coast, softened environmental restrictions on coal usage and extraction, and on potential oil shale production in the midwest. Though woefully inadequate the White House has introduced multiple measures in the past year to increase the gas efficiency standards in light trucks, SUVs and vans, bringing those fuel efficiency standards up to what was the average vehicle fuel efficiency in 1970. A large proportion of the US Gulf of Mexico production is still offline after recent hurricanes and as much as 25% of that production will probably be perpetually offline due to the increasing incidence and severity of tropical storms and hurricanes. In his most recent State of the Union address president Bush finally openly declared that "America is addicted to oil" and indicated America needed to get off that addiction.
Late last year Mathew Simmons, CEO of the major oil industry investment firm of Simmons and Company, came out with his landmark book, Twilight In The Desert which warned that the Saudi oil reserve data is badly overstated and that their production is on the verge of going into rapid decline. Saudi Arabia has the largest oil field in the world, Ghawar, which is now delivering ten barrels of water for every barrel of oil indicating it is about to go into steep decline. Already this year the world's second largest oil field, Burgan in Kuwait, and the third largest, Cantarell in Mexico, have gone into sharp decline. These two fields and the Saudi Ghawar field produce nearly 20% of the world's oil. The majority of non-OPEC oil producing nations are now past their peak in oil production with nearly half in steep decline. Three of the OPEC nations have, in the past year, become net importers of oil, several others likely to become so in the next year. There have been serious riots, protests and civil disobedience in several OPEC nations as they have tried to raise the local price of gasoline to slow the draw of precious and dwindling oil resources for local usage. Every few weeks another OPEC country announces plans to construct a new oil refinery, not because of high profits in the value added products they could produce but because the only way they can sell their heavy sour crude is to refine it themselves. The majority of the refineries in the industrialized world are constructed for light and intermediate grades of oil.
Global oil production, despite rapidly increasing demand from the U.S., China, and India, has remained roughly constant at 84mbpd the past two years. Recent reports indicate that, despite record expenditures on exploration and development, we are now consuming nearly ten barrels of oil for every new barrel found. There has not been a super-giant field (over 500 million barrels) found in decades. Those oil fields being discovered are smaller each year and soon the finds may not be sufficient to even bother developing them or the infrastructure to get such small quantities of oil to market. Major oil consuming nations are increasingly looking at politically unstable nations such as Nigeria, Sudan, Chad, Azerbaijan, Lybia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia and Iran, for both future and current supplies of oil. One of the most telling and salient facts is that no new refineries have been built in the U.S. in the past thirty years and the oil majors are not committing to increasing their refining capacity because we are already well past a global peak in the production of the light sweet and intermediate grades of crude oil and they believe they could not get environmental approval for new refineries designed to process sour crude, the grade that will soon be all there is left.
Does all of this add up to proof that we have reached peak oil? In a court of law it would represent an overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence on which most juries would bring in a guilty verdict. If you were considering a long term investment in an industry with this sort of current track record you would run the other way. But how much of this reaches the average person? How much does the average politician know, or corporate executive? These are, after all, the people who make the major decisions that affect your life and the lives of your children and grandchildren. They hold the lives of six and a half billion people in their hands. Shouldn't they be aware of something so important? They are! The unfortunate reality is, however, just as with warnings for earthquakes and serious volcanic eruptions, the political and business interests in keeping the population calm and productive far outweigh the feeling of a need to issue a clear warning about a pending energy crisis when there is still so much admitted uncertainty as to the timing of such a crisis. The perceived political liability of a false alarm, especially when the uncertainty in the timing extends beyond the next election cycle, is just far too great. Letting the build up of soft warnings happen through unofficial means and focussing official attention on both denial and creating scapegoats to blame and to continue to point to alternatives that will never be able to replace oil are all seen as far more productive. Even allowing the odd politician, like Representative Bartlett, to sound alarm bells which the administration can ignore is acceptable, as long as there are scapegoats to fall back on when the time comes.
Ignoring the clear warning represented by the oil tremors that have been building globally over these past few years, and particularly in this last year, does not just put one city at risk, or one region or coast or even one country or continent. This is not something that can be handled with a mandatory evacuation of a city. Boarding up your windows won't help. Laying in a four or five day store of food is not the answer. When this one hits it will, like the Christmas Tsunami, spread around the entire world, will sweep away the global economy, though whether quickly or slowly is hotly debated, will gradually or quickly lead to a global depression and truly massive global unemployment, will critically affect our global ability to produce and distribute the food needed by those 6.5 billion people. This is not something that will be limited to poor third world countries in its effect. In fact it will probably have a more devastating effect on the rich, soft, industrialized world. The current generations, save but an aging few, have had no experience with the hunger, poverty and violence that is a way of life in the third world and which is going to build in the industrialized world in the years and decades following peak oil. If you are lucky to have grandparents who lived through the Great Depression ask them what it was like and listen very carefully. The tales they will tell will give you a foretaste of the future you can tell your grandchildren about, if you live through it.