Peak Oil, The Credit Crunch and Immigration Reversal

You can always tell a delusional idiot, for them reality is less important than ideology.

The primary example of this is immigration.

The credit crunch has destroyed totally the entire basis for immigration - and in fact has now led to the point where we must begin deporting economic migrants voluntarily or by enforced means.

Peak Oil will also ensure the same process must begin - but the idiot politicians are so tied up by political correctness that they are unable to articulate this simple economic, social and political reality.

Only the BNP will save this country - only the BNP will save our people - as only the BNP will begin the process of immigration reversal VOLUNTARILY without the crisis point being reached if nothing is done.

If the crisis point is reached then social and civil unrest will erupt that will make the Greek riots look tame in comparison.

Rome has fallen - the elite may still be in denial in their ivory towers, but out on the streets the revolution has already begun.


http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Archives2008/KunstlerDecember15ChangeYouWontBelieve.html


Change You Won't Believe

By James Howard Kunstler for ClusterFuck Nation

The peak oil story has not been nullified by the scramble to unload every asset for cash -- including whomping gobs of oil contracts -- during this desperate season of bank liquidation. The main implication of the peak oil story is that we won't be able to generate the kind of economic growth that defined our way of life for decades because the primary energy resources needed for it will be contracting.

Just as global oil production peaked, our economy evolved into a morbid hypertrophy, and the chief manifestation of it was the suburban sprawl-building fiesta that has now climaxed in the real estate bust. By the early 21st century, when so much American manufacturing had been swapped out to Asia, there was no business left except sprawl-building -- a manifold tragedy which wrecked the banks that financed it, and left the ordinary people mortgaged to it with ruinous liabilities.

That economy is now in its death throes. The "normality" it represents to so many Americans is gone and can't be brought back, no matter how wistfully we watch it recede. Even so, it was obviously not good for the country. The terrain of North America has been left scarred by unlovable objects and baleful futureless vistas that, from now on, will shed whatever pecuniary value they once had. It represents the physical counterpart to the financial mess that has been left to the young generations to clean up -- and the job will take a very long time.

We have to, so to speak, get to place mentally where we can face the kinds of change that are now necessary and unavoidable. We're not there yet. It's not clear whether the elected new national leadership knows just how severe the required changes will really be. Surely the public would be shocked to grasp what's in store. Probably the worst thing we can do now would be to mount a campaign to stay where we are, lost in raptures of happy motoring and blue-light-special shopping.

The economy we're evolving into will be un-global, necessarily local and regional, and austere. It won't support even our current population. This being the case, the political fallout is also liable to be severe. For one thing, we'll have to put aside our sentimental fantasies about immigration. This is almost impossible to imagine, since that narrative is especially potent among the Democratic Party members who are coming in to run things. A tough immigration policy is exactly the kind of difficult change we have to face. This is no longer the 19th century. The narrative has to change.

The new narrative has to be about a managed contraction -- and by "managed" I mean a way that does not produce civil violence, starvation, and public health disasters. One of the telltale signs to look for will be whether the Obama administration bandies around the word "growth." If you hear them use it, it will indicate that they don't understand the kind of change we face.

It is hugely ironic that the US automobile industry is collapsing at this very moment, and the ongoing debate about whether to "rescue" it or not is an obvious kabuki theater exercise because this industry is hopeless. It is headed into bankruptcy with one hundred percent certainty. The only thing in question is whether the news of its death will spoil the Christmas of those who draw a paycheck from it, or those whose hopes for an easy retirement are vested in it. But American political-economy being very Santa Claus oriented for recent generations, the gesture will be made. A single leaky little lifeboat will be lowered and the chiefs of the Big Three will be invited to go for a brief little row, and then they will sink, glug, glug, glug, while the rusty old Titanic of the car industry slides diagonally into the deep behind them, against a sickening greenish-orange sunset backdrop of the morbid economy.

A key concept of the economy to come is that size matters -- everything organized at the giant scale will suffer dysfunction and failure. Giant companies, giant governments, giant institutions will all get into trouble. This, unfortunately, doesn't bode so well for the Obama team and it is salient reason why they must not mount a campaign to keep things the way they are and support enterprises that have to be let go, including many of the government's own operations. The best thing Mr. Obama can do is act as a wise counselor companion-in-chief to a people who now have to leave a lot behind in order to move forward into a plausible future. He seems well-suited to this task in sensibility and intelligence. The task will surely include a degree of pretense that he is holding some familiar things together and propping up some touchstones of the comfortable life. But the truth is we are all going to the same unfamiliar new territory.

The economy we're moving into will have to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent with energy resource reality. I'm convinced that farming will come much closer to the center of economic life, as the death of petro-agribusiness makes food production a matter of life and death in America -- as opposed to the disaster of metabolic entertainment it is now. Reorganizing the landscape itself for this finer-scaled new type of farming is a task fraught with political peril (land ownership questions being historically one of the main reasons that societies fall into revolution). The public is completely unprepared for this kind of change. We still think that "the path to success" is based on getting a college degree certifying people for a lifetime of sitting in an office cubicle. This is so far from the approaching reality that it will be eventually viewed as a sick joke -- like those old 1912 lithographs of mega-cities with Zeppelins plying the air between Everest-size skyscrapers.

The crucial element in the transformation underway will be emotion. The American experience for a few generations has produced an adult population with very childish instincts, increasingly worse each decade. For instance, the desperate power fantasies among the younger tattooed lumpenproles -- those with next-to-zero real economic power -- suggest a certain unappetizing playing-out of resource competition when the supply of Cheez Doodles and Pepsi starts to dwindle. But even the heretofore gainfully employed middle classes are pretty lost in fantasies at least of comfort an convenience. For years now, I have wondered how their sense of grievance and resentment will be expressed when the supermarket shelves run bare and the cardboard signs get taped over the local gas pump and the cable TV gets cut off for non-payment. You wonder, to put it bluntly, how far gone we really are.

Oil to be $500 A Barrel

The black beast of Peak Oil slouches ever closer, its womb squirming with a myriad monsters about to be born.

Drunk on its delusions and decadence, the West sleeps as the shadow of the monster already begins to darken the day.

Consumerism, the offspring of the Oil Era is facing the abyss.

Globalism, and the liberal consensus based on the theory of universal human rights, will fall with the Oil Era.

The Natural Order will replace the New World Order, and an age red in tooth and claw will erupt as nations struggle to secure the last remaining oil reserves in the last few remaining oil wells.

This will be an era of Eco-Conflict, Resource Wars, Oil Wars such as the Iraq War and Neo-Darwinian Politics.



Here is a video of the energy expert Dr. Robert Hirsch explaining how oil will be $500 a bareel by 2012.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=774744570


With the collapse of the dollar as a result of the collapse of the Petro-Dollar Recycling System, energy inflation costs, growing political, terrorist and social instability in the last remaining oil producing nations and rising oil prices globally mean that this projection of $500 is a likely scenario.

The Great Depression ended because economic growth was still possible due to the vast amounts of oil still available.


We are now in The Second Great Depression with the oil almost half gone. Therefore the possibility of cheap oil subsidising future economic growth is gone, and all the remaining oil can do is satisfy existing demand at an ever diminishing rate and ever rising cost.

The Second Great Depression was prefigured by the Credit Crunch, which was itself an aspect of the collapse of the Oil Age.

Credit expansion and rising incomes in the 20th century were aspects of an economic expansion generated by cheap oil, but with the collapse of the Oil Age which began with the Iraq War (which was undertaken to secure the last remaining globaly significant oil deposits) then future economic expansion was not possible, and therefore the expansion of the credit based system was impossible. This caused the credit based system to collapse.

Previously easy credit has been available to everyone, simply because as long as the cheap oil remained then an increase in the growth of the economy was guaranteed. Credit could be repaid. The credit crunch caused by losses caused by the Sub Prime Crisis and the linked withdrawal of credit by loaners of private liquidity, who are now holding onto their capital, has caused the credit supply system to crash.

Governments cannot pump vast amounts of liquidity into the economic system in order to boost economic growth as Public Debt is escalating due to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

So Public Liquidity and Private Liquidity are both restricted at the same time as the ability of those already in debt to pay back existing credit loans is diminished due to economic reccession as a result of the oil price rise.

This is a triple whammy.

With oil supplies diminishing then the end of the Capitalist system is in sight.

Both Marx and Smith misuderstood the fundamental dynamic of all modern economic systems, which is energy supply.

Capital is an aspect of the energy capture and supply process.

Agricultural production in early human societies allowed man to grow crops containing calories, energy, to feed himself and his family.

Previous to this development of agriculture then human calorific intake had been based on nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyles based on subsistence living.

Then as agricultural techniques improved, the excess calories produced by the farmers allowed the creation of a warrior elite whose sole roles in early agricultural societies was to protect the farmers and to hunt down, capture, keep and feed slaves.

The slaves were the first machines dependent on mans ability to unlock energy from the environment.

Then the slaves became workers in the Feudal System. They worked the land and produced the food and goods that formed the basis of feudal trade.

Then the development of new technologies during the Industrial Revolution using wood, coal and charcoal allowed massive economic growth.

The Feudal Workers became the Working Class who worked in the mines, fields and factories and who supplied the machines with energy, who worked the machines or who sold the products of the machine or who protected the capital hoarded by the owners of the machines.

The demand for workers to work the machines drove up incomes and with disposable incomes this drove up the demand for commodities produced by the machines.

The discovery of oil, and the creation of technologies that used oil, caused massive economic and population growth.

Growing populations in growing economies with rising incomes are all aspects of the energy supply process.

The Oil Age replaced the coal age, but the Nuclear Age has not, and cannot, replace the Oil Age.

Therefore the end of the Oil Age is the end of modern human civilisation.

The Olduvai theory posits a return to the population levels by a devastating collapse in human opulation numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory

The Time of Malthus will have begun, for it had only been delayed by the age of oil and the fertilisers and pesticides created from oil.

Both Communism and Nazism were aspects of the energy capture process. Both represented the return to Slave Economies, and both Communism and Nazism were destroyed by oil.

The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union to get at the oil owned by Russia (leading to the defeat of Germany due to its war on two fronts ) and the Soviet Union collapsed because of Oil.

The Soviet Union experienced peak oil first hand—a 43% decline in domestic oil production between 1987 and 1996. This crisis caused Soviet society to fall into devastating economic impoverishment. The oil decline in the Soviet Union preceded the GDP decline.

Thatcherism was simply the expansion of credit and the British economy due to the oil boom of North Sea Oil.

There are NO economic miracles - there is simply lots of oil or expensive oil.

The need to ensure energy supplies to maintain existing social complexity and to fuel future economic growth is the basis of all economic and social systems.

When the energy source that any civilisation depends upon no longer provides enough energy to sustain its existing social complexity and future economic growth, then that society will collapse.

The only option for any nation or civilisation in such an energy crisis is to either collapse or embark upon wars to secure energy supplies.

THAT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL BASIS OF ALL HUMAN SOCIETIES.

It is the one true law of the Natural Order to come.



http://www.energybulletin.net/node/19837

THE SMOKING GUN ON IRAQ

FINALLY THE TRUTH IS OUT - THE IRAQ WAR WAS ABOUT OIL AS WE HAVE BEEN SAYING ALL ALONG !


http://www.opednews.com/articles/Ex-British-Army-Chief-in-I-by-Nafeez-Mosaddeq-Ah-080617-625.html

Ex-British Army Chief in Iraq Confirms Peak Oil as Motive for War; Praises Fraudulent Reconstruction Programmes

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Page 1 of 2 page(s)

http://www.opednews.com



Ex-British Army Chief in Iraq Confirms Peak Oil as Motive for War;
Praises Fraudulent Reconstruction Programmes

© Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed



1,384 words

Brigadier-General James Ellery CBE, the Foreign Office's Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad since 2003, confirmed the critical role of Iraqi oil reserves in potentially alleviating a "world shortage" of conventional oil. The Iraq War has helped to head off what Brigadier Ellery described as "the tide of Easternisation" – a shift in global political and economic power toward China and India, to whom goes "two thirds of the Middle East's oil."

After the 2004 transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi civilian administration, Brigadier Ellery set up and ran the 700-strong security framework operation in support of the US-funded Reconstruction of Iraq. His remarks were made as part of a presentation at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), University of London, sponsored by the Iraqi Youth Foundation, on 22nd April.

World Oil Shortage

"The reason that oil reached $117 a barrel last week", he said, "was less to do with security of supply... than World shortage." He went on to emphasise the strategic significance of Iraqi petroleum fields in relation to the danger of production peaks being breached in major oil reserves around the world. "Russia's production has peaked at 10 million barrels per day; Africa has proved slow to yield affordable extra supplies – from Sudan and Angola for example. Thus the only near-term potential increase will be from Iraq," he said. Whether Iraq began "favouring East or West" could therefore be "de-stabilizing" not only "within the region but to nations far beyond which have an interest."

Last month geological surveys and seismic data compiled by several international oil companies exploring Iraqi oil reserves showed that Iraq has the world's largest proven oil reserves, with as much as 350 billion barrels, significantly exceeding Saudi Arabia's 264 billion barrels, according to a report in the London Times. Former Bush administration energy adviser Matthew Simmons, author of the book Twilight in the Desert, says that Saudi oil production has probably already peaked, with production rates declining consecutively each year. This month the UK Treasury Department warned of the danger of an oil supply crunch by 2015, due to rocketing demand from China and India.

The Threat of Easternisation

Brigadier Ellery's career in the British Army has involved stints in the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, Germany and Northern Ireland. "Iraq holds the key to stability in the region," he said, "unless that is you believe the tide of 'Easternisation' is such that the USA and the West are in such decline, relative to the emerging China and India, that it is the East – not the West – which is more likely to guarantee stability. Incidentally, I do not." Iraq's pivotal importance in the Middle East, he explained, is because of its "relatively large, consuming population" at 24 million, its being home to "the second largest reserve of oil – under exploited", and finally its geostrategic location "on the routes between Asia, Europe, Arabia and North Africa - hence the Silk Road."

Oil production peaks when a given petroleum reserve is depleted by half, after which oil is geophysically increasingly difficult to extract, causing production to plateau, and then steadily decline. US oil production peaked by 1970, while British production in the North Sea peaked by 2000, converting both countries from exporters into net importers of oil and gas.

Oil industry experts and petroleum geologists increasingly believe that world oil production is precariously close to peaking. According to an October 2007 report by the German-based Energy Watch Group, run by an international network of European politicians and scientists, world oil production peaked in 2006. According to BP's annual statistical review of world energy supply and demand for 2008, released on 11th June, world oil production fell last year for the first time since 2002, by 130,000 barrels per day last year to 81.53 million. Yet world consumption continued to rise by 1.1 per cent to 85.22 million barrels per day, outweighing production by nearly 5 per cent.

Iraqi Reconstruction Corruption Whitewash

Brigadier-General James Ellery is currently Director of Operations at AEGIS Defence Services Ltd., a private British security firm and US defence contractor since June 2004. In April this year, the same month as Ellery's SOAS lecture, AEGIS won the renewal of its US defence department (DoD) contract for two more years, which at $475 million is the single largest security contract brokered by the DoD. The contract is to provide security services for reconstruction projects in Iraq conducted by mostly American companies.

A US government audit by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, released exactly two years before Brigadier Ellery's SOAS presentation, concluded that AEGIS could not prove it had properly trained or vetted several armed Iraqi employees. For a random sample of 20 armed guards, no training documentation was found for 14 of them. For 125 other employees, AEGIS reportedly failed to document background checks. The auditors concluded that "there is no assurance that Aegis is providing the best possible safety and security for government and reconstruction contractor personnel and facilities."

During his April presentation at SOAS, AEGIS director Ellery declared, "Iraq promises a degree of prosperity in the region as it embarks on massive Iraqi-funded reconstruction, a part of which will raise Iraqi's oil production from 2.5 million bpd today to 3 million by next year and maybe ultimately 6 million barrels per day." He added, "With a budget of $187 billion over 4 years, Iraq is poised to have a considerable impact on the economies of countries whose technologies can fill the skills gap left by the latter years of Saddam Hussein's regime." During the UN sanctions regime imposed primarily by the US and Britain, Iraq was banned from importing thousands of household goods, including food, medicines, clothes and books, from 1991 to 2003, purportedly to prevent Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction. It is now widely recognized that the sanctions led to massive socio-economic deprivation, the break-down of civilian infrastructure, large-scale unemployment, and de-industrialisation, resulting in the deaths of up to 1.8 million Iraqis, half of whom were children. The humanitarian crisis led United Nations officials such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General, and Hans von Sponeck, former Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, to resign in protest.


Today, those profiting most from reconstruction projects in Iraq are not Iraqis, but private contractors based primarily in the United States and Britain, according to a new report out last month by Stuart Bowen Jr, incumbent Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The Bowen Report found that at least 855 contracts valued at billions of dollars were cancelled before completion. Another 112 agreements were cancelled because of poor performance, while still more projects recorded as completed never happened. In one case, a $50 million children's hospital in Basra is listed as completed although the contract was stopped when only 35 percent of the work was finished.

During Brigadier Ellery's tenure at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, under Paul Bremer's leadership $8.8 billion of reconstruction funds were unaccounted for, and a further $3.4 billion was re-directed for "security" purposes. A UN body to audit the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), by which the CPA Programme Review Board managed Iraqi oil revenues until June 2004, found "gross irregularities by CPA officials in their management of the DFI," and condemned the United States for "lack of transparency" and providing the opportunity for "fraudulent acts."



Under American- and British-administered Iraqi reconstruction programmes, Iraqi agriculture has been devastated. In 2004, the Coalition Provision Authority imposed a hundred economic orders designed to open Iraq's economy to foreign investment, including Order 12 for tax- and tariff-free imports of foreign products. The Order allowed the giant American agribusiness conglomerate Cargill to flood Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cheap wheat, undercutting local food prices, and wiping out the livelihoods of Iraqi farmers.

As an executive director of AEGIS, one of the most prominent US defence contractors in Iraq, Brigadier Ellery is a personal beneficiary of the privatisation of the Iraqi economy. In the conclusions of his April address, he said, "Iraq has resources aplenty: not just oil, of which there is a prodigious quantity", but especially "the capacity to rebuild a balanced economy including agriculture - for which Iraq was a legend."
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www.nafeez.blogspot.com

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in International Relations, Globalisation, Empire, and 20th Century History, at Brunel University in West London and the University of Sussex in Brighton. Since 9/11, he has authored a critically acclaimed trilogy of books revealing the realpolitik behind the rhetoric of the "War on Terror", The War on Freedom, Behind the War on Terror, and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism. His fourth book is ,"The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry" (Duckworth, 2006). In summer 2005, he testified as an expert witness in US Congress about his research on international terrorism. His work has been featured in the Sunday Times, The Independent, The Observer, Sky News, and Channel 4, among other outlets.