Would I be insulted by a slap in the face from an infant? I think not - you massively overestimate the credibility of your position. And, you are still deluding yourself. You are trying to assemble a coherent truth made solely out of the fictions you've been spoonfed, which is going to lead absolutely nowhere. Fine. This exercise has been very enlightening for me, but not in the way you think.
I didn't try to present the future in a totally realistic way because I didnt have the time so I settled for attempting to grab your attention. Well done for reading the links, but there are other sites that do a better job of explaining the necessary consequences when oil becomes hard to obtain.
The most important thing to realize is that modern agriculture is basically a means of turning oil into food. It takes 6 calories worth of oil to produce 1 calorie of food. Also modern agriculture (especially as practised in the US) doesn't use crop rotation but instead relies heavily on chemical fertilizers and has badly depleted the soil - it's been described as a "big sponge" in some places. So add together the paralysis of the distribution network, no fertilizer or working farm machinery, and I don't see how food production and distribution could NOT fail. I've read also that in many cities water is brought in by electrical pumps, so no water supply for many people either. During the brief fuel shortages we've had in the UK from time to time there have been spells when the local shops have run out of basic commodities after *just a few days*. If you want to imagine a society that survives this intact, you have to figure out how people are going to get fed, at least. And on a long term basis.
Sorry, I've no action plan. The only one I can think of that might work is to build a fleet of rockets to round up some frozen volatiles from the asteroid belt and bring them back, but even if we had the technology to do it, it would take decades we don't have. Plus of course it would require a government or a coalition of governments to raise the gazillions needed, and they're not even listening. The only hope we have is (1) we can cut back consumption to ensure there is enough oil around later on to fuel the restructuring effort, and (2) that someone will think of something and that this will happen soon enough to make a difference.
Therefore the only thing we can do is try to raise awareness. Talk to as many people about it as you can until it enters the public consciousness. If we succeed maybe it will be an issue at the next election. If it doesn't happen until the election after that it may already be too late - because global oil production is already at a plateau now and oil companies are revising their reserves estimates downward and cutting back on investment in prospecting in refining. It loks like Global Peak Oil production is happening right now and could begin to decline very soon.
So many of you still in denial. Well that is a problem that will solve itself. Keep an eye on the newspapers. Expect more and more articles about fuel shortages, the budget deficit, the current account deficit, the trade deficit, the exchange rate, the interest rate, the unemployment rate, defaults, bankruptcies, and, further wars to acquire either direct control of resources or to obtain a strategic advantage granting control over those resources. Each time with a casus belli that is thinner than the previous one. Expect Iran to be attacked. Expect Venezuela to be attacked again - or at least for something to befall Hugo Chavez. Venezuela?!? Such a threat to US national security! Yeah - if they go ahead and abandon the petrodollar standard.
1. Ask the residents of New Orleans if climate change is bad.
2. We know that greenhouse gases will cause global warming. The question would have been how much and how fast. However we have been overtaken by events. Totally apart from the ice core data we have measurements of ocean temperature over a period of time, and we also have data on ice melting at the poles. We know the oceans are warming up. A reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which are substantially larger than anything before industrial civilisation, would obviously help. Is it all the US's fault? No. But:
3. The US is the worlds largest fossil fuel consumer, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and also the largest in both categories per capita. Getting the US on side is pretty much essential. We will also need to recruit China and India before too long but while they are substantially behind the US and Europe economically it would be irrational to expect them to abandon their dreams of wealth when they can still see us guzzling down the oil like we don't give a damn. The US simply must be convinced to participate before it's too late or we are all *sunk*.
The free market is great for many things I 100% agree. But there are some things it can't solve because it's not very good at solving problems that require restraint, it's not very good a solving problems that require mutual co-operation, and it's hopeless at solving problems that require voluntary sacrifice. In fact it should also be obvious to you that the free market can only work as long as there are resources to consume.
You are trying to substitute capitalism for common sense. But there is no ideology devised that can replace common sense. Ideology == limited thinking.
You're confusing the pretext for the Iraq war with Washington's actual reason for it. If you don't grasp the difference then you clearly haven't a clue what politics is about. As always, follow the money.
I don't know anybody who really thought Saddam had WMDs. In both the US and the UK the security services made their doubts known and were unceremeniously told to shut up.
One particular doubter in the UK civil service dept. concerned died under very mysterious circumstances after publicly revealing that the UK govt. had deliberately "sexed up" the dossier presented to Parliament as justification for viewing Iraq as a threat.
Under the old Goebbels diktat that you only need to keep repeating a lie in order to get away with it, the official line remains that "we were told they had WMDs!". However every single piece of justification offered in support of this idea has was disproved long ago. We know for an absolute fact that both the Whitehouse and 10 Downing Street knew very well that after a decade of sanctions and aerial bombardment, Saddam Hussein had no teeth and was acknowledged by both the UN and US seurity services as completely containable. That war was fought over resources, as will be all the wars to be fought over the coming century and you will know I am telling the truth when it becomes apparent that the US' readiness to go to war is strangely linked to opportunities for profit, strategic military location etc. etc.
To read about the secret session in the oval office poring over the oil map of Iraaq, read "It's the Crude, Dude - War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet" by Linda McQuaig. There is a relevant extract quoted verbatim in numerous places around the web, eg. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?Sectio nID=15&ItemID=6314
People everywhere get more conservative as they age, me included. But we remain skeptics. Only in America is age-related conservatism so closely correlated with ultra-stupid levels of self delusion.
If you are yourself acquainted with the issues then obviously I would exclude you from the ranks of the politically naive. Nowhere did I say *everyone* in America was uninformed. I said "***Most*** ordinary American people don't even know or understand...", which I would stand by absolutely, and I would be astonished if you believed different.
I need to interject here that I've no ties with the US so in practical terms I've no real stake in how you people deal with the coming problems - in fact the more you fuck it up, very probably the better off I'll be in the long run. So it's fruitless for you to complain that I should "do something more productive". I'm already doing you a big favour in spending my time in this discussion. It's not as if I don't have anything more important to do. Apart from such attempts to spread awareness, any further action I take will be local and in my own selfish interest.
In response to the other direct charges you made, I know very well what ad hominem means but I can't find anything ad hominem in the phrase "if you knew, you wouldn't be complacent". I can't find anything remotely hostile or provocative. Where did I "lash out at anyone"? Where was I hypocritical? I see neither. Such vitriol and for what?
You guys have got to rid yourselves of this knee-jerk, trigger finger mentality and start realizing who your friends are. I'm just trying to present the issues to raise awareness and stimulate debate in the US. In pursuit of this aim I have studiously avoided getting into pointless Left vs. Right arguments. But I continue to get bashed for it by BOTH SIDES, usually in the form of people responding to things they imagine I said, that I didn't actually say at all. Keep on like this and you'll soon have no friends overseas at all.
Sadly your overconfidence is due to your being completely misinformed on every single point. Sadly whistling in the dark isnt going to get you very far when things go pear shaped. You like many of your countrymen are in denial. A quick course in the relevant facts will cure this. The following will serve as an easy introduction.
Particularly comprehensive, contains many links to unimpeachable sources to corroborate the arguments made here:
While you are briefly considering whether you can be bothered to put in the effort required to replace the opinions you've been fed by establishment sources with something based on genuine facts and figures, consider this: global resource acquisition is a zero sum game. But I am from the UK and in the long term, the worse it goes for the US, very likely the better it will go for us here in Europe. So why am I bothering to try and warn you? Good question. I don't really know - especially given the tendency of some you guys to shoot the messenger.
> I'm being factual and honest. It's you who won't see the obvious facts.
Your asserting that doesn't actually make it true. Your paranoid remarks about the motivations of some nebulous group of scientists are subjective and lacking in any real content. Your point about error bars: the comparison with fundamental phhsics is spurious because we *need* to know the mass of the electron to an astounding degree of accuracy, but with this ice core data even an error of a few percent would hardly invalidate the pattern that emerges from it. If it were any more than that somebody would have noticed by now. This work has been extensively peer-reviewed and the results corroborated by independent teams.
The style of argument you present here is highly reminiscent of the desperate nitpicking employed by tobacco company scientists back when they were trying to argue that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. Nobody is fooled.
Look I've dealt with your sort before, where every disagreement somehow means I must be a "communist" (rolls eyes skyward) - that sort of namecalling really doesn't do you or your argument any credit. But it does signal clearly that I'm wasting my time with you. Fine, believe what you want because you are in a tiny and dwindling minority and I surely don't need to convince you personally of anything.
Fair point about the doomsday scenario; I wasn't pulling any punches because I wanted to get your attention. There is actually plenty the government could do to ameliorate the situation *if* they get started now and don't pussyfoot around.
If they don't do this then I believe the situation will be much like what I described. You saw what happened in Argentina not long ago. You remember from history class what happened in the Great Depression. It will be like a combination of those only much worse because of the size and steepness of the decline. And there is something else that makes it much worse...
But let's assume they do exhibit fiscal prudence: It will seem expensive and everybody is going to hurt, and things will never be the same again afterwards. On the negative side, I'm afraid big social programs are likely to be an early casualty of government belt tightening and they will disappear bit by bit until they are gone. On the plus side I am sure you will a major downsizing of government, that you asked for. Hopefully after a combination of managed inflation and devaluation of the dollar balanced by increased interest rates to stabilize foreign investment, the dollar will seek a more realistic level on the FX markets. In theory the trade deficit could be addressed then as US exports could be priced competitively. However...
I think you are mistaken about the scale of your remaining natural resources. For example US oil extraction peaked in 1970 and the US now imports most of its oil. In terms of what is critical to the economy, nothing is more important than oil. And global oil production is currently at its peak and about to go into a permanent decline that will become a steep decline after very few years. At the same global demand for oil is strengthening in line with global economic growth. Under those circumstances the price of oil will rise quickly to $100 per barrel then within 5-10 years it will move into the $200-$400 per barrel range (in today's dollars, which are *not* tomorrow's dollars).
This will be a disaster for all modern industrial economies. For starters, nobody but the super-rich will be able to afford to run a car, even. And very few people in the restructured US will be even moderately wealthy as you understand the term now. Worse than that though is the effect it will have on your industry. With oil maybe 5 times as expensive as it is now in real terms, and oil being sold in Euros rather than dollars, and your currency worth a lot less than it is now, your current consumption of 7.5 billion barrels per year will simply be impossible. Even if you trade every ounce of gold, uranium etc that you have you will merely be fighting one shortage by creating another and therefore only putting off what must be faced in any event as oil become more and more expensive to extract and continues to dwindle in supply and increase in price.
So as well as facing a major economic restructuring in terms of the US currency, the US debt and its various deficits with other countries, the US also has to achieve all this while trying to run on a small fraction of the amount of oil it is used to today. Most critically, oil is essential in huge quantities for food production using efficient modern methods of agriculture (pesticides, fertilizers). This will simply no longer be possible. Even with sufficient technology development and investment in alternative enrgy sources you will be lucky if US food production capacity reaches a tenth of what it is today.
This will necessarily mean a much lower population.
Exactly the same scenario will be unfolding in the rest of the world.
So that's the scenario *if* the government pulls its finger out and gets on with the job while there is still time (barely). Which by the way it is still conspicuously failing to do. I've only touched on a couple of aspects of the post "peak oil" world so I'm sure you can figure out for yourself that things will indeed be much worse than I've described.
All governments conspire to keep their people in the dark at some time or another. Usually when they're up to something that would cause trouble for them if it were widely known and discussed in public. It might be that they're up to something that most people would call "evil" but it doesn't always have to be. In the case of the Bush administration I am merely trying to report what I think is happening without colouring it with political value judgements. You seem keen to do that for me though, for some reason I can't fathom.
I have a hard time trying to believe that you could really think governments don't lie or conceal what they are doing. That's plainly ridiculous. Have you never heard of the phrase "state secrets"? Look, governments don't even operate under the same ethical framework that people do because the environment they operate in is too different. The US couldn't remain effectively in control of the whole world if it operated in a way you would call fair and open.
There is nothing partisan about what I am saying. Your argument is specious and it's clear you just want to score a political point for "your side". Well you're in the wrong discussion son, I'm just not interested.
There is one difference though. On the whole *educated* Europeans tend to be distrustful of ideological government and controlled media pretty much across the board. But if slashdot is any guide, there are plenty of "red state" Americans with a college degree whose conservative orthodoxy is virtually indistinguishable from that of uneducated rednecks. And they will line up under the flag at the drop of a hat. This doesn't really happen among college educated Europeans who tend en masse to be much more liberal in outlook.
For crying out loud don't you get it yet? All that WAS true and even where it is still true in some sense it no longer matters very much in the context of the larger picture. Small government or large government, your whole civilization is threatened with extinction. All that money you are talking about - whether it's in the governments pockets or your own - is already largely worthless paper because the Fed have been printing dollars for years as a means of propping up the economy. But there is nothing to underpin its value, and very very soon the other nations of the world who are heavily invested in the dollar, and getting increasingly nervous about the dollar's lack of substance and its very shaky futures, will come looking to redeem their investments. On that same day your banking system will shut down, most of your state institutions will close due to bankruptcy and US currency will suddenly be worthless. Most people will stop going to work because there will be no point. Imports will stop. Oil stockpiles will run out. Farm machinery and the food transportation network will grind to a halt as it runs out of gas. There will be panic, looting and rioting everywhere as people begin to grasp the situation. People will shoot their neighbours over a can of baked beans. As you saw in New Orleans recently, many police will desert and many will join the looters. There will be an absence of law and order. The army will be brought in, those that haven't deserted yet anyway. They will fire live ammunition at crowds of disobedient civilians. There will be street barricades and widespread arson as desperate civilians fight back.
You will be lucky if your nation still has the ability to FORM a government by the time this has run its course.
Unless of course everybody gets their heads out of their asses now and finally starts to accept that they don't have the money they thought they had, and accepts a more realistic standard of living. Guess what - you can't have that social security money back because the government already spent it. Some of it they wasted, some of it they probably embezzled but a lot of it they spread around to prop up the economy, to allow people to buy imports and generally keep living the high life. Anyhow it's gone and it isn't coming back. It's been spent, and everybody who spent dollars in the meantime was spending that same money without knowing it.
You need to stop being in denial about the state of your country's finances and DEAL with it.
As for civil liberties, in an attempt to forestall outbreaks of the chaos described above should things come apart piecemeal instead, expect more and more clampdowns. Especially expect an end to freedom of speech.
Try to read my earlier posts in this thread. I didnt say they were evil. What's evil? From their point of view it was a calculated risk, but a purely pragmatic one. I'm afraid your knee-jerk reaction very effectively reveals you to be the one with the narrow frame of mind.
Look, try to understand that this thread isn't about Conservative versus Liberal or anything of the sort. Its about Peak Oil, the future of the dollar and trying to interpret the actions and inactions of the US establishment in the light of what's been revealed about the risks ahead. You solve nothing by just trying to shout down anybody who doesn't conform to some [insert party of choice] orthodoxy.
I won't even bother with the straw man questions you put up which could easily be answered by a ten year old. Nice try, troll.
I was very careful to say: "appearing to steal the election". Because that is how it appeared to many people, and some of the facts that came out later did support the idea though I doubt it could ever be proven. I'm sure this is a point that will remain controversial for a long time.
Ha, no you've kind of missed my point! I fully agree about how shitty it is that we're always being robbed by our governments (you think you have it bad in the US???) But the problem I am addressing today makes this pale into insignificance.
If the US government doesn't get these things right - paying off its debts, reducing consumer credit and setting an aggressive energy policy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels AS FAST AS POSSIBLE - then long before you retire there will BE no economy and all your investments will just disappear altogether - your social security pension, your stock portfolio. Even your bank deposits and the money in the cookie jar will be worthless because the Fed will have been forced to devalue the dollar probably more than once.
The economists say there are two ways this could go and the least harmful of these would be increasing inflation. You already know what inflation will do to your investments. However most analyses posit a DEflationary scenario as most likely, similar to what happened after the 1929 crash but a lot worse. People stop spending, wages fall, firms go bust, millions thrown out of work, the price of luxury items falls (though not enough to compensate for most people's loss of income) while essential items like food, housing, heating and compulsory insurance become relatively expensive; social security programs are massively cut back or just stopped altogether just when they are most needed, because the government does not have the means to pay for them.
It's not possible to avoid this without a major rebalancing of the US economy. One way or another, Americans are going to be forced to adapt to a much lower standard of living. The only question is, is this going to be a managed change enacted via controlled tax rises, starting now but happening gradually enough to allow people time to adjust - or is it going to be spend, spend, spend all the way until it just can't be sustained any more and then suddenly overnight the foreign banks foreclose, the US banking system shuts down, and the factories switch off the lights? The latter scenario may seem unduly pessimistic to you but as long as America remains in denial about where the numbers are headed and chooses just to go on as before, there can be no opportunity for any other outcome to emerge.
This isn't my own theory. I've been reading about it a lot lately and everywhere I go there are professional economists, market analysists, industry figureheads and Washington insiders all saying the same things. Just google "peak oil" or "after the crash" or "dollar devaluation" and terms of that nature. You may be surprised at the things that were just paranoid whispers from the fringe only three years ago, that are now becoming increasingly accepted orthodoxy. I guess thats the most scary aspect of it for me. In a sense, the lunatics seem to have taken over the asylum. I never really expected this to become real.
There's one problem with your plan. As demand for oil grows and supply declines - yes, (assuming you can keep the pipelines going) even the Middle East, even Iraq will peak soon at the rate we will deplete it. There is only so much oil in the world and if your plan is to just steal it all (just so that you don't have to give up ipods, SUVs and intelligent OLED-bedecked keyboards) this is a plan that is going to backfire massively within your very own lifetime. Because with all that consumption going on it will still run out just as fast. The scenarios have all been worked through. Like a heap of marijuana in a house full of hippies, the more there is, and the cheaper it is, the more quickly people will go through it.
Your only hope of containing the situation is for everybody to cut back drastically and learn to live very differently than they do now, i.e. no more fucking musical toilet brushes. This is regardless of whether you kill everybody else or not. Since the US is the biggest consumer by far (and still increasing in that regard) killing everybody else would only buy you a few short years. So you might as well NOT BOTHER.
Yes I'm not at all suggesting that Mr Bush comes up with any of this stuff on his own. He's a puppet of the establishment - otherwise how could he have got away with appearing to steal the election. That sort of thing is only do-able when the most powerful news media owners are on your side.
Surely you don't think the Iraq war went exactly according to plan? What Bush was attempting, and what he actually accomplished, are two different things. That's what happens when you ignore every warning you are given and hire and fire people based on whether they are giving you the news you wanted to hear. The neocons' lack of competence cannot be used as an indicator of their ambitions which are fairly limitless (reality control anyone?).
The fact of the matter is that inside Washington, nobody really doubts this any more. There is just too much evidence pointing to a conclusion that the war was at least tentatively planned before 9/11 as a means of gaining control of the oil, and fought ultimately as a means of buying time for the dollar. For instance the closed-session Whitehouse meeting with senior oil executives during the early pre-9/11 days of the Bush presidency, a meeting which was spent poring over a GEOLOGICAL map of Iraq marked up to show the various oil fields.
If you think a Republican controlled establishment would spend trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives just to knock over a tinpot dictator on the other side of the world - a tinpot dictator who was thoroughly evil but no worse than dozens of non-oil-owning tinpot dictators who will continue to be left alone - then you are seriously deluding yourself. Altruism had fuck all to do with it.
Hilarious. The guy is on YOUR SIDE - i.e. fuck morality, rob the world, murder all competitors just so that Americans can keep living in prodigious, wasteful comfort, waving the flag, driving SUVs and buying ipods - but you still attacked his position because you are TOO DUMB TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HE SAID. Not that I am surprised in the slightest, you obviously have to be at a mental disadvantage to be feeling loyalty to the 21st century's greatest and most self-interested criminal.
> Easy, dissolve social security. Half the US debt is owed to the US government.
Agreed, and I think that *will* happen sooner or later. The US government will also deflate the currency and if that isnt enough they will likely start defaulting on foreign debt. Calling US Treasury Bonds before they mature will be the least of it.
Agreed that one of the reasons the US govt arent doing the right thing (eg raising taxes) is because its hard to do the right thing when the only thing you *really* care about is having *your* man win the next election.
I understand about the various pluses you see in the Iraq invasion. I am sure there are more.
I never said they were idiots. I am sure they are not. They are however psychopathic in that they do not care what else happens as long as they get what they came for (the power and the money).
The difference is, Europeans - even if you take only left wing or right wing - are not nearly so united and "orthodox" as redneck Americans. That's because we don't all get our politics off the TV let alone just a couple of influential big-money-owned channels the way you do. And we don't automatically and unthinkingly line up behind our leaders the way you do, calling it "patriotism". Right or Left, Europeans are very different from Americans in terms of how we do politics. For example we are very much more sceptical of news coming from sources that are potentially compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
Would I be insulted by a slap in the face from an infant? I think not - you massively overestimate the credibility of your position. And, you are still deluding yourself. You are trying to assemble a coherent truth made solely out of the fictions you've been spoonfed, which is going to lead absolutely nowhere. Fine. This exercise has been very enlightening for me, but not in the way you think.
I didn't try to present the future in a totally realistic way because I didnt have the time so I settled for attempting to grab your attention. Well done for reading the links, but there are other sites that do a better job of explaining the necessary consequences when oil becomes hard to obtain.
The most important thing to realize is that modern agriculture is basically a means of turning oil into food. It takes 6 calories worth of oil to produce 1 calorie of food. Also modern agriculture (especially as practised in the US) doesn't use crop rotation but instead relies heavily on chemical fertilizers and has badly depleted the soil - it's been described as a "big sponge" in some places. So add together the paralysis of the distribution network, no fertilizer or working farm machinery, and I don't see how food production and distribution could NOT fail. I've read also that in many cities water is brought in by electrical pumps, so no water supply for many people either. During the brief fuel shortages we've had in the UK from time to time there have been spells when the local shops have run out of basic commodities after *just a few days*. If you want to imagine a society that survives this intact, you have to figure out how people are going to get fed, at least. And on a long term basis.
Sorry, I've no action plan. The only one I can think of that might work is to build a fleet of rockets to round up some frozen volatiles from the asteroid belt and bring them back, but even if we had the technology to do it, it would take decades we don't have. Plus of course it would require a government or a coalition of governments to raise the gazillions needed, and they're not even listening. The only hope we have is (1) we can cut back consumption to ensure there is enough oil around later on to fuel the restructuring effort, and (2) that someone will think of something and that this will happen soon enough to make a difference.
Therefore the only thing we can do is try to raise awareness. Talk to as many people about it as you can until it enters the public consciousness. If we succeed maybe it will be an issue at the next election. If it doesn't happen until the election after that it may already be too late - because global oil production is already at a plateau now and oil companies are revising their reserves estimates downward and cutting back on investment in prospecting in refining. It loks like Global Peak Oil production is happening right now and could begin to decline very soon.
I hate the way they have dumbed down the UI to make it more appealing to the mass market. I sure hope the seamonkey project works out.
So many of you still in denial. Well that is a problem that will solve itself. Keep an eye on the newspapers. Expect more and more articles about fuel shortages, the budget deficit, the current account deficit, the trade deficit, the exchange rate, the interest rate, the unemployment rate, defaults, bankruptcies, and, further wars to acquire either direct control of resources or to obtain a strategic advantage granting control over those resources. Each time with a casus belli that is thinner than the previous one. Expect Iran to be attacked. Expect Venezuela to be attacked again - or at least for something to befall Hugo Chavez. Venezuela?!? Such a threat to US national security! Yeah - if they go ahead and abandon the petrodollar standard.
1. Ask the residents of New Orleans if climate change is bad.
2. We know that greenhouse gases will cause global warming. The question would have been how much and how fast. However we have been overtaken by events. Totally apart from the ice core data we have measurements of ocean temperature over a period of time, and we also have data on ice melting at the poles. We know the oceans are warming up. A reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which are substantially larger than anything before industrial civilisation, would obviously help. Is it all the US's fault? No. But:
3. The US is the worlds largest fossil fuel consumer, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and also the largest in both categories per capita. Getting the US on side is pretty much essential. We will also need to recruit China and India before too long but while they are substantially behind the US and Europe economically it would be irrational to expect them to abandon their dreams of wealth when they can still see us guzzling down the oil like we don't give a damn. The US simply must be convinced to participate before it's too late or we are all *sunk*.
The free market is great for many things I 100% agree. But there are some things it can't solve because it's not very good at solving problems that require restraint, it's not very good a solving problems that require mutual co-operation, and it's hopeless at solving problems that require voluntary sacrifice. In fact it should also be obvious to you that the free market can only work as long as there are resources to consume.
You are trying to substitute capitalism for common sense. But there is no ideology devised that can replace common sense. Ideology == limited thinking.
You're confusing the pretext for the Iraq war with Washington's actual reason for it. If you don't grasp the difference then you clearly haven't a clue what politics is about. As always, follow the money.
I don't know anybody who really thought Saddam had WMDs. In both the US and the UK the security services made their doubts known and were unceremeniously told to shut up.
o nID=15&ItemID=6314
One particular doubter in the UK civil service dept. concerned died under very mysterious circumstances after publicly revealing that the UK govt. had deliberately "sexed up" the dossier presented to Parliament as justification for viewing Iraq as a threat.
Under the old Goebbels diktat that you only need to keep repeating a lie in order to get away with it, the official line remains that "we were told they had WMDs!". However every single piece of justification offered in support of this idea has was disproved long ago. We know for an absolute fact that both the Whitehouse and 10 Downing Street knew very well that after a decade of sanctions and aerial bombardment, Saddam Hussein had no teeth and was acknowledged by both the UN and US seurity services as completely containable. That war was fought over resources, as will be all the wars to be fought over the coming century and you will know I am telling the truth when it becomes apparent that the US' readiness to go to war is strangely linked to opportunities for profit, strategic military location etc. etc.
To read about the secret session in the oval office poring over the oil map of Iraaq, read "It's the Crude, Dude - War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet"
by Linda McQuaig. There is a relevant extract quoted verbatim in numerous places around the web, eg. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?Secti
People everywhere get more conservative as they age, me included. But we remain skeptics. Only in America is age-related conservatism so closely correlated with ultra-stupid levels of self delusion.
If you are yourself acquainted with the issues then obviously I would exclude you from the ranks of the politically naive. Nowhere did I say *everyone* in America was uninformed. I said "***Most*** ordinary American people don't even know or understand...", which I would stand by absolutely, and I would be astonished if you believed different.
I need to interject here that I've no ties with the US so in practical terms I've no real stake in how you people deal with the coming problems - in fact the more you fuck it up, very probably the better off I'll be in the long run. So it's fruitless for you to complain that I should "do something more productive". I'm already doing you a big favour in spending my time in this discussion. It's not as if I don't have anything more important to do. Apart from such attempts to spread awareness, any further action I take will be local and in my own selfish interest.
In response to the other direct charges you made, I know very well what ad hominem means but I can't find anything ad hominem in the phrase "if you knew, you wouldn't be complacent". I can't find anything remotely hostile or provocative. Where did I "lash out at anyone"? Where was I hypocritical? I see neither. Such vitriol and for what?
You guys have got to rid yourselves of this knee-jerk, trigger finger mentality and start realizing who your friends are. I'm just trying to present the issues to raise awareness and stimulate debate in the US. In pursuit of this aim I have studiously avoided getting into pointless Left vs. Right arguments. But I continue to get bashed for it by BOTH SIDES, usually in the form of people responding to things they imagine I said, that I didn't actually say at all. Keep on like this and you'll soon have no friends overseas at all.
Sadly your overconfidence is due to your being completely misinformed on every single point. Sadly whistling in the dark isnt going to get you very far when things go pear shaped. You like many of your countrymen are in denial. A quick course in the relevant facts will cure this. The following will serve as an easy introduction.
3 677,00.html
Particularly comprehensive, contains many links to unimpeachable sources to corroborate the arguments made here:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
On the problems with the US dollar:
http://www.markswatson.com/Depression1.html
And here is a repudiation of the biodiesel argument from George Monbiot, a one-time proponent of that technology.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5349045-10
While you are briefly considering whether you can be bothered to put in the effort required to replace the opinions you've been fed by establishment sources with something based on genuine facts and figures, consider this: global resource acquisition is a zero sum game. But I am from the UK and in the long term, the worse it goes for the US, very likely the better it will go for us here in Europe. So why am I bothering to try and warn you? Good question. I don't really know - especially given the tendency of some you guys to shoot the messenger.
> I'm being factual and honest. It's you who won't see the obvious facts.
Your asserting that doesn't actually make it true. Your paranoid remarks about the motivations of some nebulous group of scientists are subjective and lacking in any real content. Your point about error bars: the comparison with fundamental phhsics is spurious because we *need* to know the mass of the electron to an astounding degree of accuracy, but with this ice core data even an error of a few percent would hardly invalidate the pattern that emerges from it. If it were any more than that somebody would have noticed by now. This work has been extensively peer-reviewed and the results corroborated by independent teams.
The style of argument you present here is highly reminiscent of the desperate nitpicking employed by tobacco company scientists back when they were trying to argue that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. Nobody is fooled.
Look I've dealt with your sort before, where every disagreement somehow means I must be a "communist" (rolls eyes skyward) - that sort of namecalling really doesn't do you or your argument any credit. But it does signal clearly that I'm wasting my time with you. Fine, believe what you want because you are in a tiny and dwindling minority and I surely don't need to convince you personally of anything.
Fair point about the doomsday scenario; I wasn't pulling any punches because I wanted to get your attention. There is actually plenty the government could do to ameliorate the situation *if* they get started now and don't pussyfoot around.
If they don't do this then I believe the situation will be much like what I described. You saw what happened in Argentina not long ago. You remember from history class what happened in the Great Depression. It will be like a combination of those only much worse because of the size and steepness of the decline. And there is something else that makes it much worse...
But let's assume they do exhibit fiscal prudence: It will seem expensive and everybody is going to hurt, and things will never be the same again afterwards. On the negative side, I'm afraid big social programs are likely to be an early casualty of government belt tightening and they will disappear bit by bit until they are gone. On the plus side I am sure you will a major downsizing of government, that you asked for. Hopefully after a combination of managed inflation and devaluation of the dollar balanced by increased interest rates to stabilize foreign investment, the dollar will seek a more realistic level on the FX markets. In theory the trade deficit could be addressed then as US exports could be priced competitively. However...
I think you are mistaken about the scale of your remaining natural resources. For example US oil extraction peaked in 1970 and the US now imports most of its oil. In terms of what is critical to the economy, nothing is more important than oil. And global oil production is currently at its peak and about to go into a permanent decline that will become a steep decline after very few years. At the same global demand for oil is strengthening in line with global economic growth. Under those circumstances the price of oil will rise quickly to $100 per barrel then within 5-10 years it will move into the $200-$400 per barrel range (in today's dollars, which are *not* tomorrow's dollars).
This will be a disaster for all modern industrial economies. For starters, nobody but the super-rich will be able to afford to run a car, even. And very few people in the restructured US will be even moderately wealthy as you understand the term now. Worse than that though is the effect it will have on your industry. With oil maybe 5 times as expensive as it is now in real terms, and oil being sold in Euros rather than dollars, and your currency worth a lot less than it is now, your current consumption of 7.5 billion barrels per year will simply be impossible. Even if you trade every ounce of gold, uranium etc that you have you will merely be fighting one shortage by creating another and therefore only putting off what must be faced in any event as oil become more and more expensive to extract and continues to dwindle in supply and increase in price.
So as well as facing a major economic restructuring in terms of the US currency, the US debt and its various deficits with other countries, the US also has to achieve all this while trying to run on a small fraction of the amount of oil it is used to today. Most critically, oil is essential in huge quantities for food production using efficient modern methods of agriculture (pesticides, fertilizers). This will simply no longer be possible. Even with sufficient technology development and investment in alternative enrgy sources you will be lucky if US food production capacity reaches a tenth of what it is today.
This will necessarily mean a much lower population.
Exactly the same scenario will be unfolding in the rest of the world.
So that's the scenario *if* the government pulls its finger out and gets on with the job while there is still time (barely). Which by the way it is still conspicuously failing to do. I've only touched on a couple of aspects of the post "peak oil" world so I'm sure you can figure out for yourself that things will indeed be much worse than I've described.
As I've said elsewhere in this th
If you did know what was going on you would hardly be so complacent.
All governments conspire to keep their people in the dark at some time or another. Usually when they're up to something that would cause trouble for them if it were widely known and discussed in public. It might be that they're up to something that most people would call "evil" but it doesn't always have to be. In the case of the Bush administration I am merely trying to report what I think is happening without colouring it with political value judgements. You seem keen to do that for me though, for some reason I can't fathom.
I have a hard time trying to believe that you could really think governments don't lie or conceal what they are doing. That's plainly ridiculous. Have you never heard of the phrase "state secrets"? Look, governments don't even operate under the same ethical framework that people do because the environment they operate in is too different. The US couldn't remain effectively in control of the whole world if it operated in a way you would call fair and open.
There is nothing partisan about what I am saying. Your argument is specious and it's clear you just want to score a political point for "your side". Well you're in the wrong discussion son, I'm just not interested.
There is one difference though. On the whole *educated* Europeans tend to be distrustful of ideological government and controlled media pretty much across the board. But if slashdot is any guide, there are plenty of "red state" Americans with a college degree whose conservative orthodoxy is virtually indistinguishable from that of uneducated rednecks. And they will line up under the flag at the drop of a hat. This doesn't really happen among college educated Europeans who tend en masse to be much more liberal in outlook.
For crying out loud don't you get it yet? All that WAS true and even where it is still true in some sense it no longer matters very much in the context of the larger picture. Small government or large government, your whole civilization is threatened with extinction. All that money you are talking about - whether it's in the governments pockets or your own - is already largely worthless paper because the Fed have been printing dollars for years as a means of propping up the economy. But there is nothing to underpin its value, and very very soon the other nations of the world who are heavily invested in the dollar, and getting increasingly nervous about the dollar's lack of substance and its very shaky futures, will come looking to redeem their investments. On that same day your banking system will shut down, most of your state institutions will close due to bankruptcy and US currency will suddenly be worthless. Most people will stop going to work because there will be no point. Imports will stop. Oil stockpiles will run out. Farm machinery and the food transportation network will grind to a halt as it runs out of gas. There will be panic, looting and rioting everywhere as people begin to grasp the situation. People will shoot their neighbours over a can of baked beans. As you saw in New Orleans recently, many police will desert and many will join the looters. There will be an absence of law and order. The army will be brought in, those that haven't deserted yet anyway. They will fire live ammunition at crowds of disobedient civilians. There will be street barricades and widespread arson as desperate civilians fight back.
You will be lucky if your nation still has the ability to FORM a government by the time this has run its course.
Unless of course everybody gets their heads out of their asses now and finally starts to accept that they don't have the money they thought they had, and accepts a more realistic standard of living. Guess what - you can't have that social security money back because the government already spent it. Some of it they wasted, some of it they probably embezzled but a lot of it they spread around to prop up the economy, to allow people to buy imports and generally keep living the high life. Anyhow it's gone and it isn't coming back. It's been spent, and everybody who spent dollars in the meantime was spending that same money without knowing it.
You need to stop being in denial about the state of your country's finances and DEAL with it.
As for civil liberties, in an attempt to forestall outbreaks of the chaos described above should things come apart piecemeal instead, expect more and more clampdowns. Especially expect an end to freedom of speech.
Try to read my earlier posts in this thread. I didnt say they were evil. What's evil? From their point of view it was a calculated risk, but a purely pragmatic one. I'm afraid your knee-jerk reaction very effectively reveals you to be the one with the narrow frame of mind.
Look, try to understand that this thread isn't about Conservative versus Liberal or anything of the sort. Its about Peak Oil, the future of the dollar and trying to interpret the actions and inactions of the US establishment in the light of what's been revealed about the risks ahead. You solve nothing by just trying to shout down anybody who doesn't conform to some [insert party of choice] orthodoxy.
I won't even bother with the straw man questions you put up which could easily be answered by a ten year old. Nice try, troll.
I was very careful to say: "appearing to steal the election". Because that is how it appeared to many people, and some of the facts that came out later did support the idea though I doubt it could ever be proven. I'm sure this is a point that will remain controversial for a long time.
Ha, no you've kind of missed my point! I fully agree about how shitty it is that we're always being robbed by our governments (you think you have it bad in the US???) But the problem I am addressing today makes this pale into insignificance.
If the US government doesn't get these things right - paying off its debts, reducing consumer credit and setting an aggressive energy policy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels AS FAST AS POSSIBLE - then long before you retire there will BE no economy and all your investments will just disappear altogether - your social security pension, your stock portfolio. Even your bank deposits and the money in the cookie jar will be worthless because the Fed will have been forced to devalue the dollar probably more than once.
The economists say there are two ways this could go and the least harmful of these would be increasing inflation. You already know what inflation will do to your investments. However most analyses posit a DEflationary scenario as most likely, similar to what happened after the 1929 crash but a lot worse. People stop spending, wages fall, firms go bust, millions thrown out of work, the price of luxury items falls (though not enough to compensate for most people's loss of income) while essential items like food, housing, heating and compulsory insurance become relatively expensive; social security programs are massively cut back or just stopped altogether just when they are most needed, because the government does not have the means to pay for them.
It's not possible to avoid this without a major rebalancing of the US economy. One way or another, Americans are going to be forced to adapt to a much lower standard of living. The only question is, is this going to be a managed change enacted via controlled tax rises, starting now but happening gradually enough to allow people time to adjust - or is it going to be spend, spend, spend all the way until it just can't be sustained any more and then suddenly overnight the foreign banks foreclose, the US banking system shuts down, and the factories switch off the lights? The latter scenario may seem unduly pessimistic to you but as long as America remains in denial about where the numbers are headed and chooses just to go on as before, there can be no opportunity for any other outcome to emerge.
This isn't my own theory. I've been reading about it a lot lately and everywhere I go there are professional economists, market analysists, industry figureheads and Washington insiders all saying the same things. Just google "peak oil" or "after the crash" or "dollar devaluation" and terms of that nature. You may be surprised at the things that were just paranoid whispers from the fringe only three years ago, that are now becoming increasingly accepted orthodoxy. I guess thats the most scary aspect of it for me. In a sense, the lunatics seem to have taken over the asylum. I never really expected this to become real.
There's one problem with your plan. As demand for oil grows and supply declines - yes, (assuming you can keep the pipelines going) even the Middle East, even Iraq will peak soon at the rate we will deplete it. There is only so much oil in the world and if your plan is to just steal it all (just so that you don't have to give up ipods, SUVs and intelligent OLED-bedecked keyboards) this is a plan that is going to backfire massively within your very own lifetime. Because with all that consumption going on it will still run out just as fast. The scenarios have all been worked through. Like a heap of marijuana in a house full of hippies, the more there is, and the cheaper it is, the more quickly people will go through it.
Your only hope of containing the situation is for everybody to cut back drastically and learn to live very differently than they do now, i.e. no more fucking musical toilet brushes. This is regardless of whether you kill everybody else or not. Since the US is the biggest consumer by far (and still increasing in that regard) killing everybody else would only buy you a few short years. So you might as well NOT BOTHER.
Yes I'm not at all suggesting that Mr Bush comes up with any of this stuff on his own. He's a puppet of the establishment - otherwise how could he have got away with appearing to steal the election. That sort of thing is only do-able when the most powerful news media owners are on your side.
Surely you don't think the Iraq war went exactly according to plan? What Bush was attempting, and what he actually accomplished, are two different things. That's what happens when you ignore every warning you are given and hire and fire people based on whether they are giving you the news you wanted to hear. The neocons' lack of competence cannot be used as an indicator of their ambitions which are fairly limitless (reality control anyone?).
The fact of the matter is that inside Washington, nobody really doubts this any more. There is just too much evidence pointing to a conclusion that the war was at least tentatively planned before 9/11 as a means of gaining control of the oil, and fought ultimately as a means of buying time for the dollar. For instance the closed-session Whitehouse meeting with senior oil executives during the early pre-9/11 days of the Bush presidency, a meeting which was spent poring over a GEOLOGICAL map of Iraq marked up to show the various oil fields.
If you think a Republican controlled establishment would spend trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives just to knock over a tinpot dictator on the other side of the world - a tinpot dictator who was thoroughly evil but no worse than dozens of non-oil-owning tinpot dictators who will continue to be left alone - then you are seriously deluding yourself. Altruism had fuck all to do with it.
Hilarious. The guy is on YOUR SIDE - i.e. fuck morality, rob the world, murder all competitors just so that Americans can keep living in prodigious, wasteful comfort, waving the flag, driving SUVs and buying ipods - but you still attacked his position because you are TOO DUMB TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HE SAID. Not that I am surprised in the slightest, you obviously have to be at a mental disadvantage to be feeling loyalty to the 21st century's greatest and most self-interested criminal.
> Easy, dissolve social security. Half the US debt is owed to the US government.
Agreed, and I think that *will* happen sooner or later. The US government will also deflate the currency and if that isnt enough they will likely start defaulting on foreign debt. Calling US Treasury Bonds before they mature will be the least of it.
Agreed that one of the reasons the US govt arent doing the right thing (eg raising taxes) is because its hard to do the right thing when the only thing you *really* care about is having *your* man win the next election.
I understand about the various pluses you see in the Iraq invasion. I am sure there are more.
I never said they were idiots. I am sure they are not. They are however psychopathic in that they do not care what else happens as long as they get what they came for (the power and the money).
The difference is, Europeans - even if you take only left wing or right wing - are not nearly so united and "orthodox" as redneck Americans. That's because we don't all get our politics off the TV let alone just a couple of influential big-money-owned channels the way you do. And we don't automatically and unthinkingly line up behind our leaders the way you do, calling it "patriotism". Right or Left, Europeans are very different from Americans in terms of how we do politics. For example we are very much more sceptical of news coming from sources that are potentially compromised.