Use Downing to attack underlying oil policy in Iraq

[yurbud]

Since Bush knew Saddam had no ties to 9/11, Al Qaeda, or WMD, and no competent analyst would have told him that Saddam could or would launch them at us anyway, we need to point and make it crystal clear what the real motive is: oil.

The oil production worldwide is set to decline because of depleted supplies just as demand in China goes through the roof. If you don't believe this, ocnsider that King Hubbert, who predicted the peak of world oil production also accurately predicted the peak and decline of US production in the 1970s. It isn't that hard to see how it works either. There's a lag of a couple of decades between the peak of discovering new oil and the peak of production, as you can see in this chart:



You can see an overview of the scientific basic for this at the http://www.hubbertpeak.com/">Hubbert Peak website, including all the relevant geology journals.

Scientific American also did an excellent article on this in 1998.

Oil is the real reason we are in the Persian Gulf and the former Soviet Republics circling the Caspian Sea. The one plan the Bush adminstration had for Iraq after the invasion was to privatize their oil, as http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=383&row=1">Greg Palast and others have noted. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars, so a handful of oil companies can profit by monopolizing a resource worth trillions of dollars.

They will NOT use this control of oil to help average Americans. Back in the 30s and 40s, the US was the top oil producer in the world, but that didn't seem to do most of us any good during the Great Depression. If you look at the chart below, our oil production is the bright green chunk--and was the thickest part back then when a third of us were out of work and grateful to get a job picking berries.



Nothing they have done recently makes it look like trans-national oil companies feel any obligation toward the people paying for or the soldiers fighting the wars to secure their oil contracts.

And after they wring the last drops of oil and bucks out of those wells, it is the American people, not the oil companies that will have to endure the hatred and emnity of those countries, for about as long as it took the Muslims to get over the Crusades.

For tenth of the cost in money and infinity less in human lives, we convert to other forms of energy like biofuels for vehicles until we develop better fuel cells, and solar and wind for large scale production, with existing coal fired plants to make up for the variable output of the other two.

The corporate world is trying to sell nuclear as the answer again, but they want it for a simple reason: it can be monopolized. Most of us can't afford to build a nuclear plant in our backyard. But if most of our electricity came from solar and wind, and a big utility decided to priced gouge us as happened here in California a few years back, it wouldn't be hard for a disgruntled ratepayer to slap some solar cells on his roof or even make a Rube Goldberg windmill with an old car alternator and stuff in his garage. That is a natural check on monopoly power, and ideally would be a better way to go than large scale generation anyway.

If terrorism is a real threat, which is going to be more of a tempting and vulnerable target, one big nuclear plant or a web of homes and businesses feeding electricity into the grid like an energy internet?

We can do this, but the longer we wait the more painful the change will be, and the more the oil companies will profit from that pain. Our elected officials need to start representing us instead of the oil companies sucking the life out of us and our democracy.


Hillbilly Hitler art:



Blog:

[killbotfactory]

1. The PNAC documents pretty much say it's about oil

no surprise there, but anyone investigating this war should be aware of it.

[FloridaPat]

2. Also another reason. After 9-11 Sadam switched from using the dollar

for oil sales to the Euro. Other countries want to do the same thing. Should oil be sold in Euros, the US economy immediately collapses.

[yurbud]

3. I wrote Robert Reich about the Euro issue before the war

He said it wouldn't break us and it might actually be good for our balance of trade.

Meanwhile, pentagon insiders like Karen Kitowalski (sp?) mentioned it as one of the causes, and the dollar has been on a steady decline against not just the Euro, but just about ALL currencies.

The Euro could have been one of the ways they got the Dems on board too though.

The problem with the currency issue is it's even less visceral than oil--neither as fun as swarthy boogeymen.