Peak Oil: Devil's Tears

Added: (Fri Dec 08 2006)

Pressbox (Press Release) - Boston, MA (PRESSBOX) December 8, 2006 -- This peak of global oil
production is the primary factor behind the ‘resource wars’
masquerading as the war on terrorism. The US does not need Iraqi oil; access to oil is specifically not what the invasion was about, but more importantly as a military geo-strategic solution to control the supply of oil over other competing nations such as China and India. And for that objective, the cost is not to high. Alexander Kiy, author of fiction novel: 'Fear Kindness Love / Earth Ascending 2012' (Lulu Press) offers readers heart-felt hope in surviving the difficult times ahead.

Human population suddenly spiked six-fold during the first half of the oil age (1859 to 1970), the result of rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade, agriculture and financial capital. For nearly forty years hence the industrialized world has been riding the crest of a monstrous energy wave powered by fossil fuels all of which should finally peak before 2010 and begin a steady permanent decline. Human population will decline parallel to how oil production depletes down its own bell-shaped curve. Peak oil is not about when the oil will be gone, but rather when demand
begins to outstrip supply and production. The key issue here is that oil simply cannot be extracted, transported and refined fast enough to meet rising fuel demands. The rate of this consumption is in fact about to increase dramatically since both China and India, representing about one-third of the world’s population, are rapidly industrializing.

Our oil based industrialized economy has finally reached it’s limit to sustain a
human population in excess of 6.5 billion. Overpopulation has been disastrous for the planet, and still greater populations will pollute and consume even more, ruining the environment and creating or intensifying a variety of problems. It is unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its current use levels of fossil energy consumption, or the third world which is responsible for a great deal of this population growth, it’s suicidal consumption of the landscape.

The Earth and its ecosystems are in serious trouble. Industrial civilization, population pressure, and an economics of short-term gains have had a devastating effect on the planet, leading to the overall reduction in biodiversity. Ecosystem, species, population and genetic diversity are all on decline. Biodiversity is in decline at all levels and geographical scales. Industrial civilization has led to this current period we’re in which has witnessed for itself the greatest rate of extinction since the dinosaurs went extinct some 65 million years ago. Between 3,000 to 30,000 species
are now becoming extinct each year; these incredible rates of extinction are 1000 to 10,000 times the expected norm found in nature. All five of Earth’s known major extinctions in Earth’s long past were caused by either comets, volcanic activity, or natural climate change, this coming ‘sixth’ extinction event will be the first caused not by natural physical
events but as a result of biotic factors caused by humans.

With respect to the state of the planet after global industrialization (the industrial age) is over, that depends essentially on when the collapse of the industrial world occurs. If the collapse happens soon and catastrophically, the Earth will be able to retain a high degree of biological diversity for millions of years to come. If it happens late or gradually, the biological diversity of the planet will be critically degraded. The likelihood of mankind’s long-tem survival decreases with each passing year of the industrial age (because the ecologically diverse biosphere which supports higher life forms is being destroyed at such a rapid rate). Peak oil is the underlying
condition forcing change. That is to say, we have reached the point where our annual consumption of oil is considerably greater than our annual ability to develop new sources. No matter what anyone does, our oil-based global economy cannot continue for much longer in its current form –at current population levels. Incidentally, greenhouse gasses which are currently around 380 ppm., and rising about 2 ppm. per year should not reach severely dangerous levels for at least another generation or two.


For the last three hundred years, the key to prosperity has been the replacement of human skill with mechanical energy –steam for sails, fossil fuels for coal. Most of the human race is totally reliant on oil, almost everything we do requires it in some form from transportation to plastics, from food and water production to pharmaceuticals, from manufacturing to electricity, from sewage management to defense, and of course as a consequence of this reliance when oil prices rise the stock markets become uncertain and under extreme circumstances liable to crash. So when oil becomes too expensive we can look forward to economic collapse, war,
starvation, disease and a rapid descent down the population bell-curve to perhaps less than half of Earth’s current human population.


Alternatives to oil are presumed to be somehow independent from oil, while in reality, these alternatives are derived in some way from oil. It takes massive amounts of oil and other scarce resources to locate and mine the raw materials (silver, copper, platinum, uranium, etc.) necessary to build solar panels, wind turbines, and nuclear power plants. It takes more oil to construct these alternatives and even more oil to distribute them, maintain them, and then to adapt them to a particular infrastructure.


At the current level of global production, other fossil energy sources like coal,
cannot effectively replace oil. Natural gas extraction will peak a few years after oil, while extraction rates for coal will peak in decades. What’s more the production processes to convert coal into a substitute for oil would use more energy than they produce, and in fact function as net energy losers. The same can be said of nuclear power (apart from radiation and storage dangers) produces the very same net energy loss problem. Solar energy (excluding electromagnetic energy from the vacuum) as well as all other available energy sources combined cannot produce the necessary volume of energy derived currently from oil.


With respect to ethanol, far more energy is expended in planting, fertilizing,
growing, harvesting and processing than its end product renders. No other energy source can fly planes or drive heavy trucks and machinery like oil. Further, most of the world’s fertilizer is now made from natural gas (which is subject to the same Peak curve as oil). While most of the world’s pesticides are made from oil. As fuel prices double and triple in the coming years after the peak, the fields of agriculture, food distribution, and transport will certainly be heavily impactedor shut-down. Consider that there are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy in every calorie of food consumed on the planet. When the oil and natural gas are taken away, food as will disappear.


World wide solar energy can support at most 500 million people at a very low standard of living, or about five million people at a high standard of living. Solar energy can sustain only a fraction of the world’s current population. As Earth’s human population is culled down to more sustainable levels, a hybrid of various alternative energy sources, in addition to available supplies of fossil fuels will likely be used.


This peak of global oil production is the primary factor behind the ‘resource wars’ masquerading as the war on terrorism. In Machiavellian terms, the US does not need Iraqi oil; access to oil is specifically not what the invasion was about, but more importantly as a military geo-strategic solution to control the supply of oil over other competing nations such as China and India. And for that objective, the cost is not to high. As the world’s usable oil supplies ‘run out’ or get turned-off and the world food supply begins to shrink, billions of people will die from famine, exposure, and civil unrest. A code of silence in accordance to the ‘rules of war’ ensures privilege and exclusion, with population reduction maintained as a generational
(long term) unspoken objective.


The only reason why the US and Britain would pull out is if it became apparent that they would not have access to the Iraqi oil, or if it would cost more energy to continue the war (and occupation) than was obtained from oil. If this were the case then the U.S. and Britain would promptly leave. Realistically, the only way that that would happen is if the Iraqi oil fields became unusable, for example by nuclear attack and contamination. The United States has been aware of peak oil for quite a long time, with peak oil now upon us. U.S. military deployments have been engineered with one specific goal: to control the last remaining oil reserves on the planet. To paraphrase the famous line that Jack Nicholson’s character, a colonel of the U.S. Marine’s, spoke in the movie A Few Good Men. “You want answers…
you can’t handle the truth…”

The chief driver of today’s higher oil price is China, which is now the world’s
second largest oil importer after the US and whose demand is growing exponentially. Supply cannot keep up with this new level of demand, it is clear that there is limited scope to increase supply. Oil is transforming world politics, Iran can afford to challenge the West and continue to aspire to become a nuclear power because it has the firm support of China –secured by oil. China right now feels acutely vulnerable over oil, because it has only limited strategic oil reserves of its own and Iran is vital to China’s strategic interests.

In November 2004, Iran gave China the rights to exploit the giant Yadavaren field. Importantly, China plans to bring this oil into China, not across the Indian ocean and through the Malacca Straits but by pipeline across central Asia, free from surveillance of the US fleet. China’s attitude to Iran is clear with its refusal to; it has condemn Sudan over continued mass killings in Darfur, after Sudan allowed it to build a 500 mile pipeline to the coast. Iran’s President Mahomoud Ahmadinejad can therefore be assured that China will veto any attempt to win UN approval for military intervention
in Iran.

We may have already witnessed mass genocide and warfare unfolding in connection with oil related conflicts from: Chechnya to Nigeria, Argentina to the Sudan, and most formidably in the Middle East all concern or are related to oil fields. To inhabitants of Western countries whose industries directly benefited from the seemingly unlimited flow of cheap oil, oil is referred to as “black gold”. But for many others, particularly the inhabitants of poor oil-producing countries, oil is referred to as the “devil’s tears”.

Since the US is the world’s sole remaining super power, it is in a position to keep much of the world’s oil production to itself for a while. As President Bush once declared, “The US lifestyle is not negotiable!”. As global production falls, there are basically two approaches to securing sufficient oil: one is to expropriate the production amounts that are previously being used by other nations, and the other is to reduce consumption. It
is very difficult to decrease per-capita consumption, so about the only way
to decrease consumption is by decreasing the population. Decreasing the population of other countries will have little or no effect on the US demand for consumption of oil –the only way to decrease US consumption is to forcibly reduce the U.S. population through war.

Since nuclear bombs exploded on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the possibility of an atomic Armageddon has made the use of such WMDs unconscionable. Recently however the word ‘nuclear’ has been resurfacing back into the vocabulary of American policy with the development of ‘limited nuclear weapons’. Small or limited nuclear weapons are used in the battlefield against armored tanks, or to penetrate deeply fortified enemy bunkers. A low yield nuclear weapon is typically
one with a force less than 5 kilotons, or 5,000 tones of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima by comparison was approximately 15 kilotons. A one-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated 20 to 50 feet underground would dig a crater the size of ‘ground zero’ in New York city, ejecting one million cubic feet of radioactive debris.

The end of cheap and plentiful energy will cause the world economy to decline, competition for remaining energy resources will grow, prices will rise, countries will undergo acute economic and political changes, and the global human carrying capacity will steadily plunge. The nation-state is becoming a devolved entity. The current transnational global economy will disappear due to prohibitive energy costs to transport hard goods and services globally. To be replaced by self-sustaining Regional Hubs, each
comprised of up to millions of survivors spatially distributed across the globe,
and digitally linked as well for mutable, fluid and non-territorial Network qualities.

According to Alexander Kiy, author of fiction novel: Fear Kindness Love / Earth Ascending 2012, humans are really Interdimensional light beings with an eternal life and galactic consciousness. This crisis of fear we are in does not have to be one of energy or economy, but of soulful release. Fear Kindness Love / Earth Ascending 2012 is available in print and download through "Lulu (www.lulu.com), the world's fastest growing provider of print-on-demand books."

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