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Blowback!
The Oil Industry Has Plans For You
by Jan Lundberg
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More drilling, spills, opening up public lands for private profit, base consumerism, road building, Wal-Marts and other parking-lot developments, climate destabilization, cancer, birth defects, manipulation of science for PR, maximizing imports of liquefied natural gas, oil wars, and more guerilla warfare in Iraq...
None of this "progress" is a surprise to the White House or to society's other top sectors, nor to the conscious intelligentsia. But, news-reporting on all of these developments - although a bit scanty - makes it appear we are a people innocently discovering only now that war can have "unintended" consequences.
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Blow-back is the U.S. "intelligence community's" term for delayed reactions to its interventions and covert activity. Sept. 11, 2001 may have been purely blow-back, or something more extensive. Anyway, we need a term for oil policy blow-back. Flow-back? Gas-back? Oil-company weather?
Some oil watchers call the oil blow-back to come "the historic discontinuity," flowing from the passing of the peak in world oil extraction. The big eye-opener for the somnolent consumer is that "they" (scientists, leaders) will not be able to "think of something" to replace oil, as is assumed.
We have to have plans for the oil industry, if we are to exercise awareness of the oil industry's plans for us. Boycotting petroleum is doubtful, if not impossible these days. However, creating Citizen Petroleum Councils, for example, will allow the public to find out what the industry and government know about petroleum dependence, and will give communities a chance to start planning around the petroleros' agenda. [See the link at the end of this article for information on Citizen Petroleum Councils and non-petroleum transport and agriculture.]
News keeps coming in that shows the U.S. will continue to play the role of dangerous giant on the world scene, at any cost. But it's interesting to note the world's vulnerability to maintaining petroleum gluttony enabling the global economy of waste.
Prices of natural gas have risen greatly and are going nowhere but up. This threatens economic growth. There is no sign of significant energy conservation, or, more impressive, a transition to consuming not nearly so much energy in the U.S, because serious conservation equals no more growth.
The pointlessness and greediness of continuing present energy usage, when basic needs can be provided for on a fraction of today's energy use, is never accounted for. That's why the alternative press and websites exist. The U.S. uses twice the energy per capita of Western Europe, which takes better care of its people and the environment, but this is not known to the typical, insulated U.S. citizen.
Energy efficiency helps. But clinging to the popular fantasy of fueling today's globalized economy and its billions of consumers, with substitutes for petroleum, would be a losing game. What the Sustainable Energy Institute has learned and tried to get across, since its founding in 1988, is that there will be no continuation of the energy-intensive U.S. industrial, agricultural and consumer diet once the peak of global oil extraction passes. The peak is about now, and no new discoveries or oil wars can alter the overall trend.
The reason for a sudden change in oil availability is that the market will react to the shortfall of supply in a dramatic fashion, throwing a monkey wrench into the economy. Growth will stop and distribution of goods and services will implode along with the stock markets.
Therefore, it is vital for our survival to visualize an alternative lifestyle and social structure now. People are so enamored with massive energy consumption and technological products that any departure from that way of living is deemed to be insane and Luddite. Yet, hiding our head in the sand is no solution.
If it hurts to say that the only model for sustainability that we have is the American Indians, so be it. As the arrows fly at us from the techno-geeks and hopeless consumers - flag wavers and non-flag wavers alike - we hasten to say we know very well we cannot go back in time; Yes, there are too many people now and nature's pristine bounty has been trashed and depleted; Yes, much has been learned that can help us to develop a sustainable society. Appropriate technology must be applied for our short-term and long-term survival, especially for ecological restoration and providing food and water with renewable energy.
The fact that this is not underway except by some fanatical visionaries and hippies does not bode well. The energy future that is being pursued by mainstream society and government policy is going to make the transition to sustainability iffy. Unfortunately, the funded environmental movement is hardly helping, when it does not understand or tackle petroleum issues such as admitting that overpopulation has already been achieved.
Who's your daddy? Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan was before Congress's House Energy and Commerce Committee June 10, 2003. In a responsible-sounding economist voice, he reiterated the direction of energy policy: make more cheap energy. While it was the same old story - becoming less rational as the world is consumed - we could discern the latest national approach. Congressmen were blatantly representing industry (in the guise of promoting wage slavery), wanting more manufacturing and less regulation. A hoped-for revival in nuclear was also voiced by Greenspan and the industry lackeys on the Committee.
One Congressman pointed out that a policy of conservation still pops up here and there, in contradiction to incentives to use more energy at a discount. Another Congressmen had Greenspan comment on the peak in global oil production, which Greenspan claimed was perhaps many years off. It was clear he would not be interested in evidence that the peak could have just occurred, although this would have massive implications for status-quo economics.
The official topic for Greenspan's testimony was the "need" for more natural gas. Because of lack of domestic petroleum reserves the focus was on liquefied natural gas (LNG) that would be imported. This means more port facilities and the facilitating of dangerous spills and terrorism, as pointed out by Congresswoman Lois Capps of Santa Barbara.
Unmentioned was that more gas and LNG means more greenhouse gas emissions. The LNG would not be replacing coal; it would be for extending economic growth. More everything. Short term profits is what Greenspan's bottom line has to be, or he'd be thrown outta there.
White House cover up
A scandal hit the White House and Environmental Protection Agency in mid June: the headlines read, "EPA report omits climate section". The most fun part of this story was learning how it was the American Petroleum Institute who had questioned a well known study showing that global temperatures had spiked sharply in the past decade compared with levels over the past 1,000 years. That scientific finding was deleted from the draft of the EPA report.
The EPA report is on the state of the environment, so the White House was heavily involved in editing the climate section: The New York Times reported, "risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs". The White House can't seem to underestimate the stupidity and apathy of the public, as it gets away with this "leadership."
Why not conceal global warming, when there's no criminal penalty for frying the planet through oil-company weather? The result of today's energy policy - the same policy that this country has always had - means impending breakdowns of the transportation, agricultural and electric utility systems in the U.S. and elsewhere. That is what your country is doing for you. We already know what it is doing to the rest of the world: burning it up for profit.
That's U.S. energy policy, and it's given a greenwash, such as when natural gas and LNG are called "clean fuels" even though they're just petroleum. However, if substitution of coal (three times dirtier than gas) were the goal, one should accept on a temporary basis domestic natural gas as a replacement fuel, but not as a way to increase consumption for the sake of "economic growth".
There are good ways to reduce pollution, but activists become hardened against compromise when the entrenched polluters have their way all the time (after Clinton especially), and the mainstream enviros have never accepted or offered a vision beyond minor reformism. Anticipating collapse, the transition to renewables will prove impossible to implement to a large degree when the size of the consuming human population and of the production-economy is so large, and the infrastructure is hopelessly oil-based.
It's time to individually chart our own destiny, and for starters that would mean working closer to home or moving closer to the job. For more ideas that the powers that be do NOT want to explore or encourage, see our website at www.culturechange.org, and talk to your family and neighbors about options - unless Alan Greenspan is your daddy.
- – Jan Lundberg
This piece was Culture Change Letter #24
If you are interested in receiving Culture Change's e-letter you can sign up to get Culture Change Letter directly, by clicking here: E-Letter
Jan Lundberg, co-founded the Lundberg Letter, called "the bible of the oil industry," in 1973. Mr. Lundberg ran Lundberg Survey Incorporated for the petroleum industry, utilities and government. He founded the Sustainable Energy Institute (SEI) in 1988.
We promote and practice cultural change as key to sustainability. Does economic growth via fossil fuels and materialism provide real security? A sustainable society features car-free living and growing food locally. Communities must return to self-sufficiency for food and energy.
Culture Change and SEI:
P.O. Box 4347
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California 95518
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Telephone: (707) 826-7775
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Website: www.CultureChange.org
Published by Sustainable Energy Institute, a nonprofit charity 501(c)(3) California corporation.
Useful link: dieoff.com
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