The Hierarchy of Needs: Earth - energy - money
Social justice advocates urge more equitable sharing of the common resources of the Earth, but this goal will be even more difficult as natural capital is depleted. We are now passing the point of Peak Oil - the maximum rate that petroleum can be extracted from the Earth. Other non-renewable resources are also near or at their all time peaks of production, including natural gas, coal and certain mineral ores. In addition, renewable resources such as forests, soils, fisheries and fresh water are being used faster than they regenerate.
Now that we are passing Peak Everything, perhaps the most important question facing humanity is how we will use the remaining concentrated resources. Will we choose to use the rest of the oil to relocalize food production and build renewable energy generation systems? Or will we allow the oil to be used for a futile, endless war to control what is left?
Peak Choice describes why civilization did not choose to prepare a compassionate response to ecological and energy overshoot and offers some suggestions toward mitigation on the resource downslope. If we are going to redirect resources spent on the military industrial complex toward meeting human needs, we need to recognize the challenge of sharing a shrinking economic "pie" after Peak Oil.
The oil wells are half empty - so we cannot keep doing what we are all doing.
The oil wells are half full - so we have lots of resources to power the shift toward a lower consumption, steady state society.
Entropy is not a good idea, it's the law.
The Hierarchy of Needs: Earth - energy - money
Peak Warnings
Spaceship Earth: Beyond the Limits to Growth
Just Say No To Negativity
Triple Bottom Line or Triple Crisis
Hierarchy of Needs
The Environmental Meltdown is More Important than Financial Meltdown
Mobius politics: the illusion of two sides
Two Front War for Truth
Fractal Solutions
Connected Dots: Blind Men and the Elephant
Net Energy: Why We Are Not Addicted to Oil
Running on Empty
Peak Oil Wars
Truth and Reconciliation
Globalization of corporate power versus planetary consciousness.
The Hierarchy of Needs: Earth - energy - money
On September 20, 1963, the day before I was born, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at the United Nations recommending that the race to the moon be converted to a cooperative venture with the Soviet Union.
Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations - President John F. Kennedy
New York - September 20th 1963
''Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity--in the field of space--there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon. Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries--indeed of all the world--cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries. ....''
-- President John F. Kennedy, September 20, 1963 speech to the UN calling for an end to the Cold War and converting the Moon Race into an international cooperative effort, two months and two days before he was removed from office.
Imagine the puzzlement that any potential aliens would experience if they ever come across the US flag on the moon, they would scratch their tentacles in curiosity. The stars and stripes would be indecipherable, a reason the astronauts should have left an Earth flag.
More seriously, the proposal to change the moon race to a cooperative effort suggests a missed opportunity to use our planet's resources in a more beneficial way to meet human needs. This proposal was part of a broader policy shift to end the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, a shift that was underway at the time of Kennedy's speech to the UN. The previous month, JFK had successfully enacted the first nuclear arms control agreement -- the Limited Test Ban Treaty. He called for detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, most notably in his commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963. He refused to bomb Cuba during the Missile Crisis of October, 1962, working out a quid pro quo that averted war.
How would the world look today if the Cold War had ended in 1965, freeing up resources for peaceful purposes? What would "the Sixties" have been without the War on Viet Nam (another conflict that Kennedy was trying to scale back when he was killed)? We need a South African style "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" about the US National Security State to be able to create conditions necessary to cut the military budget so we can achieve a "peace dividend" that would allow us to reallocate our resources for our collective survival.
Perhaps the most important outcome from the entire space program was the ability to see the Earth floating in the vastness of space. This was the most profound consciousness shift in human history, probably more important than realizing the planet is a sphere. From the vantage point of space there are no national boundaries visible, ethnic and religious conflicts are irrelevant, and the fact we are completely dependent on the planetary biosphere becomes obvious to everyone.
The breathable part of our atmosphere is less than the height of Mount Everest, the highest place above sea level. One comparison is that this distance is less than the length of the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge. The entire atmosphere is thicker than this, but the part that is useful to humans and other creatures is extremely thin compared with the width of the Earth. Whatever we all do to the atmosphere mostly happens in the film that composes the part we can live in.
"our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
-- President John F. Kennedy, commencement speech at American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963
I have come to wonder whether Kennedy sensed that seeing the planet would be perhaps the most profound consciousness shift in the history of our species, and that was the reason behind the motivation for the Apollo moon landings.
JFK's change of approach on the moon race was part of a broader effort to turn off the Cold War, the reason JFK was removed from office. James Douglass, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" is one of the few books that mentions that this shift on the Moon Race was contemplated and then forgotten once LBJ took over. In 2009, Douglass interviewed Sergei Krushchev, the son of the former Soviet leader, who said that his father had decided to accept Kennedy's offer (over the objections of his own military advisors) shortly before Kennedy's fatal trip to Dallas.
Any political autopsy on what happened to the United States of America needs to start with the removal of the President through a coup d'etat to protect the permanent war economy, since the same political, economic and military forces that thwarted JFK's efforts to shift course are still in charge today. We need to understand not only the missed opportunities of 1963, but also the challenges and opportunities that we all face as we pass the limits to endless growth on a finite planet.
Peak Warnings
Peak Oil is not the about the oil "running out," but the point where production increases can no longer continue. Since our society requires endless growth to sustain a debt and interest based monetary system, some of the initial impacts of Peak Oil are economic disruptions.
Most of us who are adults today, at the peak, are going to be Peak Oil Moses -- few of us will live to see the promised land beyond oil. Instead, we are facing the threat of using progressively less and less oil. How we all cope with this reduction determines how future generations will live without any oil.
In 1956, the geologist M. King Hubbert gave a famous presentation modeling the rise and fall of oil fields. He predicted that the US would peak in production around 1970 and the world would peak around 1995. He was ridiculed in the industry since more and more oil fields were being found, so his alarmism seemed ludicrous. But a decade and a half later Hubbert was proved correct when the US actually did peak in domestic oil production.
After the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, Hubbert stated that the modest decline in consumption triggered by shortages and rising prices might push back the global peak a few years, possibly a decade. That delay is exactly what happened. Most important, Hubbert cautioned that focusing on the specific year of the global peak was not important, from the very long perspective our civilization's brief use of fossil fuels would be a temporary aberration. Hubbert used a chart showing fossil fuel usage from five thousand years ago to five thousand years in the future - with our current consumption a narrow spike.
In his final years, Hubbert became convinced that solar energy could and would provide our energy requirements as a civilization but only if we moved away from growth based money and focused on a steady state based society.
The 2005 "Hirsch Report" commissioned by the US Department of Energy was a report about the implications of Peak Oil, prepared by the military / intelligence contractor Science Applications International Corporation. It concluded that it would require two decades of intense efforts to mitigate the impacts of Peak Oil, and that failing to do preparation and mitigation would have massive economic impacts. The report considered toxic, centralized technologies as tar sands and coal-to-liquids to be acceptable, and did not make much effort to suggest more sane solutions would be decentralization, relocalization and power down approaches. But despite this approach, it subtly said - if reading between the lines - that Jimmy Carter was right and we blew it when our society ignored the warnings of the 1970s energy crises.
Easy mitigation of the energy crisis is not possible because Carter was sabotaged. The same forces that toppled the Carter administration are still running the show: militarism, covert intelligence agencies, centralized energy companies and the global financial system.
When I was born, world population was about half as many people as there are today and there was about twice as much primary forest on the planet as there is now. Coping with overpopulation and overconsumption is the greatest challenge in humanity's history.
Spaceship Earth: Beyond the Limits to Growth
Once upon a time, people thought Earth was flat. They they decided it was round. But now we know better: the Earth is constantly getting bigger.
This seems ridiculous - and it is - but this is the hidden assumption behind the global economy. Endless growth is absolutely required by our economic models and passing the limits to growth poses unprecedented problems for civilization.
The math of exponential growth is deceptively simple. Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics at University of Colorado, Boulder, offers this analogy. If you have a jar of yeast that doubles every minute and it takes an hour, 60 minutes, to fill the jar, the jar is half full of yeast at 59 minutes. At a minute after it's full, the yeast need a whole new jar, at 62 minutes, two more jars after that, and so on. The challenge of our times - are we smarter than yeast?
How do the yeast in the bottle understand the concept of "enough" before the bottle is filled? Would the most far sighted yeast notice that in a few more doublings they will be out of room? Would they be able to persuade their fellow yeast that they should consider a moratorium on population growth while there was still extra room in the bottle?
Are humans smarter than yeast? or perhaps more accurately, is Capitalism smarter than yeast?
Just Say No To Negativity
If one is lost in an unpleasant place, do you want a map of Disneyland or a map that explains where you really are so that you can stop being lost?
Understanding these fundamental problems is as much a psychological issue as a political problem, we need to recognize why credible warnings about ecological, energy and economic overshoot have been mostly ignored for decades.
There's lots of discussion about the need for "Hope," which is important, but what we need more is the courage to face our collective predicament. Baby steps are no longer enough now that we are passing Peak Oil and other resource limits. We need to be able to examine the full scope of these problems if there is potential for effective solutions for our collective survival.
Triple Bottom Line or Triple Crisis
The psychologist Maslow suggested that humans have a hierarchy of needs - without the basics of survival it is difficult to focus on abstract culture.
"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."
-- John Adams, 1780, to Abigail
The dominant paradigm teaches that money is the most important value, energy conservation and ecological sanity are nice if we can afford them.
Most of the environmental movement has embraced the concept of the Triple Bottom Line, which suggests that the economy needs to consider ecology and social justice issues. While it is good to factor these into economic decisions, the deeper truth is that the environment makes the economy possible. Energy creates money, not the other way around.
It is probably not a coincidence that many of the political voices calling attention to the problems of fiat currency, the Federal Reserve and other structural problems rarely mention the underlying ecological limits. We need to weave together advocates for social justice with understanding of how money is created and that we have reached the limits to growth on a finite planet.
Instead of the Triple Bottom Line, we need to recognize that we are facing a Triple Crisis of Earth, Energy and Money.
Hierarchy of Needs
Money is not a basic human need, humans survived for countless millennia before the invention of money, it is a symbolic resource.
If deprived of air, we can only survive for a few minutes. We can live without water for a few days. Without food, we die in a few weeks, more or less. Our requirements for shelter vary considerably depending on the climate we live in, but it is a practical concern for survival. Technically, one could live one's whole life without money, but to function in a complex civilization where access to many of the basic necessities of life are mediated by money, financial concerns become central to guaranteeing human existence.
The amount of money one has is not directly correlated with happiness.
Extremely poor countries such as Somalia and Haiti lack basic services that provide minimal standards of nutrition and health care. But countries that are overfed and overconsume such as the United States do not become happier once basic needs are met.
Countries such as Costa Rica, which is much poorer than the United States has roughly similar levels of general happiness and health standards. Costa Ricans do not share the same standard of living, but basic needs are met. The United States has much more sophisticated health care systems for those who can afford access to them, but the basic health care services are provided to most Costa Ricans. Similarly, most European countries are considerably poorer per capita than the United States yet European societies generally have equal or greater social cohesion and generalized happiness.
Environmental Meltdown More Important than Financial Meltdown
In nature, when species exceed their carrying capacity, their populations quickly crash. Unsustainable does not mean that something is a bad idea, it means that it cannot continue.
The story of the Titanic shows the futility of arrogance and the need to have an equitable approach to the disaster. Many of the poorer people on board were locked below decks as the situation became known to the crew. Supporters of the "endless growth" suggest that economic growth will take care of poverty and gross inequality -- a rising tide lifts all yachts. If growth is ending, then pressure for a different economic paradigm might increase substantially. Social justice advocates are desperately needed to be part of the global discussion of how to cope with Peak Everything in a compassionate way. Traditional leftist politics are focused on how to share the economic pie more fairly. Resource depletion means the size of the economic pie is going to get smaller, which makes equity an even more difficult goal.
Mobius politics: the illusion of two sides
A strip of paper folded into a ring has two sides, but if that strip is given a half twist before made into a loop, the resulting creation is a Mobius strip, a bizarre geometric contortion that only has one side. (There is even a three dimensional version called a Klein bottle, which has no inside and no outside.)
Two Front War for Truth
My "political map" details a psychological pattern used to manipulate public perceptions -- a two front war for truth. The corporate media promotes the official story. Next, there's the fall back position of the limited hang out -- to let out some truths but in a way that it seems to be the full truth, which is also a lie. The alternative media mostly focus on secondary issues and limited hang outs, not root causes. At the other end of the spectrum is deliberate disinformation that is designed to discredit looking deeper beyond the official story and / or the limited hang outs. These can be dismissed as so-called conspiracy theories, although most of them have bits of truth mixed together with nonsense -- mirror images of the incompetence theories. For most issues, the best evidence is difficult to find through these distractions.
Detailed description of the "political map" are at www.peakchoice.org/fake-debates.html and at www.oilempire.us/map.html (a political map: connected dots).
"Just because someone says the government is lying does not mean they're telling the truth."
-- John Judge
Fractal Solutions
Many of the solutions are fractal - they can be scaled from the personal, family and neighborhood levels all the way up to the global level. It's a false choice to wonder which level is the most important -- all of these -- and more -- are needed. Different people have different talents, no one individual can address all of them. It helps to have local familiarity with growing food or reducing energy consumption to be able to advocate effectively for large scale shifts.
A chart showing how these fractal solutions can be applied on various topics is at www.peakchoice.org/levels.html
Connected Dots: Blind Men and the Elephant
The responses to ecocide often resemble the parable of the blind men and the elephant -- each is touching part of the elephant but none of them understand the Big Picture. Why should environmentalists and social justice advocates "connect the dots" between Peak Oil, Climate Change, Depletion of Renewable Resources - forests, fresh water, fish, soil, Overpopulation, Consumption and the Financial Crash?
Trying to address Peak and Climate without the other makes both worse.
Focusing on energy shortage while ignoring climate has led to the false solutions of tar sands, offshore drilling, mountaintop removal, Liquid Natural Gas, Shale Gas and nuclear power.
Focusing on Climate Change while ignoring energy limits is one of the reasons for the political backlash against climate change awareness. Most of the climate movement is framed as we should reduce energy consumption instead of we will reduce consumption because you cannot burn fuel that does not exist.
Where is the environmental movement regarding Peak Oil? A few groups have focused on it, but most are disinterested at best. It's not enough to hate the oil companies and hope they go away.
We need energy literacy, we need ecological perspectives on how to mitigate energy shortages, how to do more with less.
Peak Oil is not an activist cause - not just because most environmental groups ignore it, but because addressing it is a civilization wide shift, not a political campaign.
David Holmgren, the co-orginator of Permaculture, is author of Future Scenarios, about the interconnections between Peak Oil and Climate Change. Holmgren notes that
"Economic recession is the only proven mechanism for a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions ... most of the proposals for mitigation from Kyoto to the feverish efforts to construct post Kyoto solutions have been framed in ignorance of Peak Oil. As Richard Heinberg has argued recently, proposals to cap carbon emissions annually, and allowing them to be traded, rely on the rights to pollute being scarce relative to the availability of the fuel. Actual scarcity of fuel may make such schemes irrelevant.
The suggestion that we need to "reduce carbon by 2050" - or even by 2030 - is a subtle way to acknowledge Peak Oil. A reason politicians prefer to focus solely on carbon emissions is it is easier to pretend that renewable energy could keep the industrial growth paradigm powered through technological substitution. If one has to also factor resource depletion, this scenario no longer looks realistic and reduction of consumption, not merely through efficiency, becomes obvious.
There's not enough fossil fuel remaining to have endless increases in carbon emissions although there is enough to cause even more severe ecological damage.
The scale of these problems is clearly the biggest crisis in human history so the scale of the solutions will require a species wide response.
All of these energy sources are either near or at their peak, and in the short run we will need lots of efficiency to mitigate the early stages of decline, in addition to the need to reduce consumption for ecological and social justice reasons.
David Fridley, who works for the United States Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, recently said
"(Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy) was my boss. He knows all about peak oil, but he can't talk about it. If the government announced that peak oil was threatening our economy, Wall Street would crash. He just can't say anything about it."
Net Energy: Why We Are Not Addicted to Oil
President George W. Bush once said during a "State of the Union" speech that "America is addicted to oil." This mantra was echoed by many opponents of his administration, but the fact that Bush said it is a clue that it is not really true. We are not "addicted" to oil, since an addiction is something that can be kicked. Instead, our society is completely dependent on concentrated fossil fuels for industrial agriculture, long distance transportation, and our growth based monetary system.
Net energy is the concept that you need to invest energy in to get energy out. Some of the earliest oil fields had a 100 to 1 ratio -- we got 100 times more energy out than it took to extract, process and distribute the oil.
As oil production increased, the rate of return decreased as the easiest to get oil was used up -- the "low hanging fruit" analogy. Now, oil fields take far more energy to extract what Michael Klare calls "tough oil." Offshore drilling, oil fields in remote locations, polar regions, tar sands -- these take far more energy to obtain than the early riches of the oil era.
When North America began to be logged, the first forests to be cut down were those near the oceans and riverbanks. The big trees on steep slopes did not get clearcut until the easier to extract logs had already been taken. Now, the lumber industry is going after smaller trees on the steepest slopes, or focused on second and third growth forests. This analogy is crude, pun not intended, since forests grow back far faster than oil fields are created through geological processes.
Renewable sources have the advantage of lasting as long as the sun shines and the wind blows, but they are less concentrated than fossil fuels. I've used solar panels for two decades and have concluded that a renewable energy economy would be based on steady state principles, not a growth based system.
Running on Empty
There is a tremendous amount of sunlight that strikes the Earth, but only a small fraction of that can be captured via photosynthesis. If all forests were converted into industrial energy that could not replace all of the fossil fuel we use.
Every second, we all use a thousand barrels of oil per second, about a quarter of that is US consumption. This roughly translates to the flow of a moderate sized river, about 6,000 cubic feet per second. A river near my home in Oregon, the mighty McKenzie River, a tributary of the Willamette, is about that flow rate on average.
Another way to look at fossil fuel usage is we are all using up about a million years of stored solar energy per year. One need not be a climatologist or geologist to recognize that this is destabilizing the delicate balance of the thin film of the atmosphere, which regulates the weather patterns that our agricultural systems depend upon.
Driving cars is only part of our energy use, but it is the part that most people associate with fossil fuels. Vehicle Miles Travels shows how transportation and energy are linked. The first break in the growth curve was the 1973 Saudi oil embargo, the 1979 energy crises after the Iranian revolution is shown as well. And travel leveled off as the price of gas rose as Peak Oil approached.
Reaching Peak Oil hasn't deterred highway planners from continuing to promote more roads.
80 "high priority corridors," including widening Interstate 5 from Canada to Mexico, part of the implementation of NAFTA. The next transportation bill is percolating in Congress now, and is planned to double spending on highway construction from Bush's bill.
I've focused on freeway fighting as a means to shift energy policies, but in the two decades I've been interested in transportation issues I have never seen a foundation funded enviro group discuss the full scale of the highway projects in the transportation bills. Most focus on modest increases in transit funding and overlook the scale of road expansions. Details on these issues are at my website www.PeakTraffic.org
The Obama / Biden administration gave more support to Amtrak than any previous administrations, partly because Senator Biden was a frequent Amtrak rider between Delaware and Capitol Hill. The main reason is probably because the administration understands Peak Oil even if they dare not admit it in public. Rebuilding the rails would be required to mitigate Peak Oil's transportation impacts. But the soundbite of "High Speed Rail" distracts from some inconvenient truths - the appropriation of eight billion dollars will only pay for modest fixes to a few lines. Higher speed rail would require tens of billions, and a national network of actual high speed rail would be even more expensive -- that would require redirecting funds for more freeways and converting military contractors to build trains. It creates more jobs per dollar to make trains instead of missiles. On the downslope of Peak Energy we need "Transportation Triage" to prioritize systems more likely to be useful during the permanent oil shock, not new highways built on the assumption traffic levels will go up forever.
The money the United States spent to destroy Iraq could have been used for renewable energy systems to power a real national rail network. It would take a lot of fossil fuel inputs to make these systems. Steel and concrete need a lot of energy to produce.
When we look at energy use and the way we live, we need to consider more than personal transportation - but also energy use for buildings and to transport our food. Urbanites can easily ride bicycles or take public transit, but they still require long distance delivery of food supplies. We need to integrate the cities, suburbs and rural areas to support each other. Let's use the remaining oil to relocalize and rebuild agricultural systems
The biggest threat of Peak Oil is not the disruption of the God given inalienable right to drive as much as we want -- but the risk to the food supply. In the industrial world, nearly all food requires enormous energy inputs. Fertilizer from natural gas. Pesticides from petroleum. Diesel tractors. Even organic food is usually transported long distances and packaged with petroleum based plastics.
Per capita grain production peaked in the early 1980s. One of the largest users of grain is to feed farm animals, so a more vegetarian diet in the rich countries is needed to mitigate the impact of Peak Oil.
The rise of oil production led to the rise of the global economy. On the downslope, we are also going to have a reduction in the economy. The writer James Kunstler states this means that the economic crisis is not a recession like a big storm blowing through, it is a permanent new condition like climate change.
Money is one of the most mysterious things -- we all use it, but few think about how it is created. This is a whole topic in itself, but money is essentially loaned into existence, based on debt based on compound interest. This works, sort of, as the total economy can keep getting bigger, but on the energy downslope our monetary system cannot function properly any more. This is essentially the root cause of the financial crisis. I recommend especially the "Crash Course" by Chris Martenson as an online teaching tool for those interested in this.
Peak Oil Wars
The invasion of Iraq was not a war just for oil profits. The United States did not spend over a trillion dollars so that oil companies could make billions. At its root, the war on Iraq is a Peak Oil War - part of long planned occupations of the oil fields of the Gulf. Military power is being used to try to control the energy resources of Europe, Japan, China, India and the other industrialized countries that are US economic competitors.
In 2007, Senator Joe Biden ran for President largely on the promise to solve the Iraq war by splitting Iraq into three new states. Iraq's oil fields are relatively concentrated in a few parts of the country, the largest fields are in the south, where the Shia majority lives. The rise of the "Sunni / Shia" conflict during the occupation of Iraq suggests a deeper, uglier vision behind the alleged civil war.
Iran also has its petroleum reserves concentrated in a small part of the country. Iran's oil fields are located along the Persian Gulf, not spread throughout the country. The province of Khuzestan, which is a largely Arab minority section of Iran, is a center for the Iranian oil industry. When Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980, he was trying to take over Khuzestan. (Most Americans don't know that Iran is not an Arab country - it is Islamic, but not Arab.)
The US cannot attack Iran without risking destruction of oil fields, since Iran clearly has the military capability to destroy Saudi oil installations in revenge and shut down oil tanker traffic in the strategic Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf. The US hasn't fought a war with a country that could fight back since 1861. Even Nazi Germany couldn't hit the US and imperial Japan could only wage the single attack on Pearl Harbor and some largely irrelevant balloon launched bombs that caused minor damage on the West Coast. This is probably why the US attack on Iran hasn't happened - at least not yet.
In June 2006, Armed Forces Journal published a map from Ralph Peters, a prominent pro-war strategist. It shows the method to the madness -- creating ethnic tension and civil war in order to redraw the boundaries. He proposed creating a new state out of southern Iraq, western Iran and eastern Saudi Arabia - which would separate those countries from most of their oil. This proposal created enormous outrage in the Middle East, but there's not much difference between Dick Cheney's support for partition versus Biden's support for partition. Most of these borders were imposted by Britain and France after World War I. The US war plan seems to hope that the entire region will blow up so that the US will be able to redesign the region. There is a method to their madness.
The Peters map is no longer on the Armed Forces Journal website, but a copy is archived for "Fair Use" purposes at www.oilempire.us/new-map.html
The borders of Iraq - and the other Middle East countries - were mostly drawn by French and British bureaucrats shortly after World War I, not by anyone who lived in the region. The "New Middle East Map" suggests the United States is trying to impose its own stamp on the region's geography as part of an effort to control the flow of oil on the downslope.
Politicians are united in saying that "it's time we end foreign oil dependence." But since most of what is left globally is in the Islamic parts of the world, we will continue to be increasingly dependent on foreign oil as long as we want to continue to use oil.
If the bulk of the remaining oil was in India, we would probably have a war on Hinduism.
This is why I'm not disappointed by Obama and I "voted" for former Democratic member of Congress Cynthia McKinney - who ran as the Green candidate in 2008. But I think the Presidential elections are just theater, they resemble a televised wrestling match - a bruising contest that is fake. Obama is the good cop for the empire. And it's likely that Sarah Palin was put on McCain's ticket to ensure that he lost.
The ultra right wing paranoia that Obama is supposedly a secret Muslim and not a US citizen helps ensure that many liberals who are getting buyer's remorse about Obama continuing many Bush policies don't dare criticize him too much, since they might then seem to support the so-called "Birthers." This is how Mobius politics works. Divide and Conquer.
Truth and Reconciliation
In the 1990s, a project called Biosphere 2 was a demonstration site to see if domed cities could create self sufficient ecosystems - but it was a failure. The reality is a planetary sized system is required. The billionaires can't hide in a bunker and expect to survive, they won't make it unless everyone does. And the rest of us probably won't make it unless our resources are redirected for survival.
One thing that is confusing is things are getting better and worse at the same time. we have the potential to convert the military industrial complex, to redirect the financial system, to use the tremendous talents we have developed in our civilization toward real sustainability. But the billionaires need to see they're in the "same boat" as everyone else.
Jared Diamond, author of the best selling book "Collapse," gave an interview in 2005 where he said "Another person I've talked to is a (Bush Administration) cabinet minister who I cannot name, but a cabinet minister of the current administration. ... This cabinet minister read my book, Guns, Germs and Steel and read my book, Collapse, and is convinced of the seriousness of these problems"
This shows that there are some in senior positions who are very alarmed, but they don't know what to do. Exposing the full crimes and scale of what is going on would be too much - an "American Gorbachev" is what we need, but when Gorbachev tried to reform communism it ended up dissolving into the dustbin of history.
Globalization of corporate power versus planetary consciousness
I'll close with another excerpt from Kennedy's United Nations speech:
"Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world--or to make it the last."
Mark Robinowitz
PeakChoice.org