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MOTIVE: Peak Oil
By definition, world hydrocarbon (oil and gas) production peaks when half the planet's reserves have been used up. After that point, every barrel of oil will be harder to find, more expensive to obtain, and more valuable to whoever controls it.
Many of the world's foremost experts place that peak between 2000 and 2007. We live in a global economic system based on endless growth, and that growth is only possible with endless hydrocarbons to burn.
Demand for oil and gas is increasing at staggering rates; after peak, there will be demand that simply cannot be met, and energy prices will rise inexorably. The resulting economic catastrophe may see oil hit $100 per barrel before the end of this decade.
Oil not only keeps us warm and moves our cars, it is used to make all plastics and is, together with natural gas, the most important ingredient keeping modern agriculture afloat.
It is a little known fact that for every 1 calorie of food energy produced, 10 calories of hydrocarbons are consumed. We eat oil. Without cheap oil, billions of people will freeze or starve and unfortunately, there is no combination of renewable energy sources that can replace oil and gas consumption without massive conservation efforts that are nowhere in sight.
Cheney knew about this. There are no national plans for conservation in America. As Dick Cheney has stated, "The American way of life is not negotiable." Over-consumption is as American as apple pie.
Many industry experts have been speaking to the reality of Peak Oil for some time.
One of those experts - perhaps the most prominent in the world - was in Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG). Just four days after Dick Cheney became Vice President he convened the NEPDG. Among the experts whose opinion Cheney paid for (with taxpayer dollars) was
Matthew Simmons, one of the most respected energy investment bankers in the world. Simmons has been speaking out about Peak Oil for years, and there is no question that the urgent story of Peak Oil is what he told Cheney's NEPDG.
The content of the NEPDG documentation has been illegally withheld from the American public with a rubber stamp of approval from the Supreme Court.
Cheney knew about Peak Oil in 1999 as CEO of
Halliburton, long before was Vice President. A speech he gave at the London Institute of Petroleum demonstrates this clearly.
As stated in Crossing the Rubicon, "By way of confirmation, people in and close to the oil industry are reporting that increased drilling is not resulting as yet in significantly increased supply."
A crisis of this magnitude required a
crisis plan, something the Neo-Liberals didn't have.
The
Neo-Conservatives, including Dick Cheney, had such a plan:
manufacture a crisis - one that had long been imagined as necessary by elite planners inside the national security state and use it to maintain permanent war to steal the world's last remaining hydrocarbons and temporarily stave off the Peak Oil crisis.