The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

Commentator Jim Minter on the Energy Resources list-serve makes some excellent points about the looming Iraq war vis-a-vis oil. Note, Minter is not a war hawk. he is just trying to explain what is really behind our policy.

Iraq has a lot of oil that is soon to be needed in the global oil market. It doesn't matter to this market whether American, British, French or Russian companies pump and sell it. It's a global market! Iraqi oil doesn't even need to come to the U.S. Even if Iraqi oil only went to Europe it would increase the global supply and lower the global price. Oil companies are multi-national. Their investors are international. Don't trap yourselves into old-think nationalism. As we slide deeper into this decade, global oil consumers need Iraqi oil.

Saddam has out-waited us--at terrible cost to the Iraqi people--but nevertheless shutting off Iraqi oil from the global market will soon hurt global consumers worse than it hurts Saddam's regime. Why? GLOBAL OIL PRODUCTION IS AT PEAK, as Matthew Simmons, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère and other knowledgeable experts have shown... as the highest levels of U.S. and British decision-makers know from their highly-classified briefings. And so, because global oil production peaks in this decade, Iraqi oil must re-enter the global mainstream--and soon! Saddam can't have those profits. It's as simple as that. The global community cannot afford to have the profits from the very imminent massive pumping of Iraqi oil funding the arsenal of that maniac. That regime has got to go

It's a stark picture and I suppose the best "humanitarian" face we can candidly put on it goes something like this: "The goal is to see peace and stability come to Iraq and the oil-producing Middle East while the global economy pumps its oil. The aim of the global community is to set up a 'democratic, market-economy regime' in Iraq with the oil revenues going to build a stable, secular and prosperous society in Iraq. The Iraqi people can select whomever they please to help them quickly develop their oil, and God bless them (though guess who has the best oil technology?).

Oil directly fuels more than a third of the American economy, most specifically our entire transportation system. That includes the auto/truck industry (everything from manufacturing to repair to insurance) road building and maintenance, all commerce and industry (trucking delivers everything and even the few trains left are diesel), air transport, and every facet of our daily lives from commuting to tourism. There is no substitute fuel for our present transportation system. None. Nada, Zilch. That has been conclusively and finally demonstrated to exhaustion on this Energy Resources Web Site. But even if those lame, low-net transportation-fuel substitutes touted by a few stubbornly-giddy techno-cornucopians were viable, none can claim that their pet schemes can be put on-line in time to provide an alternative-fueled transportation system for America in this decade... or even the next decade. Without our petroleum transportation system, the U.S. economy dies. Also having trans-continental economies, Canada and Australia are in the same boat. Next in transportation vulnerability are Europe and Japan.

Oil is also the base feed stock for our petro-chemical industry and possibly half of all the non-edible, physical products we now consume. There are some substitute feed stocks in some products, but they are not likely to be as cheap or as usable as oil stock is presently. Oil products also drive much of our non-transportation machinery, in addition to heating and powering a chunk of our built-infrastructure. Here, at least, petroleum products can be almost totally replaced, though not always swiftly or efficiently... and rarely, cheaply. We can run our buildings, if not our cars, on something besides petroleum. However, our modern agricultural system is totally petroleum-dependant. So is our forestry and fishing.

Bottom line: Our transcontinental economy is built upon the cheap transportation provided by petroleum. For the foreseeable future there is no alternative. If oil fails totally, which is not likely, we fail totally. But [as we advance into the future and] oil becomes restricted and expensive, we enter the same "stagflation" of inflation-with-recession that we experienced after the last oil crisis in the mid-70s. Simply put: Without petroleum the U.S. faces catastrophe; with constrained supplies or expensive supplies of petroleum we only face disaster.

The rapid flow of Iraqi oil into the global bloodstream for the next dozen-or-so years will not, of course, alleviate the total decline in global petro-stocks. But rapidly pumping Iraqi oil can push forward in time the "felt effects" of the global "Hubbert Peak" decline. Pumping Iraq and Saudi Arabia at ever-accelerated rates can for a time cover the decline of the North Sea and the North Slope, the continental U.S., and other aging oil fields. Of course, as many here at Energy Resources have already pointed out, this reckless course of blindly fueling the growth of oil consumption only assures that when the supply/demand crunch finally does arrive, it will be more precipitous and more catastrophic than the sane and sensible "soft path down" proposed by our late guru, Howard T, Odum and many others.

I am NOT advocating or defending the impending war to depose Saddam -- just explaining why it is going to happen and why no amount of outrage and righteous indignation is going to stop it. I think the world's oil gluttony is deplorable. I do not think that consuming nations have a right to other people's resources. What I am trying to explain is the relentless logic of our blind consumption. We are at Peak but we do not understand it. We have been lied to by our corporations and our government. Our news media has been credulous, blind, corrupted and stupid. And so the momentum of our economy and our society is going full-tilt to business-as-usual, which means getting all the petroleum we can pump into our transportation bloodstream because our economy and our society shrivel without it. It is far too late to change course. We do not even know that we need to. What's more we don't want to know, and most of us wouldn't make the hard decisions to begin changing our personal lifestyles if we did know.

Where I depart from Minter's view is that the takeover of Iraq and its oil may not be an orderly process. The operation itself may turn into a protracted military clusterfuck. Assuming that we eventually conclude it, I am not convinced that we could control either the far-flung terrain of the oil fields or the oil drilling equipment on it, not to mention the extremely vulnurable pipelines, terminals, and refineries. What's more, I'm inclined to believe that our Iraqi adventure will unleash Jihad-o-rama, which may topple the Saudi regime and bring lasting disorder to much of the Middle East.