Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts

November 24, 2009

Global Warming On Trial: US Senator Inhofe Calls For Investigation Of UN IPCC

November 23, 2009

Climate change alarmists engaged in desperate whitewash, but scandal is not going away


In response to the astounding revelations arising out of the hacked CRU emails, Senator Jim Inhofe has stated that unless something is done within the next seven days, he will lead the call for a rigorous investigation into mounting evidence that top climate scientists conspired to manipulate data to hide evidence of global cooling while engaging in academic witch hunts to eliminate scientists skeptical of man-made climate change.

Speaking on the Americas Morning Show earlier today, Inhofe, Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the new revelations proved what he has been warning about for over four years, that politicians and bias-driven climate scientists affiliated with the UN IPCC have been fraudulently “cooking the science” to conform to their agenda.

“If nothing happens in the next seven days when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation,” said Inhofe. “Cause this thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with.”

Asked what he would call for an investigation of, Inhofe responded, “On the IPCC and on the United Nations on the way that they cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.”

Meanwhile, even some pro-man made global warming advocates have conceded that an investigation is necessary.

Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, told the London Guardianthat only a rigorous investigation could clear the names of those accused of manipulating the data, admitting that the emails “created the impression of impropriety,” which is a lot further than most have gone in accepting the damning nature of the hacked data.

Indeed, the British Met Office performed the equivalent of a child sticking his fingers in his ears by merely attempting to dismiss the emails altogether, without even explaining what was meant when scientists at CRU talked about pulling “tricks” to “hide the decline” in temperatures.

A spokesman at the Met Office, which jointly produces global temperature datasets with the Climate Research Unit, said there was no need for an inquiry. “If you look at the emails, there isn’t any evidence that the data was falsified and there’s no evidence that climate change is a hoax. It’s a shame that some of the sceptics have had to take this rather shallow attempt to discredit robust science undertaken by some of the world’s most respected scientists. The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it. We have every confidence in the science and the various datasets we use. The peer-review process is as robust as it could possibly be. It’s no surprise, with the Copenhagen talks just days away, that this has happened now.”

As James Delingpole of the Telegraph highlights, alarmists are not going to be effected by the scandal, because they will allow nothing whatsoever to corrupt their religious belief system. “They’ve made up their minds and no quantity of contrary evidence, however devastating, is going to shake their considered position of “Nyah nyah nyah. Got my fingers in my ears. Not listening. The world IS warming and it’s man’s fault. Must tax carbon now….”

However, there seems little doubt that this bombshell will go a long way to derailing, or at least delaying the agenda for a global carbon tax that will be collected by the very same elitists aggressively pushing the fraud of global warming.


source: Global Research

November 23, 2009

Report: GMOs Causing Massive Pesticide Pollution

Andrew Kimbrell
Center for Food Safety
November 21, 2009

There is one fact about genetically engineered foods that there is no debate about: no one wakes up in the morning eager to buy gene-altered food. There's good reason for this. Genetically modified foods do nothing for the "eating public". They provide no extra nutrition, flavor, safety or any other trait that people actually want. Instead, these food products only offer risks, which include potential toxicity, allergenecity, and lower nutritional value.

This presents a tough problem for the Monsantos of the world, who are pushing these GM foods. How can you sell something to the public that offers no benefits to them? And, because of their lobbying power, the biotech companies have ensured that their products are not labeled. So Monsanto's real request of the public is "be unknowing guinea pigs for foods that make us a lot of money and offer you nothing but risk."

Obviously this message is a PR nightmare, so Monsanto has come up with a spin that is old as public relations itself: "accept and buy our products because they will help the world." More particularly, their ads displayed in mass transit systems around the country and regularly on NPR claim that GM foods "will feed a hungry world" and "reduce the load of pesticides" used in agriculture.

Not surprisingly, both these claims turn out to be self-serving myths. Earlier this year the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a detailed report entitled "Failure to Yield". The report's findings were straightforward and incontrovertible. After 21 years of research, billions of dollars of investments in public and private funds, and more than 13 years of commercialization, GM crops have done nothing to significantly increase yield: so much for the "feeding the world's hungry" spin.

Now, a new report from The Organic Center, "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years", exposes the "less pesticide" myth. The report, which was released on Tuesday, was authored by Dr. Charles Benbrook, a leading agricultural scientist. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should also mention that Center for Food Safety helped fund the report.

It turns out that far from reducing pesticides, GM crops are a major reason for the massive expansion of pesticide use in recent years. This should not be a surprise. The majority of GE crops are "Roundup Ready," designed to survive heavy and repeated spraying with Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller. Roundup Ready crops have dramatically increased Roundup use, and spawned a growing epidemic of Roundup-resistant weeds, which now infest millions of acres of American cropland. Killing resistant weeds requires more herbicides. How much more? Dr. Benbrook's study - based on official USDA data - shows that GE crops have increased the overall use of weedkillers in the U.S. by a massive 383 million pounds since 1996.

Sometimes even more chemicals won't do the trick. In the South, cotton farmers are reverting to the pre-industrial practice of "chopping cotton," or manual hoeing, to rid their fields of Roundup-resistant pigweed.

Never fear, the biotech industry has "killer" solutions to the Roundup-resistant weed epidemic - you guessed it, new crops resistant to different and multiple herbicides. Dr. Benbrook describes these "next-generation" GE crops, which are the true pesticide-promoting future of agricultural biotechnology.

For instance, Dow Agrosciences will soon bring us GE corn, resistant to 2,4-D, one of the weedkillers in Agent Orange - the dioxin-laced defoliant used during the Vietnam War. 2,4-D-resistant corn will undoubtedly increase use of this dangerous weedkiller, which has been banned in Sweden, Norway and Denmark due to its links to cancer and reproductive disorders. Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer and Syngenta all have their own new "herbicide-tolerant" crops in the works, some resistant to two and even three herbicides each. The inevitable result will be continuing increases in the use of toxic chemicals to kill "next-generation" weeds resistant to multiple weedkillers.

In the face of all this, many farmers are becoming disillusioned with GE crops. In many states, demand for conventional seed, especially soybeans, is outstripping supply. Among the reasons given by farmers for this historic switch are dramatic price hikes for biotech seeds, increased pesticide costs due to resistant weeds, premiums for non-GM supplies, and importantly, the ability to save and replant conventional seeds, which is illegal with Monsanto's patented GE seeds.

Thanks then to the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Organic Center for debunking the myths about GM crops and foods. In terms of timing, the two reports released this year couldn't have come at a more crucial moment. Through careful scientific analysis they expose the false advertising that biotechnology companies are using in print and on our public radio airways.

We should all know what Monsanto and other companies are selling, and its not a solution to world hunger or a cleanser for the environment. What they are really selling is what they make best: chemicals. The biotech giants - Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow - are, without exception, major pesticide manufacturers. They have each bought up sizeable chunks of the world's seed supply, and are using biotechnology to make those seeds sell their pesticides for them.

It may be good for their bottom line, but its bad for us, the safety of our food, and the health of our environment.

Source

Iran, Brazil sign 8 deals

Press TV - November 24, 2009 00:21:04 GMT

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (R) and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L)

Iran and Brazil signed eight cooperation deals in Brasilia on Monday after talks between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

On the second leg of his five-nation tour of South America and Africa, Ahmadinejad arrived in Brazil on Monday with the goal of strengthening ties between the two countries.

The new deals will pave the way for Iran and Brazil to enhance their cooperation in the areas of commerce, energy, and agricultural research and to lift the visa regime between the two countries.

After Ahmadinejad's arrival, the Brazilian president expressed support for Iran's right to access peaceful nuclear energy and called for a “just solution” to be found in the dispute between Iran and the West over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

Lula stated that Brazil backed Iran's plans to make use of “peaceful nuclear energy, in full respect of international accords.”

He also advised Iran to “continue contacts with interested countries to find a just solution to the nuclear issue.”

Brazil has repeatedly voiced its support for Iran's nuclear program and has always opposed calls to impose sanctions on the country.

Ahmadinejad was in Gambia on Sunday.

After his one-day visit to Brazil, the Iranian president will travel to Venezuela, Bolivia, and Senegal.

How the financial "Big Players" gained their power

Not Sylvia Night
November 23, 2009

The international financial elites wield enormous power over governments both in developing and developed industrial countries.

Legislation in many parliaments favors large corporations and puts ordinary citizens and small businesses at a disadvantage. Wealth is being systematically transferred from the middle classes to the super-rich. The poor are getting poorer and are joined in by more and more former members of the middle-classes.

Large banks, which had brought themselves and the whole world economy to the verge of bankruptcy by their fraudulent speculations, are being bailed out with tax-payer money, while small banks with honest business practices are being swallowed by those just bailed out.

The power by which the financial elite create these processes is the power they have over the money issuing process of nations and over the world's resources.

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws" said Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the first international banking empire, about 200 years ago.

With the invention of fractional reserve banking, private bankers became the de facto money-issuing entities which now controls the money supply of all capitalist nations.

With the establishment of private, or semi-private, central banks, like the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, or the European Central Bank, the largest private banking establishments became interconnected cartels with monopoly powers.

The history of money creation and the consequences of the process today are explained in the videos; Money as Debt, and with more details on the influence of interest payments in, Money as Debt II.

Today this ever more consolidated banking cartel, which has pushed most independent banks out of the market, controls and issues not only the money of individual nations, but also the money transfer lines between nations all over the globe. It also controls through speculation with exotic financial instruments the price of all internationally traded resources, as well as most services and manufactured goods and even the value of real estate.

In order to control prices and availability of vital resources, the financial elites do not actually need to own those very resources. It is far more efficient for them to gain control over the trade of raw-materials among nations.

In gaining trade-control the physical transit lines; using ships, pipelines, rail, trucks or airfreight, are relatively unimportant. What actually counts in international trade nowadays are the money-transfer lines.

When in October 2008 the Icelandic banking system crashed, the most important physical industry of Iceland, the fishing industry, was still doing well. Fish, the principle source of income for the Icelandic economy, was still being caught, processed and transported to retail markets abroad.

However, the whole western financial industry had in one accord put a full stop to money transfers to and from Iceland. The buyers abroad could no longer pay for the Icelandic fish they bought and transfer the money to the accounts of the Icelandic fishing-companies and processing plants.

Normally the foreign money would then have been exchanged by the exporters into Icelandic currency at the central bank. Icelandic retailers could in return have bought those foreign currencies from there to pay for their imports. These are the basics of international trade, the balances of exports and imports. And due to the boycott, the western financial elites had declared on money-transfers to and from Iceland, this was now no longer possible, to the detriment of Icelanders and their customers abroad. And so, in one stroke the Icelandic government had lost all sovereignty over it´s financial policies.

Practically every every Icelandic politician was initially opposed to allowing the IMF, the representative of the international banking-consortium, to dictate Icelandic policies. And still the Icelandic government, both the one driven out of office by the people, as well as the newly elected one, eventually saw no other option, but to surrender control over the nation´s financial policies to the IMF and obey it´s dictates, knowing full well, it would hurt the population and the domestic industry.

To be sure, Iceland is a country with a tiny population, and therefor rather helpless against the pressure from more powerful actors. But as we can see in US politics today, even the largest economies and military powers on earth have to bow down to those financial powers, against the interests of their own peoples and their own industries.

But the power of "big finance" goes far beyond purely financial policies. As is being confirmed by more and more scientific evidence, the burning of oil, natural gas and coal as energy sources does not have a catastrophic influence on our climate, but still laws are being prepared for the energy consumers of the world to have to pay carbon-taxes and trade in carbon offsetts, a trade, which soon will be controlled by the international financial markets. We also have seen it becoming more accepted by the scientific community that those hydrocarbon fuels are not really scarce resources either. We will not run out of them any time soon, and still there are reoccurring price hikes under the pretense of present or soon to come scarcity.

The financial elites with the help of pseudo-scientists nurtured those myths into existence in order to gain even more control over the world´s the energy markets and a free hand in manipulating prices.

Most prices consumers pay nowadays for the goods they purchase or the energy they use or the rent or mortgage payments they have to make, have nothing whatsoever to do with supply and demand, or production costs or the level of wages or the costs of extracting the needed raw material. The financial markets determine the prices by their speculative financial instruments and the phoney scarcity paradigm quiets any potential public discontent.

Both rising as well as falling prices will produce profits for the "Big Players" of these markets.
To see how much and in what way consumer energy prices are shaped by speculation let´s take the example of crude oil and refined gasoline:

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the official US government source,

in 2006, average production costs (or lifting costs - the cost to bring a barrel of oil to the surface) ranged from
* about $4 per barrel (excluding taxes) in Africa
* to about $8.30 per barrel in Canada;
* the average for the U.S. was $6.83/barrel...

In 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the refining costs of gasoline was calculated with about 10 cents per gallon (or per 4 liters).

The next question, of course, is how many gallons of gasoline can be produced through the refining process from one barrel of crude oil?

The website "Fat Knowledge" explains, that a barrel of crude oil containing 42 gallons or about 158 liters, can be turned - using the most modern refining technology - into just as many gallons or liters of gasoline.

Using these figures we can now estimate that the combined costs of oil extraction and refining and transport, minus energy loss (about 18%) in the process, is for American-produced gasoline roughly 30 cents per gallon or 7.5 cents per liter.

Quite a bit of a difference between consumer prices and production costs, isn´t it?

Of course, some of the prices are taxes, which are supposed to be used for creating and upholding the traffic infrastructure like streets, roads and bridges. Does the rest go to the oil-companies or the oil-producing countries? A percentage of it, yes, but the real profits are being made on the financial markets.

In a November 2009 article stockbroker and financial expert Philip R. Davis writes:
The Global Oil Scam: 50 Times Bigger than Madoff

$2.5 Trillion - That’s the size of the global oil scam...
Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), BP (BP), Total (TOT), Shell (RDS.A), Deutsche Bank (DB) and Societe Generale (SCGLY.PK) founded the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in 2000.

ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate "dark pool" trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.....

A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate "round-trip" trades. " Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple....

How widespread are “round-trip’‘ trades?...

DMS Energy, when investigated by Congress, admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were “round-trip” trades... Duke Energy (DUK) disclosed that $1.1 billion worth of trades were “round-trip” since 1999 [of course these trades gained strategic leverage on broader price levels]....

There is NO shortage of oil. OPEC alone has 6-7 Million barrels a day of spare capacity, more than the total disruption of any single country and any two countries other than Saudi Arabia could offset. Additionally, ICE partners Total and JPM are part of the cartel that is totally skewing the global demand picture by storing 125M barrels of oil in offshore tankers...

Goldman Sachs issues bullish opinions on oil and builds large positions in oil, while it is the cartel’s job to hide oil in offshore tankers, and then sell forward all the oil, with futures contracts, locking in the high price....

Richard Freeman and John Hoefle describe in a June 2004 article the history and the technical process of oil speculations:

The key to the ability of the financiers behind the oil cartel to manipulate prices in the oil market, is the shift which occurred during the oil crises of 1974 and 1979, in which long-term contracts—frequently for 24 or 36 months—at stable prices were replaced with the spot market and then the futures markets...

The oil spot market was created in 1969 by the Lazard/Rothschild-allied Philipp Brothers, then the world's largest metals trader. Philipp Brothers, largely in the person of their top trader Marc Rich, began by selling small quantities of Iranian crude oil to independent refiners.

The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, which were orchestrated by the financier oligarchy under the cover of the OPEC oil embargo and the fall of the Shah in Iran, resulted in a shift in oil pricing away from long-term contracts toward the Rotterdam-based spot market.

By "spot" is meant, that one buys the oil at a market only 24-48 hours before one takes physical (spot) delivery, as opposed to buying it 12 or more months in advance. In effect, the spot market inserted a financial middleman into the oil-patch income stream in much the same way that deregulation would later do for electricity.

Today, the oil price is largely set in the futures markets. The two principal locales which dominate oil futures trading are the London-based International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), established in 1980, and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), which is more than a century old, but also first started trading oil futures in 1983. Traders call futures contracts "paper oil": the contracts are a paper claim against oil, which is far in excess of the volume of oil produced and actually delivered at oil terminals on behalf of those contracts.

The traders transact a large volume of derivatives bets. Speculators purchase on the IPE and NYMEX exchanges, futures contracts; each single contract is a bet on 1,000 barrels of oil. More than 100 million of these oil derivatives contracts were traded on these exchanges in 2003, representing 100 billion barrels of oil. In a year 2000 study, EIR showed that on the IPE, for every 570 "paper barrels of oil"—that is futures derivatives covering 570 barrels—traded each year, there was only one underlying physical barrel of oil. The 570 paper oil contracts pull the price of the underlying barrel of oil, manipulating the oil price. If the speculators bet long—that the price will rise—the mountain of bets pulls up the underlying price.

But worse, there is a second layer of leverage. At the London IPE, the speculator can buy a futures contract on a margin of 3.8%. That is, were the speculator to buy a single futures contract, representing 1,000 barrels of oil at, say, an oil price of $40 per barrel, then the contract represents $40,000. However, the speculator pays only $1,520 for the premium of the contract—or 3.8% of the $40,000—which gives him control over the contract. Through an investment of $1,520, the speculator controls 1,000 barrels of oil. A small group of speculators, through leverage, control the world oil price.

A NYMEX document, "How the Exchange Works," boasts that it has nothing to do with oil production. "Yet the buying and selling on the Exchange occurs amid the winding streets of the oldest section of New York, with nary an oil well or copper mine in sight. In fact, many thousands of transactions conducted on the Exchange each day are accomplished without the participants ever seeing a gallon of heating oil."...

As for London's (IPE), it has reported that its trade with Brent Crude oil contracts reached 375 million barrels in open-interest contracts on May 14, the highest level ever. This is about five times the total daily production of all sorts of oil worldwide....

The money that is being drawn out of the real world economy by these speculative practices is then being used to keep the international financial markets afloat, enticing even more real economy money into the speculative realm, creating in the process a shortage of liquid capital for ordinary consumer lending and end user purchasing, causing economic deflation in some countries, while at the same time depreciating the value of national currencies across the world.

The funds are also being used to buy up real resources and agricultural lands all over the world as well as bribing politicians and putting pressure on governments and nations to sell out their industries, public services and public lands to multi-national corporations, which are majority owned by those same financial "big players".

Today´s financial markets and their "big players" are totally disconnected from economic reality and any public good. They have become pure predators on the whole world´s population. They are destructive of the real economy. And if they ever contributed anything useful in the past, they certainly don´t any more.

The author is a frequent contributor to Aletho News and a human rights activist based in Iceland. An archive of previous articles is available at her blog. She deals with subjects like Zionism and the war against the Palestinian people, Western Islamophobia and the myths used to justify wars in the Middle East, imperialism in general, pseudo-scientific myths, falsification of history, the influence of religion on political philosophies, the human mind and how it is influenced by organized propaganda.

November 22, 2009

Exelon Halts Three Mile Unit Work After Contamination

By Aaron Clark

Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Exelon Corp. halted work yesterday inside the Three Mile Island 1 reactor in Pennsylvania after radiological contamination was detected inside the containment building.

“We have stopped work inside the reactor building while we investigate the cause of the contamination,” Beth Archer, a company spokesman said in a telephone interview. “There was no contamination outside the reactor building and there was no threat to public health and safety.”

A monitor near a temporary opening cut into the containment building created to move the new steam generators inside “showed a slight increase in a reading and then returned to normal” Exelon said in a statement yesterday. The 786-megawatt unit has been shut since Oct. 26 for refueling and maintenance during which workers will replace the steam generation.

About 150 workers inside the containment building were sent home at about 4 p.m. yesterday after an airborne radiological alarm sounded. One worker received 16 millirem of exposure, which is below the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s limits. Exelon’s “annual occupational dose limit” for nuclear workers is 2,000 millirem.

A millirem is a unit of measurement for a radiation dose. The average person is exposed to about 360 millirems a year from naturally occurring radiation, according to the American Nuclear Society.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has sent a radiation specialist and a regional manager to the power plant to “follow-up on yesterday’s incident” the commission said in an e-mailed statement today.

Unit 2 at Three Mile has been shut since 1979 following a partial core meltdown. It was the biggest nuclear accident in U.S. history.

November 20, 2009

Foreign 'Feudal Lords' and 'Diabolical' Seed Companies

By Katherine Gustafson
Excerpt
November 18, 2009

[Muammar Gaddafi] warned the other assembled leaders at the [World Summit on Food Security] that foreign companies that are procuring massive tracts of farmland in Africa are becoming the continent's “new feudal lords," reports Reuters.

“In Africa, foreign investors buy farmland, transforming themselves into new feudal lords against whom we must fight,” Gaddafi said at the summit. Indeed many are calling the ominous development a massive "land grab," and the UK's Times Online went so far as to dub it "modern imperialism."

The giant steps back on two GMOs. Why?

November 17, 2009

Monsanto has abandoned its ambitious plans for two types of a so-called "second generation GM crop" rather than accede to a request from European regulators for additional research and safety data.

Monsanto has informed the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) that it no longer wishes to pursue its application for approval of GM maize LY038 and the stacked variety LY038 x MON810. Both of these varieties were designed to accelerate the growth rate of animals. Two letters were sent to EFSA from the Monsanto subsidiary company Renessen at the end of April this year confirming the withdrawal of its applications originally submitted in 2005 and 2006. The letters cite "decreased commercial value worldwide" and state that the high-lysene varieties "will no longer be a part of the Renessen business strategy in the near future." There has been no announcement of these decisions on the Monsanto web site, and there are no mentions on EFSA or European Commission web sites either.

In other words, there is a conspiracy of silence involving both the applicants and the regulators.

The two letters sent to EFSA in April requested the return of all dossier material (varietal characterization, experimental protocols, and test results) which was submitted with the applications for cultivation, animal feed and human food. EFSA acceded to this request, making it impossible for any future independent researchers to analyse the Monsanto / Renessen data.

Scientists who have followed these two applications are quite convinced that the "decisions to withdraw" have nothing to do with commercial considerations and everything to do with food safety. In other words, the varieties are too dangerous to be allowed onto the open market. Objections came from scientists at the Canterbury University's Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety (INBI), New Zealand, who warned that the new corn was not safe for humans when cooked. They also expressed concerns about unpredictable health effects, increased levels of toxins in high- lysene corn, and possible allergies and links to cancer.

INBI's concerns were supported by some European countries, which prompted the EFSA to ask for new trials and adherence to the rules of the Codex Alimentarius, thus forcing Monsanto to withdraw its request under the pretext of a "decreased commercial value".

Source

November 19, 2009

Some OPEC Nations Charge Ahead Despite Slow Oil Demand

The Wall Street Journal
11/19/2009 12:04

Energy forecasters increasingly predict slowing growth in global oil demand in the years ahead, but some OPEC nations are heading in the opposite direction and ramping up their capacity to pump oil.

Qatar, for example, is set to raise its oil-production capacity early next year from an existing field known as Al Shaheen. The more than $6 billion expansion project brightens the revenue prospects of the Mideast state but highlights a bigger problem brewing for its partners in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

After keeping a tight tether on supply in recent years by cautiously investing, the 12-nation cartel finds itself battling an untimely convergence of lackluster consumption that magnifies its own rising supply capacity -- which may in turn reignite old battles between members over market share and ultimately push oil prices lower.

OPEC output capacity is expected to increase around one million barrels a day in 2010 as projects enter service in Angola, Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, according to Bill Farren-Price, energy director at Medley Global Advisors.

"Significant challenges face OPEC next year," Mr. Farren-Price says. "It will struggle to integrate a wave of new OPEC production capacity that vastly exceeds world demand for its crude." Many of the projects started development well before the recession.

Projects like Al Shaheen may swell OPEC's nominal spare production capacity, a measure of its overall capability to bring barrels to consumers, to roughly 7.5 million barrels a day. That would will leave OPEC capacity up about 15% from 2008, almost a 10-year high, depending on how much oil the group is actually producing.

Operated by Denmark's AP Moller-Maersk, the offshore Al Shaheen field started producing crude in the early 1990s and could almost double in capacity to over 500,000 barrels a day, says Qatar oil minister Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah. "The expansion is coming along as expected," he said, dismissing concern about depressed demand.

Mr. Al-Attiyah and other OPEC officials say China, India and other parts of Asia will remain OPEC's fastest-growing markets. OPEC exports to Asia, not including Japan, grew by 22% in 2000-08, according to OPEC data. By comparison, shipments to North America, mainly the U.S., were flat in that period.

Prices, meanwhile, have risen about 77% this year to $79 a barrel, thanks in part to a weak U.S. dollar that is encouraging investors to buy higher-yielding oil futures contracts, and in part to big OPEC production cuts this year. Those cuts are likely to be kept in place at the group's final meeting of the year scheduled for Dec. 22 in Angola, OPEC officials say.

But problems seem set to mount. In the near term, a persistent glut in crude inventory this year is expected to last into 2010. Yet OPEC is cranking up its ability to produce oil -- and that could extend the current supply glut.

Among the most aggressive has been Angola, which has doubled its production capacity -- from a low base -- since 2004, to about 2.1 million barrels a day. Most of the output from its 100,000-barrel-a-day Tombua-Landana offshore project will start in 2010. Chevron Corp. is developing the $3.8 billion project.

Source

November 18, 2009

Local Currencies -
The missing link in the quest for sustainability

by Helen Dew,
a founding member of the Living Economies Trust, New Zealand
November 4, 2009

Currency is the lifeblood of an economic system. Most people think that there’s only one type of money, because that’s all they’ve ever known. Cheques and credit cards etc. represent special-purpose forms of cash, but money is money, they think, regardless of the form it takes. Few realise that there are, potentially at least, many different forms of money, and each type can affect the economy, human society and the natural environment in a different way.

Bernard Lietaer, research fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Resources, California, and author of "The Future of Money" (2001), says
‘We create our exchange systems and then they create the world we live in.’

Richard Douthwaite, author of "The Ecology of Money" (1999), says
‘If we wish to live more ecologically, it would make sense to adopt monetary systems that make it easier to do so.’


Essentially, community currencies connect unused or under-utilised resources with unmet needs, enabling exchanges to take place despite a shortage of money.

A wide variety of currency models are currently in use throughout the world, including manually operated mutual credit systems, beautifully designed vouchers and on-line accounting systems.

Members form trading circles, list their offerings and needs, and offer and accept payment for goods and services either wholly or partly in the local currency.

Local Currencies are the ultimate in loyalty programs. Unlike profits derived from trading with national currencies, the wealth generated by trading with exchange systems created by and for local communities stays within the district.

Since community currencies work alongside and supplement national currency, once their advantages are understood they are welcomed by the community, particularly in times of economic stress. Historically, community currencies have been economic and social lifesavers.

The principle advantages of community currencies are
:

• Protection against global economic instability
• Stemming ‘leakage’ of community wealth to outsiders/offshore
• Support for local small/medium businesses
• Business opportunities in import substitution
• Less fuel needed for imported product
• Increased employment opportunities
• Less conventional money required for desirable projects
• Enhanced sense of community
• Branding opportunity for the district
• Tourist attraction, especially for early adopters

Naturally, if we decide to change how money works we first of all need to understand how the current money system is designed, how the use of it manages to leave a trail of destruction in its wake and what other options are possible.

Deirdre Kent, in "Healthy Money, Healthy Planet", brings to light some surprising facts about the history and workings of money:

Almost all of our money supply is created by private banks as interest-bearing debt. The Reserve Bank has confirmed that only about two percent of the money supply in use in New Zealand is created interest-free.

The problem with this is that money is always in short supply. When banks provide loans they create the principle only. Borrowers must find extra money to repay the interest either by increasing their production, competing with others facing the same problem or by further borrowing.

Therefore:
• The never-ending need to increase production causes intolerable demand to be made on natural resources.
• The competition for an inadequate supply of money is a bit like musical chairs; someone misses out; bankruptcy is inevitable for some of the losers.
• Further borrowing compounds borrower’s problems, consigning them to long-term and often inescapable debt.

Given the above options imposed by the present money system it is little wonder that regionally, nationally and globally we are now faced with escalating environmental damage, economic strain and social dislocation.

In the search for effective means of meeting these challenges, particularly the immanent problem of diminishing and more costly supplies of energy communities are beginning to recognise the potential of community currencies.

Cuba’s response to ‘peak oil’

When Cuba lost access to Soviet oil in the early 1990s, the country faced an immediate crisis – feeding the population – and an ongoing challenge: how to create a new low-energy society. Cuba transitioned from large, fossil-fuel intensive farming to small, less energy-intensive organic farms and urban gardens, and from a highly industrial society to a more sustainable one. Although barely mentioned in the documentary film, "The Power of Community" documenting Cuba’s recovery, community currency played a very important role in that process.


Kinsale 2021, Ireland


The creators of the Kinsale 2021 energy descent plan( 7) (Kinsale has a population of 7,000), recently announced that the Kinsale Town Council has unanimously adopted the proposed long term plan. The plan, which involved the community in its development, is based on the changes that can be expected in the absence of cheap fuel. It is significant that 10 of the 53 pages of the plan are devoted to the design and implementation of a community currency system. Also noteworthy is the priority given to creating their local currency as the first step in the process of implementing the plan.

Regional currencies in Germany

Mounting economic, environmental and social pressures are prompting greater openness by communities and their business and civic leaders to seriously consider the implementation of community currencies. This is particularly so in Germany, where Prof Dr Margrit Kennedy has pioneered regionally-scaled systems. Seventeen ‘Regio’ currency systems have already launched their local vouchers, with 49 more in the pipeline.

The first example was launched in March 2005 by students at a Steiner school in Chiemgau, for the purpose of raising funds for major repairs to the school building.

Regio participants purchase vouchers at 1:1 for Euros and use them to purchase goods or services, either wholly or as a percentage of the price. Vouchers may be redeemed for Euros at any time, minus an administration fee. A combination of education and built in incentives leads to a preference for trades using the local currency.

A valued feature of local currencies is their tendency to build community. Like the growing appreciation of ‘slow food’, ‘slow money’ is helping to restore the social dimension of trading. It takes more time to process a transaction, time for graciousness, time for building connection with community of place.

Once would-be participants come to appreciate the advantage of having their own exchange medium promoters sign up members from all sectors of the community; local government, banks, businesses, community organisations and ordinary citizens.

In February 2007 an ABC TV news story reported the fast spreading voucher-based BerkShares? in Massachusetts, USA. US$835,000 worth of vouchers were distributed to the participating banks prior to the 2006 launch; 225 local businesses accept the vouchers. ‘Chambers of Commerce in three neighbouring towns recently asked how they can bring BerkShares? to their communities.’

Community currencies are a vital tool for the empowerment of local communities as they come to terms with the multitude of challenges related to energy and climate change.

source:Living Economy

Ukraine, WHO and the Geopolitics of Swine Flu Panic

by F. William Engdahl
November 17, 2009

Latest reports of what is being called a deadly Swine Flu outbreak in Ukraine according to on sight reports appear to be a political concoction by a threatened government to avoid election defeat and possibly declare martial law. The details indicate how convenient the current WHO "Swine Flu" H1N1 "pandemic" scare is for regimes in trouble.

Worldwide media reports in recent days have painted a picture of Ukraine as being under the Black Plague or worse. Pittsburgh Swine Flu "mapper" Dr Henry Niman had earlier predicted that H5N1 Avian Flu would mutate into a deadly human-to-human pandemic. It didn’t.

Niman’s map of the spread of alleged H1N1 Swine Flu since April has given the WHO, the US Government and CNN and major media a convenient graphic to create the image of a new type of "bubonic plague" threatening mankind unless we react with massive doses of untested vaccines from Big Pharma. .

Early on Niman reported about events in Ukraine: "The rapid rise in reported infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in the past few days raise concerns that the virus is transmitting very efficiently…the spike in fatalities and the frequency in hemorrhagic cases in Ukraine have raised concerns." Niman added the alarming note, "The number of infected patients has almost doubled to just under ½ million, compared to the report two days ago."

That’s pretty scary stuff. It conjures images of the reports of the Black Death in 1348 which is said to have killed up to 60% of Europe’s population. Though that history has been challenged, the image as well as the equally terrifying if incorrect panic image of the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, are being applied in Ukraine.

Exact information about what is really taking place in Ukraine is far from easy. The country is one of the most politically complex and economically distressed states in Europe. One possible hypothesis, yet to be verified, emerges from the writings of Dr Lawrence Broxmeyer MD.

Broxmeyer suggests that the WHO and CDC wish to divert attention from a worldwide epidemic of tuberculosis, while focusing attention on flu instead. Indeed recently the WHO changed its categories of causes of death to lump death from influenza in the same group as death from tuberculosis and other pulmonary disease. Given the present Swine Flu hysteria, any pulmonary death seems to be reported as "death from H1N1 influenza." In a passing note the report typically notes the patient also suffered from lung problems.


Broxmeyer states, "Both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are fully aware of a far more serious and ongoing tuberculosis Pandemic in the world today. Yet they choose to downplay the link, disregarding the similar flu-like symptoms tuberculosis often begins with. WHO freely admits that there were approximately 1.8 million deaths from tuberculosis in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available as well as that presently about one-third of the world's population, or two billion people, carry the TB bacteria."

Broxmeyer suggests that there is an underestimation of tuberculosis deaths using "flu" as the diversion: "Khomenko's 1993 study showed that the explosive contagiousness of just such influenza-like forms of tuberculosis are exactly the stuff that previous epidemics and pandemics could have been made of... But back in the US, the CDC and NIH seem to feel differently, ignoring everything but "the virus". There was much the same "Influenza" talk when in 1990, a new multi-drug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis outbreak took place in a large Miami municipal hospital. Soon thereafter, similar outbreaks in three New York City hospitals left many sufferers dying within weeks. By 1992, approximately two years later, drug-resistant tuberculosis had spread to deadly mini-epidemics in seventeen US states, and was reported, not by the American, but the international media, as out of control. Viral forms of swine, avian and human TB can be transmitted from one species to another."

He points to the similarities between the onset of the much-cited 1918 "Spanish Influenza" epidemic and that of today. However, as Broxmeyer notes, "a Press Release, issued on August 19, 2008, by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), contains a striking finding and conclusion: The 20 to 40 million deaths worldwide from the great 1918 Influenza ("Flu") Pandemic were NOT due to "flu" or a virus, but to pneumonia caused by massive bacterial infection."


Reports of low flying aircraft spraying in regions of Ukraine where outbreaks and lung-related deaths reportedly took place cannot be verified. What is clear however is that there is no scientifically rigorous proof of deaths or diseases that can be labeled H1N1 Influenza A in Ukraine.


Reality check?


The WHO, the organization responsible for declaration of the H1N1 Pandemic last summer, allowing governments like the USA and Ukraine to declare martial law and a national state of emergency, suspending all rights and imposing arrests and detentions, has validated the dubious Ukraine claims of out-of-control spread of Swine Flu. A WHO press statement November 3 declared, "Laboratory testing in Ukraine has confirmed pandemic H1N1 influenza virus in samples taken from patients in two of the most affected regions. As the pandemic virus has rapidly become the dominant influenza strain worldwide, it can be assumed that most cases of influenza in Ukraine are caused by the H1N1 virus."

The WHO added, "The outbreak in Ukraine may be indicative of how the virus can behave in the northern hemisphere during the winter season, particularly in health care settings typically found in Eastern Europe. Given the potential significance of this outbreak as an early warning signal, WHO commends the government of Ukraine for its transparent reporting and open sharing of samples." The samples have been sent to the WHO Mill Hill Influenza Reference Lab in London, not exactly inspiring confidence in a scientifically honest report given the record of UK health authorities in manipulating data to please the vaccine giants like GlaxoSmithKline. As of this writing, bizarre enough the WHO has yet to utter a single word of the test results at Mill Hill.

Nonetheless, WHO "strongly recommends early treatment with the antiviral drugs, oseltamivir or zanamivir, for patients who meet treatment criteria, even in the absence of a positive laboratory test confirming H1N1 infection." That means Tamiflu, the highly dangerous drug whose major shareholder includes former Pentagon head Don Rumsfeld. And it means GlaxoSmithKline, maker of the rival Relenza drug.


Ukrainian election geopolitics


The bizarre developments in Ukraine over the past two weeks are being blamed inside the country on intense Ukrainian election politics. In four months national elections in Ukraine are due. Among rival candidates are Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and her chief rival, Arseniy Yatseniuk.

Since Washington financed and organized the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought a pro-NATO Victor Yushchenko in as President, Ukraine politics has been a geopolitical tug-of war between Moscow and Washington. How the current political games around allegations of H1N1 panic play into that tug of war is not yet clear.

The recent speech in Warsaw by Vice President Joe Biden offering Poland and the Czech Republic a "new and improved" version of US anti-missile defense against Russia only four weeks after Obama announced the US was backing out of a controversial earlier missile defense plan for the two eastern European countries underscores the shambles of US strategic policy towards Russia.

Russia has been quick to take advantage as might be expected, as a US missile shield on its borders, as I detail in Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, gives the US a long-sought nuclear primacy over its only potential strategic rival on the planet. At that point the resistance of the rest of the world to incalculable or objectionable US policies, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia or wherever, becomes moot.

It’s clear Moscow has been working quietly to bring Ukraine, an original part of Kiev Rus, and a strategically essential part of the Russian economy, back into a more friendly "NATO-free" relationship after five years of Orange Revolution chaos in Ukraine under Yushchenko. .

Yatseniuk, a 35 year old former banker and aide to Washington’s darling, President Viktor Yushchenko, has charged that Tymoshenko is deliberately fostering unnecessary panic in order to impose martial law and suspend elections that she might well lose to Yatseniuk.

There definitely are political games going on by one or another faction in the economically devastated Ukraine. Oleksandr Bilovol, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Health, claims the outbreak of flu cases in Ukraine has been essentially contained in 11 out of 25 Ukrainian regions, with the number of people allegedly stricken with H1N1 only 15% higher than figures reported in previous years. "Figures in other the regions are in line with 2007 and 2008," Bilovol said. As well the number of reported deaths is also in line with deaths annually attributed to ordinary influenza.

Could it be the reports of Ukraine "Swine Flu" pandemic in Ukraine have more to do with the country’s geopolitical location?

Tymoshenko declared the outbreak as the threat of the third level – the highest possible – to unlock spending of up to 3 billion hryvnias to combat the swine flu. Among measures imposed by the decree include shutting down schools and public gatherings for three weeks across Ukraine, with the government also considering introducing restrictions on movement of people between the regions.

Yatseniuk said the ban on public gatherings spreads fear and panic helping Tymoshenko to promote herself on television, while hindering other presidential candidates to campaign.

Yatseniuk is Tymoshenko’s biggest rival as both compete for votes in western regions of Ukraine. He is perhaps the only candidate that may challenge Tymoshenko in the first round of vote on January 17, 2010 to enter the runoff with opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych.

Yatseniuk said the panic spread by the government helps overshadow issues politically damaging to Tymoshenko, including pedophile and the murder scandals involving Tymoshenko lawmakers, and

Ukraine’s dismal economic performance.


Prime Minister Tymoshenko, whatever the real facts of the case, is using the WHO Swine Flu panic scenario to the hilt. In a recent statement, she stated, "We cannot relax even for a moment because the World Health Organization predicts two more waves of flu, including the bird flu, are expected in Ukraine. There is no alternative to vaccination. The entire world is going this way…" A day earlier she admitted she was not vaccinated and that she prefers "like all other people" plans to rely on garlic, onion and lemon as a way of preventing the flu.

Ukraine Parliament Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn accuses Tymoshenko as well, declaring, "You've organized the flu epidemic in order to avoid responsibility for not supplying heat to houses, schools, higher educational establishments, and kindergartens," he said in Parliament. And Orange Revolution President, Yushchenko has declared there was no reason for declaring an emergency in Ukraine. "There are no such reasons," Yushchenko said. "I am not a supporter of measures that freeze the country, restrict its operation to levels that is hard to justify."

Ihor Popov, Deputy Chief of Staff to Yushchenko, said that in case of emergency the election, which is due on Jan. 17, 2010, would have to be "rescheduled."


Germany joins Swine Flu corruption


Not only is the Ukrainian government apparently using fears of Swine Flu pandemic to change the domestic political calculus, and President Barack Obama using the fears to impose an unnecessary state of emergency. Now it comes out that the responsible German health authorities are caught in a corrupt conflict of interest with the very pharma giants profiting from government decisions on "anti-swine flu" vaccines.

The recent issue of the German weekly Der Spiegel, reports that members of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI), which claims to be an independent scientific advisory body advising EU member governments on policies regarding H1N1 influenza, is anything but independent.
It’s being financed by Big Pharma. ESWI claims it brings together scientific "key opinion leaders in influenza." However the sole financial backers are 10 pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline -- manufacturer of the German swine flu vaccine -- and Roche -- producer of the antiviral drug Tamiflu.

The group lists Walter Haas as one of its scientific advisers. Haas coordinates Germany's flu pandemic preparedness measures at the Robert-Koch-Institut (RKI), the federal institute for disease research. ESWI portrays itself as an independent group of scientists. But even the organization's own statute tells a different story, describing its role as advising politicians and health authorities on "the benefits and safety of influenza vaccines and antivirals" and initiating "a policy for antiviral provisions."

The degree of fraud, deceit, official coverup and outright criminal endangerment of the broad population by the current Swine Flu hysteria is seemingly without precedent.

source: Global Research

November 15, 2009

Nuclear disposal put in doubt by recovered Swedish galleon

The plan to use copper for sealing nuclear waste underground is being thrown into disarray by corrosion in artifacts from the Vasa


* Terry Macalister
* guardian.co.uk
* November 14, 2009

Plans for nuclear waste disposal could be thrown into confusion tomorrow at a summit because of new evidence of corrosion in materials traditionally used for burial procedures.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) says it will keep careful watch on a meeting organised by the Swedish National Council for Nuclear Waste, which will look at potential problems with copper, designated for an important role in sealing radioactive waste underground.

Concerns have risen from a most unexpected quarter. Examination of copper artefacts from the Vasa, a fifteenth-century galleon raised from Stockholm harbour, has shown a level of decay that challenges the scientific wisdom that copper corrodes only when exposed to oxygen.

David Lowry, a consultant on the nuclear industry, said the latest evidence had profound implications. "As the British nuclear industry gears up to build a new generation of nuclear reactors, so the pressure builds to demonstrate there is a solution to the long-term management of nuclear waste. But plans to adopt the Swedish system of nuclear waste disposal look as if they might have hit the rocks."

The NDA said that no decision had been taken on what materials would be used for containment. "It's not a showstopper. There are other options," a spokesman said. Researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm have prepared a report for tomorrow's meeting which says its findings "cast additional doubt on copper for nuclear waste containment and other important applications."

November 14, 2009

Germany opposes bank data deal with US

Press TV - November 14, 2009 14:22:20 GMT

Germany has announced its opposition to an EU agreement to share bank data with the United States for anti-terrorist investigations.

According to the draft, financial records stored by the SWIFT financial data system including "name, account number, address, national identification number, and other personal data", can be shared with the US.

Germany's justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said she was against the deal because of lack of "legal protection provisions."

"I am still critical of the extent of the information transfer to the USA and the lack of legal recourse," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said.

The German government also called on its representative in the European Union to refrain from signing the deal.

With three other countries in opposition, an agreement on the draft will likely be delayed until after the Lisbon Treaty, which gives the European Parliament a larger role in shaping the deal, goes into effect on December 1.

Germany, Austria, France and Finland are opposing the text negotiated by the Swedish EU presidency and the European Commission.

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said Germany would try to stop the deal.

"The government has distanced itself from the SWIFT agreement," she told the Berliner Zeitung daily.

"I consider it unfortunate that the EU is trying to push through this agreement according to the old rules one day before the Lisbon Treaty goes into effect," she said.

Citing data privacy concerns, experts warn there are no controls over the use of the data by the American organizations.

They fear that the financial data will be misused by certain US companies.

November 13, 2009

Nuclear: the corporate killer in our midst?

By Rowena Mason
The Telegraph
November 10, 2009

Ed Miliband says: we need 10 new nuclear stations – and quick about it.

The men with the calculators reply: at the moment, it’s looking about as possible as splitting the atom with a blunt instrument and your bare hands.

Amid yesterday’s triumphalist fanfare about the new dawn of nuclear revolution (Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary) and a significant milestone for the new industry (Vincent de Rivaz, EDF Energy), it was easy to miss the voices of caution about the likelihood that all these saviour stations will all actually be built.

The turbines inside British Energy's Heysham nuclear power station

The turbines inside British Energy's Heysham nuclear power station

Analysts from Citigroup point out that the Government is forcing potential nuclear investors – among them EDF, Centrica, E.ON, RWEnpower, ScottishPower, GDF Suez and Scottish & Southern – to take on full exposure to the risks of construction, a volatile power price and operations. These, they claim, are stalking “corporate killers so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees financially”.

And there’s more: “Nowhere in the world have nuclear power stations been built on this basis. Nor will they be built in the UK. We see little if any prospect that new nuclear stations will be built in the UK by the private sector unless developers can lay off substantial elements of the three major risks.”

The Sizewell nuclear plant in Suffolk

The Sizewell nuclear plant in Suffolk

Adding to the doubters, we have Omar Abbosh, Accenture’s head of utilities, who has advised the Government on energy issues, warning that: “For all the optimism about nuclear new build in the UK and speeding up the planning process, we will not see sufficient nuclear investment until regulations are changed to address finance. The UK’s liberalised market cannot support major capital investment needed for nuclear and large scale wind.”

To make matters worse, the big European utilities are already drowning in debt, selling off reliable assets like their regulated electricity networks to pay it down. Another worrying sign is that EDF, the biggest investor in UK nuclear, is currently looking for a second partner on top of Centrica to take a 20pc stake in its new build programme to help spread the risk. Then there is the threat that potential money men may turn their attention away from the green glow of the UK’s nuclear revival, as dozens of other governments worldwide start sanctioning new stations, offering more tempting subsidies along the way.

So what are the Government’s options if it decides to remove its head from the nuclear bunker to see the looming financing problems?

Broadly speaking, the UK could offer loans, reform of the carbon trading system or direct taxes. The Government has already ruled out any levies to subsidise nuclear power on household bills or direct financing. If it doesn’t back down, this leaves the major players, such as EDF, pushing for a floor on the price of carbon permits.

Companies already buy and sell the right to emit carbon dioxide on the open markets, which is meant to make it cheaper for investors to build and operate clean energy projects at the expense of fossil fuel generation. But the carbon price is currently too low to make much difference. The utilities argue that a lower limit of around $35 on the price of a permit will make it economically viable to invest in nuclear power –politically unpopular, since it is likely to push up the price of gas and electricity generated by fossil fuels. But the push for low-carbon power generation is going to be expensive for consumers whichever way the country comes at the problem.

The question now is when the UK will start listening to the experts and realise that simply announcing it wants 10 new stations is not enough financial inducement for them magically to appear.

November 12, 2009

Buyer beware: Climate change and the Ventura case study

By Nikki Alexander
Online Journal
Nov 12, 2009

A seemingly wholesome local event recently led to some disturbing discoveries about a global GHG [greenhouse gas emissions] matrix that will affect people everywhere in all countries.

Students from The Bren School of Environmental Science and Management (University of California Santa Barbara) gave a presentation to city planners and citizens on their “Ventura Case Study.” Bren is working on this project for their client, AECOM, to calculate Ventura’s baseline greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in preparation for compliance with federal and state regulations.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been leading the charge for state regulations while Senator Barbara Boxer is sponsoring federal climate change legislation. AECOM states in its proposal that California is a prime target for compulsory GHG reduction strategies because it has shown a willingness to conform, whereas some other states are rebelling.

The Bren School was endowed by and named after Donald Bren, whose Irvine Company developed suburban communities on 94,000 acres, encompassing one fifth of Orange County. Forbes, in its 2008 edition of The 400 Richest Americans, ranked Bren as the wealthiest real estate developer in the US with an estimated net worth of $12 billion. He does not build eco villages and strawbale cottages.

The Bren School website asserts the “need for a new kind of solution-oriented environmental professional with combined expertise in the political, economic, and social dimensions of environmental decision-making.” At least two of the rotating deans that control the curriculum are examples of this new “environmental” professional.

Dennis Aigner, dean from 2000-2005, specializes in litigation involving contract disputes, regulation of public utilities, government contracting, health care, insurance, banking and defense. His stated research interests include corporate environmental management, US competitiveness in global markets, foreign investment, state and local economic issues, and workers’ compensation. As chair of the California Workers’ Compensation Rate Study Commission, Aigner recommended deregulating the marketplace for workers’ compensation insurance.

Ernst von Weizsäcker, dean from 2005-2008, is a member of the Club of Rome, a group of global planners that annually release Armageddon scenarios based on predictions of overpopulation and famine. In their 1991 book, entitled The First Global Revolution, they state, “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.” (p.115) He also served on the World Commission on the Social Dimensions of Globalization and was a member of the Bundestag, the federal parliament of Germany.

The relationship between AECOM and the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management is a closed loop. AECOM’s 2008 “Global Thought Leadership” annual report states:

“We become an integrated part of our clients’ organizations . . . partner with technical academies and community schools.”

The Ventura Case study was initiated by three AECOM employees that are Bren graduates. The students are not allowed to interact with community residents and are restricted to working ONLY with policy-makers. That’s a Bren rule. One of the student presenters reported that collecting this data would be nearly impossible without help from someone inside the city government. The policy-maker within the City of Ventura Environmental Services that is feeding Ventura’s GHG data to the students is a Bren graduate.

With annual revenue of $6 Billion, AECOM is a multinational corporation with offices in 100 countries. Their 2008 Annual Report proudly announces that AECOM “helped Iraq join the World Trade Organization” and “helped bring Central Asia back into the world economy.” They provide mercenary soldiers in “conflict” areas and build infrastructure projects, much like Halliburton and KBR. Their contracts are largely taxpayer funded. AECOM’s annual report states that it is well positioned to receive lucrative government contracts: ”In response to the financial crisis, governments around the world are considering stimulus packages valued at more than $1 to $2 trillion.” Impending climate change mitigation regulations will be forcing states to “deliver new transportation systems, facilities, buildings and utility networks, a $5+ trillion a year industry.”

Will this taxpayer money be well spent by AECOM? Bloomberg reported that “a new Defense Department audit said AECOM billed the US Army $19 dollars apiece for 12-cent washers on one of the largest contracts in Iraq for training Iraqi security forces on depot maintenance. The Army paid $19,527 for $122 worth of washers.”

An extensive list of architecture and engineering firms have been swallowed up by AECOM’s “targeted acquisition” strategy to buy out the green competition and monopolize what they describe as a guaranteed “contract pipeline” from the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense, as well as federal stimulus funds and state taxpayer bonds. They are also working with FEMA “in their quest to create integrated water systems. Worldwide, we are actively involved in the supply, treatment, distribution and collection of water.” Their proposal states that Ventura was selected, among other reasons, for its potential to deliver energy from the ocean and hillsides.

Using Ventura as a case study, in tandem with a town in China, the Bren/Aecom project aims to standardize a software matrix that will quantify GHG emissions and the “political and economic feasibility” of reduction strategies. This protocol will also be used to quantify an entity’s standing in the emerging cap and trade carbon exchange market. “Emissions sources may not be well understood by those who are subject to GHG regulations or wish to participate in carbon trading markets.”

The cap and trade market will operate through the Chicago Climate Exchange, set up by Goldman Sachs and Al Gore’s company, Generation Investment Management, which is also staffed by Goldman Sachs executives. GIM and Goldman Sachs each have a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange which in turn has a 50 percent stake in the European Climate Exchange. Trading carbon credits is projected to become the new multi-trillion dollar commodity bubble.

Everyone -- businesses, towns, universities, farmers -- will be required to buy GHG permits -- a global tax on energy use. Those who exceed the “cap” on GHG emissions will pay a fine or “offset” their pollution by buying carbon ”credits” from entities that don’t exceed the cap. Al Gore is an example of how this cap and trade casino will work. His Nashville mansion consumes more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year, about $1,359, or more than 20 times the national average. Rather than reduce his personal carbon footprint, Gore “offsets” his mansion’s GHG emissions by purchasing credits on the CCX in which he owns a 10 percent stake.

If mortgage-backed securities appeared to be the ultimate Ponzi scheme, just ponder the scale of this gambling casino when everything on earth is entered into the global GHG database and converted to carbon default swaps, carbon-backed securities and collateralized GHG obligations. As global energy rationing requires incremental GHG reductions, credits will become increasingly scarce and therefore more lucrative. Those who can afford to keep playing the game will be the ultimate winners. The primary derivatives traders that recently paralyzed the credit markets and collapsed the global banking system have already positioned themselves on the Chicago Climate Exchange to cash in on the carbon commodity bubble -- Bank of America, Citigroup, the Rockefeller cartel and, of course, Goldman Sachs.

The major corporate polluters and destroyers of ecosystems have bought up the patents and technologies invented by green entrepreneurs and purchased the competition through acquisitions and mergers in order to corner the market in climate change mitigation -- an industry projected to exceed $5 trillion, not counting the cap and trade casino. As global unemployment rises in this “jobless recovery,” taxpayer-funded state bonds and federal contracts will be awarded to corporate contractors to capture and reroute water, reconfigure energy grids and transform land use to comply with GHG regulations.

At the residential level, homeowners will be subject to federal code enforcement policies that supersede state and local codes; workers will be required to reduce their vehicle miles traveled and cities will be required by law to reduce their overall energy consumption, potentially supplying water and electricity to far away towns through interconnected energy grids too big to fail. At the global level, nations will be required to alter their agriculture, domestic industries, imports and exports to comply with global GHG rationing, essentially surrendering political control of food, water and energy to external global authorities.

All of this social engineering is grounded in the premise that GHG emissions are a global threat that warrants supranational regulations. Some scientists attribute global warming to solar activity, some to cyclical electromagnetic polar shifts and others cite data demonstrating that the oceans and atmosphere have recently been cooling. Regardless of which theories are correct, the political exploitation of the GHG paradigm has shifted the responsibility for environmental destruction (for which we have hard evidence) from major corporate polluters to society at large, placing the cost of remediation on victims and innocent bystanders.

There are good reasons to live sustainably, regardless of climate change theories. The violent extraction of “natural resources” by profit-seeking corporations has destroyed or poisoned virtually all of the earth’s living systems, impoverished the global south and driven whole species into extinction. What matters is that we repair the damage, reforest the earth and decontaminate the air, soil and water.

To keep things in perspective, switching to fluorescent light bulbs will accomplish far less than prohibiting coal mining corporations from blowing up mountain tops in Appalachia and burying the surrounding areas in toxic sludge; or reigning in Pentagon GHG emissions from chemtrails, star wars missiles and predator drones, not to mention the huge volumes of energy squandered every time the Pentagon invades and destroys a country. How much oil does the US military burn up and what is the net damage to the atmosphere? What is the federal strategy for reversing depleted uranium contamination?

What regulations are being proposed to hold the World Bank accountable for massive water dislocations and environmental destruction? Why is Monsanto allowed to contaminate our food supply with GMOs and mutate the earth’s natural seeds on every continent? Corporate agribusiness, a life-threatening polluter, received total exemption from all GHG regulations in the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, demonstrating that financial interests trump social responsibility.

Has the federal government lifted its ban on California’s fuel efficiency standards or demanded that General Motors put its electric car back into production with the 25 billion dollars it just received from taxpayers? That would be more effective than allowing GM, one of the leading polluters, to crank out SUVs and hire The Nature Conservancy’s Green Police to protect their carbon credits by driving indigenous Brazilians off their ancestral lands. The natives who live there sustainably are being arrested, evicted and forced into starvation by GM, Chevron and American Electric Power -- corporations that own neither the Brazilian forest nor the land. They “own” the carbon credits the trees represent. In the US, private ownership of imaginary carbon credits in national and state parks will result in park closures to protect carbon “trades” while doing nothing to repair the damage caused by corporate clear-cutters and so-called “developers.” Genuine remediation policies would require polluters and developers to plant new forests using their own profits.

If environmental destruction by the most glaring offenders is not the primary target of remediation, the stated goal of this GHG dragnet is disingenuous. Corporate destruction of the planet will not be repaired by trading imaginary carbon credits, depriving indigenous populations of access to food, privatization of energy grids or by imposing global energy restrictions and taxes on the financial underclass. Taxpayer-financed federal stimulus funds and state bonds would be better spent on localizing sustainable agriculture, reforestation, repairing ecosystems, securing clean water for all the earth’s species and developing free energy.

It’s not too late to insist on appropriate remedies -- until the Senate approves the final climate change bill. Your representative needs to hear from you now.


See also:
October 05, 2009

US Climate Change Bill Promotes Nuclear Industry


BMW to Build New China Plant on Luxury-Car Demand

Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, the world’s largest maker of luxury cars, plans to build a new China factory to meet rising demand for premium products in an economy that’s poised to surpass Japan in size.

The 5 billion yuan ($732 million) plant will have an initial capacity of 100,000 vehicles a year by 2012, eventually rising to 300,000, BMW’s Chief Financial Officer Friedrich Eichiner said today in Beijing. Capacity at BMW’s existing plant in northeastern China’s Shenyang will more than double to 75,000 by the end of 2010, he said.

BMW wants to make more 3-Series and 5-Series sedans in China as demand for top marques catches up with this year’s expected 28 percent growth in vehicle sales, enough for China to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest vehicle market. Sales of China-made BMW cars and imported models including the Mini brand jumped 37 percent in the first 10 months.

“When the overall vehicle market grows, you can see an exponential growth in the premium segment of the market,” Eichiner said. “Our existing capacity just isn’t enough,” to meet that demand, he said.

Munich-based BMW lags behind Volkswagen AG’s Audi unit in China in the segment of vehicles that cost more than 280,000 yuan ($41,000) each. The company is also facing a challenge from Daimler AG, which assembles the Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedans in China. Daimler Chief Executive Officer Dieter Zetsche said yesterday he expects Mercedes to overtake BMW in China “soon.”

Happy Partners

BMW and its Chinese partner Brilliance China Automotive Holdings Ltd. will each contribute half of the expected investment to their new plant. The new factory will assemble a new 5-Series sedan with a longer wheel base, designed specially for Chinese buyers, who tend to be chauffer-driven in luxury vehicles rather than be owner-drivers.

“We are quite happy with our Chinese partner, so there’s no reason to look for a new partner,” Eichiner said at a press conference, in response to a question on whether BMW plans to make its flagship 7-Series luxury cars with SAIC Motor Co., China’s largest carmaker and a Volkswagen partner.

BMW sales were helped by a government mandate this year that allowed luxury marques to be procured by public offices including the central government and provincial agencies. The police escort that accompanied BMW executives to today’s press conference drove a BMW sedan, Eichiner said.

Chen Zhenggao, governor of Liaoning province where BMW’s China factory is based, said his government will “lead the way” to fit out its fleet with the German brand to support the venture.

November 11, 2009

Where "Global Warming" and "Peak Oil" meet

Not Sylvia Night - November 11, 2009

Where "Global Warming" and "Peak Oil" meet

That place, of course, is the world´s financial market.

"Human Caused Climate Change" is a financial scam, so is the "Peak Oil" paradigm of catastrophic energy shortages in the near future.

Oil and natural gas are not scarce, but actually abundant energy resources. They are also most likely of non-biological origin, as Russian scientists and oil companies have shown for over 50 years.

While the myth of "Global Warming" is used to create new revenues for the financial elites, the myth of a limited supply of "fossil fuels" had been used for creating large profits in the past.

The western financial elites hope to secure those profits in the future by regulating the use of oil, gas and coal through internationally agreed upon CO2 reduction measures, carbon trade agreements and by monopolizing tomorrow´s nuclear energy market. This is one reason why Iran´s civilian nuclear energy program is being so severely opposed by all the governments of the western world that seek to dominate export markets for nuclear installations from India to Brazil. A primary reason also is Israel's demand that it retain technological superiority.

As we have seen in the last post, the theory of "Catastrophic Human Caused Global Warming" neither originated from a large group of scientists nor from environmental grass-roots organizations. Instead it was a long discarded 19th century hypothesis, which was taken out of the dustbin and then proposed by the 1979 British UN Ambassador, who "tickled" the ambition-streak of Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister at the time.

We also saw, that the main argument for a human caused Climate Change, the so-called "Hockey-Stick", has been scientifically discredited for years.

Using mostly official IPCC charts and other research done by the UN "Global Warming" scientists themselves, Dr.David Evans of Science Speak points out that, while there is evidence for some warming of the planet in the last century, there is indeed

No Evidence

that carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of the recent global warming

And with this conclusion Evans stands in agreement with over 650 leading scientists who, while attending the UN Climate Conference in Poland,

scoffed at doomsday reports of man-made global warming - labeling them variously a lie, a hoax and part of a new religion.


Those international scientists are then quoted in a US-Senate EPW Minority report.

But in spite of more and more counter arguments by the scientific community, especially from climatologists, the "Climate Change" bills, mandating carbon reduction for individuals and industries are rammed through practically all parliaments in the industrialized world.

We once again have to look at the money trail to explain the reasons for this paradox:

The New York Times, reported on November 12, 2008

Goldman Sachs Buys Into Carbon Offsets

Goldman Sachs has recently bought pieces of two carbon-offset companies, in the latest sign of investment banks’ interest in the area......

Carbon offsets are projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions — thus potentially counterbalancing a rise in emissions elsewhere. Planting trees are the most obvious offset; but other examples include capturing methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from a coal mine, or undertaking a qualified energy-efficiency project. Offsets are used in the European carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system, but have been slow to catch on in this country, where carbon trading is largely voluntary.

And on February 26, 2008 Chris Morrison from the Green Beat branch of the investment website Venture Beat writes:

Will carbon-trading happen? Goldman hopes so, backs APX

APX, a Silicon Valley company that certifies carbon and emissions offset certificates, and which is well-placed to support carbon-trading markets when they emerge, has gotten backing from Goldman Sachs in a $14 million investment, VentureBeat has learned.

Carbon trading is a growing business that could someday come to resemble the world’s largest financial markets.

Today’s emissions markets are generally small and fragmented. In regional U.S. energy markets, utilities are already required to buy electricity from alternative energy sources like geothermal, solar or wind. To prove their use of alternative energy, they’re required to file a certificate tracking their acquisition of the energy units. So this is the beginning of a “transfer” regime that could grow into more.

Meantime, carbon offsetting markets, that corporations buy credits from, are currently voluntary, but in anticipation of future government regulation, they often require similar certifying schemes. However, the source of offsets can vary widely, from alternative energy generation to tree planting projects.

APX acts as part of the intermediary chain between buyer and seller, doing the work of tracking serial numbers on these certificates and the accounts they go into. It’s not glamorous, but having an efficient, scalable back-end will be one of the requirements for building a multi-billion dollar market, as emissions trading may well become.

As today’s small, scattered emissions trading markets grow, they may come to resemble the complex business and regulatory ecosystems of the futures and equities markets, which include various behind-the-scenes businesses similar to APX.

Another indicator that some very serious businesses are becoming involved is one of the new investors in the company’s latest funding: Goldman Sachs, a heavyweight in the New York financial markets.

The largest financial corporation in the world buys into both the "carbon-offset" as well as into the "carbon-trading" market, which is expected to become a multi-billion dollar business.

The reduction of the use of hydro-carbon energy will make large profits to be funneled once again into the financial markets, which then will substitute for the profits the oil companies, in cohorts with the oil producing countries, used to make. While energy demand is fairly inelastic, a generalized increase in end user cost will enrich the well placed.

Why, if "human caused climate change" is a scam, is this substitution necessary?

Because slowly but certainly the knowledge emerges, that these large oil-profits of the past had also been based on a scam - the scam of "resource depletion" caused by over-exploitation of resources due to "exponential global population growth".

The myth of" increasing and catastrophic resource shortages" was initially promoted by the Rockefeller associated "Club of Rome".

Nowadays this scam is most often called the "Peak Oil" problem.

The "Peak Oil" propagandists tell us that oil, as well as natural gas-production, has either already peaked or will in the very near future. After reaching the peak of production a fast decline would make "cheap energy" increasingly scarce. As a consequence, the global economy, dependent on "cheap energy", would contract and eventually crash. This would then cause wide-spread devastation for most of us. And for billions of people all over the globe it would cause constant food-shortages and even starvation.

The catastrophic consequences to global food-production by shortages of oil and gas as energy resources is the first false paradigm promoted by the "Peak Oil" myth.

The second one is, that the world´s economic production is vitally dependent on energy being "cheap".

The reality is, that it isn´t the world´s real, physical economy but the global financial markets which are dependent on energy-resources being "cheap". For today´s actual consumers of energy, for private, industrial or public consumers, oil and gas aren´t actually that "cheap".

It is the large difference between production costs and consumer prices of oil and gas, which for a long time have kept the snake-oil sellers of the big financial corporations afloat. This high price/cost difference in oil production in the past was forced unto global consumers by the monopoly power the large oil-corporations had on the business and the coercive power their main shareholders had on governments all over the world.

The same "monopoly" game is now being started with nuclear energy production, as Dutch researcher Rudo de Ruijter points out in

US-Iran: Raid on nuclear fuel market

In the background of the political joust about Iran, a few countries are reshaping the world. They are taking possession of the global nuclear fuel market. New IAEA regulations should keep newcomers away.

The US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and Japan will become the world’s nuclear filling stations. Under the auspices of the IAEA these suppliers will dictate the rules, the prices and the currencies they want to get paid in.

Iran has become the pretext and test case for their plans.

However, like the "man-made Global Warming" myth, the "Peak-Oil" myth is now being contradicted by the facts, which even part of the mainstream media can no longer ignore:

On January 18, 2008 the British Times reports:

World not running out of oil, say experts

A landmark study of more than 800 oilfields by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) has concluded that rates of decline are only 4.5 per cent a year, almost half the rate previously believed, leading the consultancy to conclude that oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.

Peter Jackson, the report's author, said: “We will be able to grow supply to well over 100million barrels per day by 2017.” Current world oil output is in the region of 85million barrels a day.

But not only do western experts now concede, that there is far more oil in the ground, than they have previously admitted to, but there are also a growing number of western geologists who finally are starting to challenge the 18th century theory of "fossil" fuel, something the Russians have done over half a century ago.

William Engdahl writes about this in his "Confessions of an “ex” Peak Oil Believer"

Engdahl explains that for the Soviets it actually was "Necessity" which became "the mother of invention"

In the 1950’s the Soviet Union faced ‘Iron Curtain’ isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national security priority of the highest order.

Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940’s: where does oil come from?

In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev announced their conclusions: ‘Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.’ The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the ‘a-biotic’ theory—non-biological—to distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins.

If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the amount of hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth at the time of the earth’s formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. They also realized old fields could be revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form. ‘Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,’ Porfir’yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is was biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.

The Soviets then started to tailor their oil-explorations accordingly:

Following their a-biotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.

A total of sixty one wells were drilled, of which thirty seven were commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the field discovered compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered successful with a ten percent success rate. Nine of ten wells are typically “dry holes.”...

While the American oil multinationals were busy controlling the easily accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960’s, the Russians were busy testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed eleven major oil fields and one Giant field based on their deep ‘a-biotic’ geological estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and hit black gold of a scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope.

They then went to Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance drilling costs to show their new geological theory worked. The Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam’s White Tiger oilfield offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy. In the USSR, a-biotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their knowledge and the USSR emerged as the world’s largest oil producer by the mid-1980’s.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain the Russian oil-theory became far more available to scientists and lay people in the western world. Enthusiastically embracing free-market doctrines in the 1990s the Russian oil experts initially offered to share their expertise with the western world. But they were rebuffed in their overtures.

Obviously a theory which contradicts the scarcity myth would cut into the profits of the western oil-corporations.

The Russian oil-companies at home, however, kept on working the same way they had done for nearly half a century. Well after the dissolution of the USSR, in the early 1990’s, they went on using the a-biotic petroleum theory

to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than forty-five years, to be geologically barren—the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.

And while the well-paid scientists of the western oil-companies rejected the theory, others did not. Raymond J. Learsy quotes the western proponents of the abiotic oil-theory in the Huffington Post:

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins recognizes that petroleum is a primordial material of deep origin which has been erupted into the crust of the Earth. In short, and bluntly, petroleum is not a "fossil fuel" and has no intrinsic connection with dead dinosaurs (or any other biological detritus) "in the sediments" (or anywhere else)...

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of petroleum is based upon rigorous scientific reasoning, consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry, as well as upon extensive geological observation, and rests squarely in the mainstream of modern physics and chemistry, from which it draws its provenance.
Much of the modern Russian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum genesis developed from the sciences of chemistry and thermodynamics, and accordingly the modern theory has steadfastly held as a central tenet that the generation of hydrocarbons must conform to the general laws of chemical thermodynamics, - as must likewise all matter.
In such respect, modern Russian-Ukrainian petroleum science contrasts strongly to what are too often passed off as "theories" in the field of geology in Britain and the U.S.A.

The wall western multinational oil-companies had put up against scientifically based research to save their scarcity paradigm is obviously crumbling as was to be expected at least since the fall of the Iron Wall. More and more western scientific research supporting the long established and well tested Russian theories is now being published, as in the right-wing WorldNetDaily, which cites geologist and researcher Giora Proskurowski who, in a study published in Science Magazine

presented new evidence supporting the abiotic theory for the origin of oil...
While organic theorists have posited that the material required to produce hydrocarbons in sedimentary rock came from dinosaurs and ancient forests, more recent argument have suggested living organisms as small as plankton may have been the origin.

The abiotic theory argues, in contrast, that hydrocarbons are naturally produced on a continual basis throughout the solar system, including within the mantle of the earth. The advocates believe the oil seeps up through bedrock cracks to deposit in sedimentary rock. Traditional petro-geologists, they say, have confused the rock as the originator rather than the depository of the hydrocarbons....

Lost City is a hypothermal field some 2,100 feet below sea level that sits along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at the center of the Atlantic Ocean, noted for strange 90 to 200 foot white towers on the sea bottom.

In 2003 and again in 2005, Proskurowski and his team descended in a scientific submarine to collect liquid bubbling up from Lost City sea vents.

Proskurowski found hydrocarbons containing carbon-13 isotopes that appeared to be formed from the mantle of the Earth, rather than from biological material settled on the ocean floor.

Carbon 13 is the carbon isotope scientists associate with abiotic origin, compared to Carbon 12 that scientists typically associate with biological origin.

Proskurowski argued that the hydrocarbons found in the natural hydrothermal fluids coming out of the Lost City sea vents is attributable to abiotic production by Fischer-Tropsch, or FTT, reactions.

The Fischer-Tropsch equations were first developed by Nazi scientists who created methodologies for producing synthetic oil from coal.

"Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water and moderate amounts of heat," Proskurowski wrote.

The study also confirmed a major argument of Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold, who argued in his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels" that micro-organisms found in oil might have come from the mantle of the earth where, absent photosynthesis, the micro-organisms feed on hydrocarbons arising from the earth's mantle in the dark depths of the ocean floors.

Another piece of evidence for the abiotic origin of oil, are several experimental studies done recently:

Alexander Goncharov, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution ()
and his colleagues in Russia and Sweden have experimentally shown for the first time that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be produced under the pressure and temperature conditions of the upper mantle, the slightly viscous layer of the earth directly below the crust. Their research was published () in Nature Geoscience.

"Our results provide a link which was previously missing or was doubtful because of a lack of in situ measurements ... for the upper mantle conditions," Goncharov said. "Thus, our work suggests there is a possibility for the [abiogenic] oil formation in the deep earth and that there is a potential to find more oil fields than expected if one assumes that oil could be formed only biogenically."

The researchers used a diamond anvil cell and a laser heat source to subject methane -- a primary component of natural gas -- to conditions that mimic the earth at 40 to 95 miles deep...................

Under those conditions, the methane reacted and formed petrochemical feedstock ethane and propane and butane, which are used as fuels, as well as molecular hydrogen and graphite. When the ethane was subjected to the same conditions, it formed methane, suggesting heavier hydrocarbons could exist deep under the earth's surface.

Barry Katz, a geochemist at Chevron Corp., agreed.

"I don't disagree with the idea," Katz said. "I disagree with the idea of commercial quantities. There's no question that it's coming out of the system. However, it's not coming out in commercial quantities."

Katz is acting like a true corporate hack. Russian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese oil producers have proved that there is indeed oil to be found at great depth and in commercial quantities.

According to an interview with oil-expert Dr. Kenney

Russian and Ukrainian scientists found

that a continuous reaction occurs naturally at a depth of approximately 100 km at a pressure of approximately 50,000 atmospheres (5 GPa) and a temperature of approximately 1500°C, and will continue more or less until the ‘death’ of planet earth in millions of years’ time. The high pressure causes oil to continuously seep up along fissures in the earth’s crust into subterranean caverns, which we call oil fields.

As the "Global Warming" myth is designed to put a large economic burden on the world population and hinder developing countries from rising up from poverty, so would the acceptance of the "Peak Oil" myth become the justification for endless wars in the Middle East, South America or the Caucasus, where we in the West are told we need to protect the "scarce resources" from the grab of the Chinese.