Badger at Missing Links passes on an item that appeared in a Bahrein newspaper asserting that western oil companies are offering $5 millioin for each Iraqi Parliament deputy who votes for the Bushaviks’ proposed Oil and Gas Law .
“It’s not about the oil.”
McClatchy reports that the pessimists’ fears of the environmental consequences of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze were not unfounded. Water quality has gone to hell upstream, and the swifter flow downstream is unfriendly to the sediment-adapted fish species who’ve been there for untold millenia.
But authorities now admit that the dam is generating major problems. It’s created a huge — and heavy — reservoir pressing against the mountains along the Yangtze, making them more prone to landslides. The deep reservoir stretches upriver about 370 miles, impeding the natural flushing action of the river and trapping pesticides, fertilizer and raw sewage. Downriver from the dam, water flows cleaner and faster, adversely affecting aquatic species adapted to sediment in the river.
The Badger has some acerbic things to say about the quality of the debates in Washington regarding Iraq. He is especially annoyed at the Democrats, and I agree with him:
The two sides in the Washington hearings clashed over interpretation of statistics relating to dead bodies: how many, location, and manner of death. And naturally, the more this kind of discussion continued, the more the distinction between the war party and the anti-war party blurred and finally melted away. It was the equivalent of analyzing 9/11 by breaking out the victims by manner of death, race, social class, and so on, as if the issue was the social structure of the World Trade Center, and it had never been hit by aircraft. The fact is that in the discussions about Iraq, maintenance of that level of discussion is taken for granted. That is the insult and the vulgarity of it.
. . .
I think what’s happened is that the “progressives”, by tying themselves to the Democratic Party with all of its Washington-system baggage, have made sure that policy debate and discussion never goes beyond the system of partisan calculations. But the dynamics of those calculations ensure that it is in moral terms a race to the bottom. Policy aims can’t be critiqued (perhaps because of the unpatriotic war-crimes implications, or perhaps just because it’s better for Democrats not to talk about aims, so as not to have to propose their own, and expose themselves to criticism); in the absence of saying anything about policy aims, the debate is reduced to discussion of implementation techniques; and as far as that goes, the Democrats can’t be seen as soft on national-security; so the differences become more and more minute; until finally the only way they have of discussing Iraq is in terms of the distribution of the dead bodies, such as we are seeing now.
The Badger is dead-on regarding the utter absence of any discussion of the policy aims. I also think he’s right in asserting that the progressives have tied themselves too closely to the Democratic Party’s Washington establishment. However, I’m less than impressed with his implication that the problem is largely the reality distortion field that exists inside the Beltway.
From the get-go I’ve believed that the fundamental goal of the hidden Bush-Cheney agenda is an outcome that leaves US-based oil majors with guaranteed control over the Iraqi oil reserves at the kinds of favorable rates that prevailed before the resource-owning countries started getting uppity. The issue of what kind of state(s) (unitary, federated, more than one, etc.) exist, what kind of governments (secular democratic, fascist dictatorship, theocratic etc.) it/they have are secondary issues at best. All of the Bush-Cheney administrations changes of “strategy” have been at this latter level. Through it all has been the focus on leaning on the Iraqi government of the day to pass an oil law, and on building the gigantic embassy compound and mega-military bases from which the strings on the puppets can be pulled and the terms of the oil law that was pushed down the throat(s) of the Iraqi government(s) can be enforced.
The problem with the inside-the-Beltway Democrats (including many but not all of their Congress Critters) is that they are dependent on the same cash teat of the petroleum cow that is a major source of nourishment for the GOP. That’s what at the bottom of their strategic and tactical indecision.
There are three (at least) basic questions about the Iraqagmire mess that need to be addressed. First, can the apparent basic Bush-Cheney goal of Iraqi oil control be achieved at all? The answer, I suggest, is almost certainly not. There might have been a chance if the administration had planned the occupation rationally and manned it adequately, but we know now there was a fantasy instead of a plan, and that the troop levels forced down the military’s throat by Rumsfeld & Co. was a central episode in the dream. Now the US military ground forces are broken, and with the chickens of the nation’s fiscal profligacy coming home to roost it’s unlikely that funds can be found to adequately ramp up the military outsource contractors at their $200K per person, or whatever it is. As for Senator Lindsey Graham’s (Cloud Nine, South Carolina) recent call for the restoration of the draft to add 2 million people to the forces, well, dream on.
The second and third questions are: if we do manage to get a favorable deal for our oil companies with whatever remains of Iraq, is that sustainable over the long term? And if so, at what cost? The answer to the first, I again suggest, is almost certainly not. As for the cost if we do manage to sustain it for a while, that will be ruinous, both in fiscal terms and in the decline of our overall national security.
A primary reason why a national oil law has been so slow in coming is that almost certainly likely that the terms being demanded by the administration are a virtual death sentence to any Iraqi politician who signs on to them. The neo-colonialist arrangement that I believe Bush-Cheney envision will be a thorn in the side not only of Iraqi nationalists, but to the Arab and even entire Muslim world as a whole.
Bismarck once said something to the effect that statesmanship consists of placing one’s ear to the ground to listen for the oncoming horse of history, figuring out which direction it’s headed, and when it comes by jumping on its back and hanging on for dear life. It’s time we recognize that the horse is not riding toward neocolonialism and figure out where it is going.
Final Note:Â The history of this fiasco will not be fully known unless and until what took place in the deliberations and side conversations of Cheney’s energy task force of 2001 become public.
Econbrowser does a post mortem from today’s perspective on estimates of future oil production capacity that were made in 2005 by Daniel Yergin’s Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA). They estimated that world-wide production capacity would increase by 16 million barrels per day by 2010 from the 2004 level of 85 MBPD. How are we tracking? Not very well. Instead of the projected 5.5 MBPD anticipated by this year the increase is only 1.5. James Hamilton, the UCSD professor who is one of the two proprietors of Econbrowser, presents a troubling chart that shows that the projected capacity increases of eleven major oil producing countries have been met by none of them. And a visual inspection shows that the three biggest undershots on a percentage basis are Iran, Iraq (big surprise [/sarcasm]) and Saudi Arabia (not that much of a surprise to anyone who’s read Mathew Simmons’ Twilight in the Desert). So what happened? Here’s Hamilton at Econbrowser:
It is hard to form a clear picture of what is going on in some of these Middle East oil producing countries, since the hard data are not made public. But I think it is safe to conclude that in general, depletion of the oil from existing fields has been more significant than CERA had anticipated, which is one reason they systematically erred on the side of predicting more oil than we actually are seeing. Mature fields naturally and necessarily enter a period of declining production. That means that remarkable new oil fields, like the ones detailed in the first CERA table above, do not guarantee that annual production will increase. Big new discoveries every year are necessary just to keep annual production from declining. That CERA may have been underestimating depletion was the key criticism raised by the Oil Drum back in August 2005. With two more years of data, an impartial observer would be tempted to conclude that TOD’s side in this argument has gained some credibility.
One more compelling piece of evidence that we are at or at least near Peak Oil. There’s lots of interesting data and stuff in Econbrowser’s post. h/t to Brad DeLong.
Economist Brad DeLong weighs in on Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to charge a fee for cars and trucks that use the streets of Manhattan during the work week. He’s for it. And he takes to task a spokesman for the American Trucking Association for being unable to see the forest of advantage through the trees of the $21 daily fee for trucks.
. . “What is the biggest problem your industry faces in providing excellent service to lower Manhattan?” Based on what I’ve seen on those streets, my answer would have been “congestion.” So the mayor has proposed to tax the thing that has been encumbering the trucking industry, and its spokesman is complaining because his clients will need to pay the tax in proportion to the congestion they cause. Think of it by the numbers. How many packages are on the typical FedEx truck in Manhattan? If it were 210, then the extra expense would be a dime per package. That’s trivial. How does $21 compare to the total value of each truck’s cargo in a given day? It has to be tiny. And look at what the FedEx truck drivers get in return–fewer passenger cars clogging up the city streets where they need to make pickups and deliveries. They waste less time and less gas. It doesn’t take much abatement of that wasted time and gas to make back the $21 per truck. The trucking industry should be this proposal’s biggest supporters.
Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation, writing in the International Herald Tribune a couple of months back, starts from Sir Nicholas Stern’s observation that climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen”, and considers what that might mean for the future , not to mention America’s place in the views of future historians:
The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report’s recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.
. . .
Underlying Western free-market democracy, and its American form in particular, is the belief that this system is of permanent value to mankind: a “New Order of the Ages,” as the motto on the U.S. Great Seal has it. It is not supposed to serve only the short- term and selfish interests of existing Western populations. If our system is indeed no more than that, then it will pass from history even more utterly than Confucian China — and will deserve to do so.
If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.
This is an intriguing idea. A University of Arizona astronomer suggests a possible method of shielding the Earth from about 2% of the sun’s radiant energy in the event global warming consequences emerge much faster that us earthlings can convert to renewable energy sources.
Angel is now publishing a first detailed, scholarly paper, “Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near L1,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The plan would be to launch a constellation of trillions of small free-flying spacecraft a million miles above Earth into an orbit aligned with the sun, called the L-1 orbit.
The spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud with a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer. About 10 percent of the sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun, would be diverted away from our planet. The effect would be to uniformly reduce sunlight by about 2 percent over the entire planet, enough to balance the heating of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.
Researchers have proposed various alternatives for cooling the planet, including aerosol scatterers in the Earth’s atmosphere. The idea for a space shade at L1 to deflect sunlight from Earth was first proposed by James Early of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1989.
“The earlier ideas were for bigger, heavier structures that would have needed manufacture and launch from the moon, which is pretty futuristic,” Angel said. “I wanted to make the sunshade from small ‘flyers,’ small, light and extremely thin spacecraft that could be completely assembled and launched from Earth, in stacks of a million at a time. When they reached L1, they would be dealt off the stack into a cloud. There’s nothing to assemble in space.”
Kevin Drum posted about Bush’s appearance on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show yesterday (11/1) in which he said in regards to the Middle East ” . . they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West”, and that “If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies.” As is typical fromm someone writing from the left Drum reacted in horror, but why is he surprised?
US policy in regards the Middle East has been primarily about oil since FDR met up with King Ibn Saud aboard the cruiser USS Quincy in the Red Sea on his way back home from the Yalta Conference in early 1945. And ever since then policy of US has been to not admit it. Thus the Bush-Cheney administration’s proclaiming the threat of WMDs or the urgency of advancing democracy, or the threat to Israel or whatever happens to be their justification of the month (or week) is not only cant, but business as usual.
The differences between Bush-Cheney and the increasing number of US citizens who recognize the Iraq venture as the strategic disaster that it is are matters of means, not of ends. All it takes to realize that is the knowledge that petroleum is the most critical natural resource of world-wide industry, and a look at a world map of the distribution of the remaining known oil reserves. The latter will show you that Iraq is either directly on top of or within a few hundred miles of well over half of those reserves.
What remains mysterious are the fine-grained details of the fantasy world that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, et al were living in as they planned this fiasco. My guess is that those details lie in the documents of the Cheney Energy Task Force that the administration fought so tenaciously to keep out of the public domain where they so rightly belong. I suspect they simply assumed that the Iraqis would meekly accept extraction contracts being given to American-based major oil companies at concessionary rates. In other words, a reversion to a camoflaged version of colonialism, with the help of Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress.
This strikes me as naive in thh extreme. Even if they had gone in with a viable plan, sufficient human and material resources, and intelligent leadership for the occupation (which on the real-life check list is a “No“, a “No” and a “No“), how long would the Iraqi people stood by meekly while their national patrimony was being looted?
True energy security will be gained only first by working jointly with other nations to make sure the the remaining oil is available to all on open markets, and even more importantly, begin planning now for life after peak oil. On this latter topic, Defense In The National Interest has a useful slide presentation (pdf) on the topic. The short synopsis: Peak oil is a reality. Maybe last year, most optimistically perhaps 20 years out. Finally, the downside risks of beginning to act now pale in comparison to the risks of doing nothing until the peak comes (if it hasn’t already).
A while back a proposal to place wind generators on Nantucket Sound caused a NIMBY ruckus among the owners of pricey shoreline property who were not pleased at the prospect of a wind farm in their windows. An MIT prof who has extensive experience with deep water off-shore oil platforms suggests using that technology to move the wind farms over the horizon out to where the wind blows more predictably. Perhaps the same platforms could also support Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion technology to maximize the power output. After all, one of the major costs will be the undersea transmission cables that move the power ashore, and because installation is a major component of that cost and is largely independent of capacity the combination should improve the overall return on investment.