Re: Spiked-online and the Hubbert curve

["s.artesian" <sartesian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The connections to and from Big Oil are not confined to those who think the
issues are social, economic, not natural in origin.  I for example don't even
have an ExxonMobil credit card, nor an automobile for that matter.

Moreover, as the Hubbertists are proud to tell you their credentials include
past and current connections to Big Oil, and at the fees these guys charge for
consulting services and a peek at their exclusive "databases" only Big Oil can
afford them.

So tarring anybody with a Big Oil brush is somewhat ridiculous as I'm sure comrade
Proyect would not hesitate in reproducing an article quoting any geologist or finance
officer of a Big Oil company worrying about exploration costs and the inability to
replace reserves.






-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Jun 4, 2004 12:41 PM
To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [PEN-L] Spiked-online and the Hubbert curve

Last November, Paul Flewers had the following to say about spiked-online.

"Re Spiked and their new pals Hill and Knowlton. As a former supporter
of the Revolutionary Communist Party, I'm hardly surprised at this.
They'll go with anybody, so it seems, these days. The question is: Who's
listening to them? An interesting exercise to while away idle hours is
to take some names from the Spiked web-site, do a Google search, and
find for what corporations and think-tanks they've been working. We're
talking about Big Oil here, that sort of thing."

I should explain the reference to Hill and Knowlton. This is a PR firm
that was responsible for creating the campaign that led to Gulf War 1.
Remember the business about Iraqi soldiers plucking Kuwaiti babies from
their incubators and dumping them on the cold floor to die? That lie was
cooked up by Hill and Knowlton. If you go to www.spiked-online.com and
clink "events", you'll discover no less than 3 soirees co-sponsored by
Hill and Knowlton.

Although there are fewer and fewer radicals who have connections with
this crew, they do seem to maintain some credibility--largely through
the efforts of James Heartfield, an erstwhile ubiquitous figure on the
Internet who still writes Marxish sounding tracts. For example, a young
Barnard professor named Bashir Abu-Manneh has a polemic against Hardt
and Negri in the latest MR that finds these words by Heartfield worth
quoting: ?The real meaning of the ?new social movements? is a move away
from the idea of an agent of social transformation altogether. The novel
forms of organization are a break with the idea of collective agency.?

Unfortunately, Abu-Manneh, with whom I had a discussion with on this
citation, seems unaware that in the world of James Heartfield "social
transformation" entails the liberal use of DDT, a right to smoke
cigarettes in restaurants, etc. There was some progress, however. In the
original version of the article, there were also favorable references to
Frank Furedi, Hardt's guru, that are now nowhere to be found. I imagine
that after I pointed these words written by Furedi in a U. of Kent
faculty newsletter--"I am feeling depressed. The violence in the Middle
East dominates the news. The media have dropped the sex education
debate"--he must have had second thoughts.

All this is background, especially Paul Flewer's discovery of
spiked-online connections to big oil companies, to an article that
appears on spiked-online today:

Inflaming the oil crisis by Joe Kaplinsky

Are we running out of oil? Terrorism in Saudi Arabia, the world's
largest oil producer, and ongoing instability in Iraq have put oil
security back in the headlines. Prices have risen to over $40 a barrel
and the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is
under pressure to increase quotas. Many fear that a catastrophe in the
Middle East could cut off oil supplies.

Worries about supplies have been slowly building for some time; recent
events have brought them to a head. But to the extent that real problems
exist, they are less the result of oil scarcity or instability in the
Middle East than of more general fears within the West.

In the USA high petrol prices are a talking point of the election, where
the subtext is that intervention is Iraq created the problem. But some
argue that what makes the apparent oil shortage really scary is an
underlying problem of oil depletion. Economist Paul Krugman argues that,
'the disastrous occupation [of Iraq] is only part of the reason oil is
getting more expensive; the other, which will last even if America
somehow finds a way out of the quagmire, is the intensifying competition
for a limited world oil supply' (1).

Fears about running out of oil have become widespread in America. A slew
of books have recently put forward the imminent oil depletion argument:
Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth Deffeyes (2001), The Party's Over by Richard
Heinberg (2003), and Out of Gas by David Goodstein and The End of Oil by
Paul Roberts, both published this year (2).

Like earlier concerns about oil depletion, the current panic has little
basis in the geology of oil. The argument that we are about to run out
of oil has been around for as long as oil has been produced. But the
depletion argument becomes popular at different times for different
reasons. The last time oil depletion became a major concern was during
the OPEC boycott of 1973/4, and carried on through the recession of the
early 1980s. From the mid-1980s, concerns about global warming took over
- and instead of worrying that we had too little oil many fretted that
we had too much. Burning all that oil would disrupt the climate, they
argued, by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Today we have a synthesis of these two arguments. We apparently have
both too little oil and too much. The most pessimistic forecasters argue
that, not only is industrial civilisation about to collapse as it runs
out of oil, but it will be tipped over the edge by global warming as a
consequence of past energy use.

Full: http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA562.htm

Leave it to spiked-online to not only downplay the urgency of oil
depletion, but to defend global warming skepticism all in the same
breath. Somebody, I can't remember whom, tried to link the Hubbert curve
with some kind of oil company conspiracy to drive up the price of oil.
The spiked-online article, in my opinion, is much more in line with the
industry's thinking.

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