Sticky Tar Sands in Canada

Professor Kjell Aleklett made a stunning graphic display of how the world's oil is distributed by using twenty champagne bottles to represent the two trillion barrels of oil with which the planet was endowed. After removing ten bottles to indicate what had already been used he put two bottles aside to represent the oil that had been given to the US. Showing that one bottle was empty, he then poured one last glass from the remaining bottle and stated that America has just poured the very last glass from its endowment of oil. Four of the remaining ten bottles he indicated were in the Middle East and of those three represented the oil in Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

He then turned to tar sands projects which had once been heralded as Canada's (and America's) salvation but which have been proven to be a financial and ecological disaster. A previous speaker had noted that the process of obtaining oil from tar sands which involves washing the strip mined sand with steam requires three barrels of fresh water for every barrel of oil produced.

Aleklett then noted that Canada was using such a tremendous amount of natural gas to boil the water that its own domestic heating needs were being compromised. Other speakers had previously commented on the fact that under the NAFTA and FTAA agreements, Canada was obligated to sell natural gas to the US at low prices even to the point of not meeting its own requirements. There clearly is not enough natural gas to produce tar sands, which have not been profitable to date, even as the wastewater and strip mining destroys much of Alberta's pristine landscape. As a result, said Aleklett, Alberta is now considering the construction of a nuclear reactor for the sole purpose of making steam to work the tar sands.

No one needed to ask about energy returned on energy invested.

Stating the Obvious

American Five College Professor of Peace and World Security, Michael Klare, author of the book, Resource Wars, provided the much needed integration of Peak Oil issues with world events by noting that US oil imports passed fifty per cent for the first time in 1999 and that this share has been steadily increasing. Correctly noting that the US war machine is dependent upon petroleum he started by looking at the actual text of the report of the NEPDG Cheney energy task force published shortly before the attacks of 9/11.

As is so often the case with government reports such as those produced by the CIA's Inspector General evaluating the CIA's role in the drug trade, it is necessary to discard letters of transmittal and summaries to find out what the report really says. Klare noted that Chapter 8 of the Cheney report disclosed that what the secretivebody really advocated was an increased reliance on oil and natural gas. The report stated that US demand would increase by 7.7 Mbpd between 2000 and 2020 and that all of that increase would necessarily come from the Middle East. As FTW has reported on numerous occasions, throughout the Clinton years, the US steadily prepared for military conflict by engaging in many joint military operations and base expansion throughout the region. The greatest focus was on Saudi Arabia.

Klare's analysis left no doubt that the military operations witnessed since 9/11 were indeed the result of an elaborate plan put into place and executed steadily for more than a decade and that US energy, military, and anti-terrorism policies were really three strands of the same rope, all meshing perfectly in global and hegemonic conquest.

Princeton Professor Kenneth Deffeyes – a colleague of King Hubbert and author of the book, Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World oil Shortage, argued that Peak Oil actually arrived in 2000 by noting that production has actually been declining since that time. As further evidence of the production peak, Deffeyes noted that since 2000, there has been a 30% drop in stock values, interest rate cuts have not helped, two million have become unemployed and the employed have been unable to retire, budget surpluses have vanished, the middle class has vanished, and the World Trade Center has vanished. He added that the only way to meet the delusional USGS oil discovery predictions for the United States would be to make Iraq the 51st state.

One of his greatest concerns, he said, was the cost of fertilizer production for the Third World, implying that natural gas shortages and related electrical manufacturing and transport costs might precipitate a famine of unimagined proportions.

From FTW's perspective the reality of Peak Oil has been almost completely transparent since 9/11. As a cosmological explanation of the sublimely convenient attacks of 9/11, abetted by the US government, the sequential war to control the largest oil reserves on the planet, the near hysteria over biological warfare, the steady assault on civil liberties, and the continually declining economic performance, there is no other construct which provides a canvas on which these developments fit.

The second annual ASPO conference in Paris only deepened our conviction.

In answer to your question in Part 1 ----NO

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