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By: Stewart Brennan
Everyday we engage in a pressure cooker of daily routines that become more complex and energy consuming as time passes. These sophisticated routines we burden ourselves with, squeezes every last bit of energy out of us until we are practically disabled. What is it that has all of us in a mindless hurry? What is it that empowers us to be an active participant in this “thing” that drives our daily lives and society? Is it real or imagined? I say its time to take a good look at this madness we call reality.
What is this… “Thing”?
It has been chipping away at the foundation of civilization for a very long time. It has crept into and has woven a belief within our minds, and it guides us in everything we do. Those that have control of this “thing” dictate our very existence. “They” use it against us and control our actions with it. “They” will say anything and do everything to grab our attentions away from knowing the truth. They bombard us with planned suggestion to support this “thing” that they control.
The “thing” I am taking about is “money”, and “They” the “Private Bankers”, are the ones who control and Print it. We are totally subservient to them and their money system. It has disconnected us from our free collective ability and isolated us from each other.
Civilization should be based on the wonderful capabilities and accomplishments that humanity has achieved and not on money. Humanity should not be controlled by a few individuals but by the moral pillars of what is honest, and truthful in a just society.
Commercialism impedes our focus on reality:
You can call this monetary system a misguided direction or plan, or whatever you want…Capitalism, Imperialism, or Dictatorship, it doesn’t matter. The real problem, and driver of the current system is the money-maker, his printed-paper, and an idea called financial wealth.
If we choose to remain on this path of “financial wealth”, we will always be controlled by the few that have set their sights on acquiring and controlling anything and everything. If we continue to embrace this system of money and not in the ability of our collective selves, mankind will perish from the Earth.
Remember, “Wealth is in the Soul”, not the bank, or stock market.
What Do We Do?
Today, our survival is in the hands of corrupt bankers and corporations that hire politicians to make laws that benefit the corrupt few instead of the population.
If mankind is to survive, he must evolve out of the illusion that economics portrays and into the Global reality of unity. The reality is that we need to help each other to progress as a species. The purpose in life is not enslavement by debt, but to work collectively for the betterment of mankind or the society. We need to remove the illusion of monetary wealth. Real wealth is not in a bank account, precious metal, or abundance of material. “Wealth is in the Soul”! Imagine a World without money.
Private Bankers and their system of financial wealth have created a World that is dysfunctional. It enslaves society to keep it running. The leaders of the financial system decide on who gets food, water, medicine, and who lives and dies. It makes weapons of mass destruction, and makes tyrants and slaves. Money is the root of all our problems.
A “Society based on money” robs us of our ability to think freely. Our attentions are taken away by commercialism via communication devices like the cell phone, television, radio, and Internet. All of which portray an unrealistic bubble that most people have come to believe is reality. The system is blindly supported by many and not questioned because those that control the system have told you not to question it.
Together we can remove the oppression that money and corrupt officials have imposed on society. Let's create a “World United” where everyone goes to sleep on a full stomach, has enough water to sustain themselves, has the medicine to treat sickness, and schools to teach the values and responsibilities of being alive. Lack of Money should not impede our helping others. It is morally wrong to say that helping someone costs too much! Remove the controlling element of money from society and the future begins to look brighter.
Basic Survival:
Many of us have forgotten how to take care of ourselves and those around us when money is not involved, and I am sure the prospect scares you. The reality is that we have been disconnected from nature and do not have control of our destiny. We need to regain control of our lives… We are supposed to be integrated with nature...that is what is missing in our lives! That missing element in your life, the hole in your soul, that void we try and fill but never seem to satisfy…is our connection to nature.
One day, everything will stop…No more “Grid Electricity”, no more running water, transportation, which means no more food deliveries to stores. Think about how you would survive without electricity…no more communications. TV, radio, Internet, telephones, will all be silent. No more modern-day communications.
Does anyone remember how to build a fire, purify water, gather food, build their own shelters, know what plants and roots will cure your ailments? The world we know or knew will be gone, and that can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be.
Knowledge is your Salvation:
Our Grandparents or great grandparents and for some of us, our parents, knew how to survive hard times. They also warned us about the Private bankers and their money. My generation grew up without knowledge of hard times. We are the TV generation, born and raised.
Right now, we need to prepare for the collapse of the American Empire and the financial system that controls the World…and that means to learn everything about basic survival.
We need to get involved now by building trust in our communities. Reconnect with nature. We have to approach life as a unified community. The very lives of our children and grand children depends upon it.
Money and its guarantee of greed is the destroyer of our World. It is the sole reason for war. All crimes committed are sprung directly or indirectly from greed and the society that money created. In a future world devastated by economic upheaval…survival will come down to who was ready.
Disconnected from Nature:
We are now completely disconnected from nature and our symbiotic relationship with it. Individually, we no longer know how to provide the basic needs we require to survive. We are completely dependent on the function of the current economic system and the direction we have embraced is leading us to complete destruction. But now, “The Financial System” appears to be feeding on its self.
The foundation on which our modern world is built is crumbling, and with it the whole world will fall because government would have you believe that being a social society is evil when in fact it is quite the opposite.
Humanity needs strong characters to stand up against the endless waves of anger, brutality, and oppression that are systematically removing Human Rights and freedoms of the individual. It is up to everyone that reads this plea to stand up and make a difference in his or her perspective countries and or communities. Not one country, province, or state, and not one individual can escape the oppression that the World Bank and ruling class have imposed upon us. The time to act is NOW!
Be prepared; get back in touch with your surroundings and your community. Plan for the survival of your community in a long-term disaster scenario, and do it collectively together. We depend on each other to survive. We cannot do it alone. Be at peace.
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Steep Decline in Oil Production Brings Risk of War and Unrest, Says New Study
ReplyDeleteBy Ashley Seager
The Guardian UK
Monday 22 October 2007
Output peaked in 2006 and will fall seven percent a year. Decline in gas, coal and uranium also predicted.
World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.
The German-based Energy Watch Group will release its study in London today saying that global oil production peaked in 2006 - much earlier than most experts had expected. The report, which predicts that production will now fall by 7% a year, comes after oil prices set new records almost every day last week, on Friday hitting more than $90 (£44) a barrel.
"The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the world economy," said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG's founder and the German MP behind the country's successful support system for renewable energy.
The report's author, Joerg Schindler, said its most alarming finding was the steep decline in oil production after its peak, which he says is now behind us.
The results are in contrast to projections from the International Energy Agency, which says there is little reason to worry about oil supplies at the moment.
However, the EWG study relies more on actual oil production data which, it says, are more reliable than estimates of reserves still in the ground. The group says official industry estimates put global reserves at about 1.255 gigabarrels - equivalent to 42 years' supply at current consumption rates. But it thinks the figure is only about two thirds of that.
Global oil production is currently about 81m barrels a day - EWG expects that to fall to 39m by 2030. It also predicts significant falls in gas, coal and uranium production as those energy sources are used up.
Britain's oil production peaked in 1999 and has already dropped by half to about 1.6 million barrels a day.
The report presents a bleak view of the future unless a radically different approach is adopted. It quotes the British energy economist David Fleming as saying: "Anticipated supply shortages could lead easily to disturbing scenes of mass unrest as witnessed in Burma this month. For government, industry and the wider public, just muddling through is not an option any more as this situation could spin out of control and turn into a complete meltdown of society."
Mr Schindler comes to a similar conclusion. "The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life."
Jeremy Leggett, one of Britain's leading environmentalists and the author of Half Gone, a book about "peak oil" - defined as the moment when maximum production is reached, said that both the UK government and the energy industry were in "institutionalised denial" and that action should have been taken sooner.
"When I was an adviser to government, I proposed that we set up a taskforce to look at how fast the UK could mobilise alternative energy technologies in extremis, come the peak," he said. "Other industry advisers supported that. But the government prefers to sleep on without even doing a contingency study. For those of us who know that premature peak oil is a clear and present danger, it is impossible to understand such complacency."
Mr Fell said that the world had to move quickly towards the massive deployment of renewable energy and to a dramatic increase in energy efficiency, both as a way to combat climate change and to ensure that the lights stayed on. "If we did all this we may not have an energy crisis."
He accused the British government of hypocrisy. "Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have talked a lot about climate change but have not brought in proper policies to drive up the use of renewables," he said. "This is why they are left talking about nuclear and carbon capture and storage. "
Yesterday, a spokesman for the Department of Business and Enterprise said: "Over the next few years global oil production and refining capacity is expected to increase faster than demand. The world's oil resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future. The challenge will be to bring these resources to market in a way that ensures sustainable, timely, reliable and affordable supplies of energy."
The German policy, which guarantees above-market payments to producers of renewable power, is being adopted in many countries - but not Britain, where renewables generate about 4% of the country's electricity and 2% of its overall energy needs.
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Go to Original
Peak Universe
By James Howard Kunstler
The Energy Bulletin
Monday 22 Oct 2007
The big Peak Oil conference of the year took place in Houston last week - but before we get to the substance of that, a few words about where we were. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying urban construct than this anti-city in the malarial swamps just off the Gulf of Mexico. And it is hard to conceive of a more desolate and depressing urban district, even of such an anti-city, than the utter wasteland around Houston's convention center.
Luckily, we didn't have to enter the convention center itself across the street - a baleful megastructure the size of three aircraft carriers, adorned with massive air-conditioning ducts to counter Houston's gym-sock-like climate. And when I say "street" you understand we are talking about four or six-laners, with no curbside parking, which is the norm for this town. The effect is that every street behaves like an extension of the freeway at the expense of pedestrians - but pedestrians have been eliminated anyway because in ninety percent of Houston's so-called downtown of glass towers there are no shops or restaurants at the ground-floor level, only blank walls, air-conditioning vents, parking ramps, and landscaping fantasias. We were informed that in parts of downtown there existed a network of air-conditioned underground corridors with shopping, but that everything in it closed at 7 p.m. when the last office workers straggled home. Anyway, none of it extended as far as the convention center. The rest of district was devoted to surface parking.
It has often been stated that Houston's ghastly development pattern comes from having no official zoning laws. But all it really proves is that you can achieve the same miserable results of typical American boneheaded zoning with no zoning - as long as your don't give a shit how people feel in their daily environments.
The convention center itself, though, demonstrated something beyond even that degree of thoughtlessness. Its pharaonic hugeness was a metaphor for the fatal grandiosity at the heart of contemporary life in American today, the utter disregard for a scale of human activity consistent with what the planet has to offer within its ecological limits - and of course the oil issue was at the center of that story.
Oh, one final thing about Houston life per se. Judging by the local items in the daily newspaper, the so-called city enjoys a level of mayhem that makes Baghdad look like a Sussex garden party. Sample headlines: "10 Charged in Burglary Spree," "Pit Bull Shot Dead After Pony Attack," "Jury Gives Man Life in Carjacking Death," "Two Killed in Home Invasion." One particularly insane story told of a man who shot and stabbed a visiting friend who "dissed" his dog. We didn't see any of that action around the convention center's Hilton Americas, where the ASPO conference actually took place, but the news didn't exactly make you want to venture out beyond the lobby. Anyway, you couldn't buy a stick of gum within a mile walk of the place, and the thought of traipsing past all those surface parking lots in 90-degree heat was like an invitation to reenact the Bataan Death March.
It was a sublime coincidence of fate and history that throughout the ASPO conference, the price of a barrel of oil surged up through the high eighty-dollars range and briefly touched $90-a-barrel on Friday (just as the stock market was tanking by 360-odd points). It was also interesting that as all this action was unfolding, MSNBC was running an interview with Senator Larry Craig (R. Idaho), lately accused of soliciting sex from a policeman in an airport toilet. Apparently what the nation really wants to know about is the Senator's self-described "wide stance" in bathroom technique. Perhaps when Craig is finally forced from his senate seat, he can get a job as a "personal toilet coach," and become the pioneer in a whole new realm of self-improvement science, teaching others how to assume the manly "wide stance" and become more effective leaders.
So, while the price of oil ratcheted up hour by hour, the ASPO conference members heard from an impressive range of experts who have been leading the public conversation on the Peak Oil story - with no help from the mainstream media or the political sector. Among them were Robert Hirsch, co-author of the now-famous 2005 Hirsch Report, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, which, much to the consternation of its sponsor, first told the nation in no uncertain terms that it was heading for a catastrophic set of disruptions in "normal" American life if we heedlessly continued energy business-as-usual. Hirsch went a little further now, two years on, than he had in his famous report, predicting a future of "oil export withholding," panicked markets, and allocation disturbances that would make the 1973 OPEC embargo look like a golden age.
Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, who has worked tirelessly to lift public awareness of Peak Oil, also raised the specter of shortages, telling the audience that market allocation problems in the near future would almost certainly induce "hoarding behavior" among the public that would cripple the economy, lead to enforced rationing, and shock the nation. Simmons compared the current public mood over energy issues to a "fog of war." He also repeated his oft-stated opinion that the drilling rigs and other equipment used around the world to pump oil out of the ground are so uniformly old and decrepit that they pose a problem every bit as dire as peak oil itself. In the meantime, he said, to offset climbing prices, the developed nations have lately dipped so deeply into their accumulated stocks of crude and "refined product" that some countries may breach what is called their "minimum operating levels." Offstage, he told me, "We're too preoccupied trying to figure out the exact date of the peak. Meanwhile, we'll drain the gasoline pool and it will be gone forever."
The other most significant contribution came from Texas geologist Jeffrey Brown who presented a full-blown version of his theory that world export rates from the countries with oil to sell are liable to decline so much more sharply than their actual production decline rates that the world would be thrust into an oil export crisis within the next five years - and that this export crisis would turn out to be the defining condition of the Peak Oil story.
There were plenty of other fruitful contributions on subjects ranging from the future of the airline industry to reviving passenger rail service, to the question of nuclear power. And there was one real clunker presentation by a shill from the Toyota corporation, designed to blow green smoke up the audience's ass about the future of happy motoring (Toyota's products will save it from Peak Oil).
For coverage of the particulars, visit TheOilDrum.com, the nation's best energy discussion website.
If there were reporters from the mainstream media present at this event, I didn't run into of them. They are apparently uninterested in the fate of industrial economies, at least as long as Senator Larry Craig is out there on the frontiers of toilet coaching science, and Britney Spears is still sparring with K-Fed, and Diddy is beating people up in nightclubs, and people are murdering their friends for dissing their dogs.
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