Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Iraq: World's Number One Oil Producer? - 4


In the last episode Dredd Blog mentioned a twisty little factor of the Oilah Akbar religion that inspires the flow of civilization's drug of choice:
"Remember first that the top producer is necessarily the one bringing the most out of the ground, but not necessarily the one with the most in the ground"
(Iraq: World's Number One Oil Producer? - 3). Thus, it is not impossible for a nation with the second-most or third-most quantity in the ground to be the first-place holder when it comes to taking it out of the ground.

That is simply a matter of pump speed.

Now that Chernobyl II is underway in Japan, the Japan disaster can be used to make oil "look good" again, as blogger disaffected said a day or so ago.

It is not entirely unreasonable to expect the oil drug peddlers to begin to start harping about the need for more "safe oil" and "clean coal".

Iraq oil is under MOMCOM control, so look for the time in the near future when the pumps are turned on full bore there.

A quote from a nuclear expert concerning unfolding events in Japan lends credence to the likelihood that nuclear addiction can be fatal:
A U.S. nuclear expert said he feared the worst.

"It's more of a surrender," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who now heads the nuclear safety program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an activist group. "It's not like you wait 10 days and the radiation goes away. In that 10 days things are going to get worse."

"It's basically a sign that there's nothing left to do but throw in the towel," Lochbaum said.
(Towel Glows In The Dark). China has been persuaded to re-think the nuclear addiction:
China has become the latest nation to re-think its nuclear plans following the situation in Japan. The State Council in Beijing announced tonight that it will suspend approval of new nuclear projects until new safety rules are introduced, the Wall Street Journal reports.
(Guardian). So now will we see drill baby drill on steroids to prove that the oil addiction is also terminal?

The next post in this series is here., the previous post in this series is here.

5 comments:

  1. Somehow this reminds me of the time when a journalist asked Gandhi what he thought of "Western civilization", to which he replied, "I think it would be a very good idea".

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  2. Yep, "drill baby drill" and "frack baby frack' will be the rallying cry from here on out, even though drill baby drill dealt us a major environmental disaster just last year. Thanks to the miracle or Corexit and a massive joint marketing/PR campaign by BP and their sycophant toadies in the US government, the toxic evidence is safely out of sight out of mind at the bottom of the Gulf, where it can only bother native marine life, which don't really matter anyway.

    Meanwhile, Japan's got a generational disaster on its hands now, even after the earthquake and tsunami damage is all cleaned up. Of course they STILL sit on a highly active fault zone which shows no signs of calming down just yet, so who knows what the future holds in store. Troubling times indeed.

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  3. disaffected,

    "they STILL sit on a highly active fault zone which shows no signs of calming down just yet"

    True dat. We sit on a more dangerous fault zone, the Cascadia which gens about a 9.0 about every 240 years according to the geological and other records.

    The last quake off Washington / Oregon generated a tsunami that killed people in far away Japan circa 1700 AD.

    The tidal wave in Washington, Oregon, and California will do more damage than the Japan quake did because, strangely enough, Japan is more prepared than the USA.

    It has been 311 years since the last quake, so it is overdue about 7 decades.

    Raw Story

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  4. Dredd Blog says "Chernobyl II is underway in Japan" which sounds over the top compared to some of the pabulum news, however an American nuclear power plant dude says:

    “That would be like Chernobyl on steroids,” said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1.

    Link

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  5. Dredd,

    Who knows, the way things have been going lately we might hit the trifecta and get activity on the Cascadia, the Hayward, and the San Andreas all at once or within a short period of each other. Any single one of those could generate enough personal, infrastructure, and/or financial damage to bring an insolvent and politically rancorous US to its knees.

    On the plus side, maybe such an event would finally help bring about the end of MOMCOM wars of imperialism. Paradoxically, it would probably result in the complete opposite. Either that or the wars returning home to be waged on the American citizenry.

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