The Peak of The Oil Lies - 2

"Everyone loves the stuff"

In the first post of this series we watched and listened to some expert observers discussing government "spin" about the peak of oil.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has several ongoing series which deal with various aspects of the issue of dependence and addiction to dirty, polluting oil.

You might want to check out or review some of these few examples taken from a long list (The Peak of Health And The Peak of Oil, The Peak Of The Oil Wars, A Peek At The Peak Oil Catastrophe, and Iraq: World's Number One Oil Producer?).

We have also discussed why addiction to this toxic oil "drug" is more critical than the issues involved with other drugs, which the "war on drugs" is concerned with, because of what becomes instantly clear when one hears what the U.S. Department of Energy thinks of oil:

A website of the federal government tells us:

"Oil is the lifeblood of America’s economy."

(Department of Energy [they removed it, so here is The Wayback Machine copy of that page: Department of Energy]). Which is the same thing as saying you are economically dead without your blood, your oil.

The struggle for economic life then, would be the struggle for oil would it not?

Bush II put it in the cowboy language during a state of the union address to congress, saying that "America is addicted to oil".

(The Fleets and Terrorism Follow The Oil). The official government understanding is that the U.S. is economically dead without oil.

It is not difficult to see, then, why they conceive the issue as being a matter of national security.

But their "solution" is to change drug dealers, rather than kicking the habit, as we pointed out in a recent post:

Consider that one similar theme at the two [presidential election] conventions was "let's get off foreign oil", that is, let's use local oil instead of foreign oil so that we will be more secure.

This theme will eventually give rise to "all oil is local", but how does that help with the addiction to dirty oil, because we must still ask "is local oil clean, is local coal clean, and is local pollution clean?"

Additionally we must ask "is the big issue concerning oil addiction who the dealer is?"

If we simply become our own oil drug peddler, does that heal our oil addiction?

Are we brazen enough to think that our oil is not addictive, our oil does not pollute, in effect saying "our you know what does not stink?"

The only sane way to look at this issue is of course to grasp the reality of the damage which the addiction does, and to stop using the drug no matter who is selling it, because not using the oil drug anymore is the only solution ...

(New Drug Dealer - Same Addiction). So in today's post we are taking off the kid gloves because in the end these lies about oil addiction are going to end up costing many, many lives:

Analysts at a New York-based research firm believe that the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (Opec’s) global oil reserve statements could be inflated by as much as 70%.
...
He explained certain Opec members were deliberately increasing their stated oil reserves to flout Opec regulations, which allowed oil-producing countries to only produce oil at a rate calculated as a certain percentage of its total reserves.

“We now know that the numbers are significantly inflated. The model we have built from available data shows that Opec reserve statements could be overstated by as much as 70%,” Nariani said.

Nariani, who is co-authoring a report, ‘The Race to Replace Reserves’, which is due for publication during the next couple of weeks, told Mining Weekly Online that the official figures did not add up. He said that given certain new discoveries of oil, such as in Venezuela and certain technological advances which allow for previously uneconomical known deposits to be exploited, many Opec countries continued to increase their oil reserves, without announcing any new discoveries, and, all that while producing significant amounts of oil.

Nariani and report co-author Brent Giles believe global oil reserves would be depleted much sooner than thought.

(Engineering News, 10/4/2012, emphasis added). That would mean that "the lifeblood" of the U.S.eh?, and even civilization itself, has not been as secure as was once faithfully believed.

It also explains all the propaganda in the media lately about the availability of oil here in North America, the "drill baby drill" mantra promulgated by The Private Empire, and President Obama's personal involvement to help with Shell's Arctic drilling efforts.

To simplify the explanation, these mentioned activities are simply panic now, because we reached The Peak of Sanity a while back, but didn't notice then.

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