Antony Loewenstein

My essay in Australian literary journal Overland last year discussed the energy crisis and denial in the West of dwindling resources.

Hello, reality (from the Independent):

The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned.

Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation, or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy supplies by OECD countries.

In an interview with The Independent, Dr Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years – at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.

But the first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago. On top of this, there is a problem of chronic under-investment by oil-producing countries, a feature that is set to result in an “oil crunch” within the next five years which will jeopardise any hope of a recovery from the present global economic recession, he said.

The International Energy Agency has released a date it claims is the point after which we’ll hit peak oil.

2020.

Comedy gold from a deluded former Virginia governor:

America is addicted to oil. What an elitist point of view. Americans are not addicted to oil. Americans are addicted to freedom — the freedom and liberty to move where and when we want.

No, it’s perfectly healthy to be raping the energy reserves of the planet’s most repressive regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, to fund military adventures in the Middle East and SUVs.

What will the rich have to cope with next?

Fuel prices have grounded an unexpected frequent-flyer: US hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.

Combs complained about the “too high” price of fuel and pleaded for free oil from his “Saudi Arabia brothers and sisters” in a YouTube video posted on Wednesday.

What price for human rights in the search for oil resources?

The Pentagon as Energy Insecurity Inc. (and where it all started):

It’s to Iran the West should look for secure energy.

Why democracy doesn’t matter when poor, African states have boundless amounts of black gold.

The new world order that forces us to recognise our energy needs are shifting profoundly. Oil is running out:

Zionist indignation recently followed this news:

The New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has condemned a Swiss-Iranian natural gas export deal, accusing Switzerland of financing terrorism.

“As the Swiss government pursues its own narrow economic interests, it is bankrolling the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” declared one of the messages in the full-page advertisement the group took out in Tuesday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and several other international and Swiss newspapers.

Unfortunately, Swiss-based journalist Shraga Elam recently reported in German that Israel is purchasing oil from the “evil empire”:

“Israel imports Iranian oil on a large scale even though contacts with Iran and purchasing of its products are officially boycotted by Israel. Israel gets around the boycott by having the oil delivered via Europe. A reliable Israeli energy newsletter, EnergiaNews, reported this last week [March 18] …

“The report by EnergiaNews editor Moshe Shalev states that the Iranian oil reaches various European ports, mainly in Rotterdam. It is bought by Israelis and the necessary European bill of lading and insurance papers are supplied. Then it is transported to Haifa in Israel. The importer is the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Co (EAPC), which keeps its oil sources secret.”

The selective outrage and hypocrisy is stunning.

George Bush, in his annual state of the union address, highlighted so-called Iranian-backed extremism in the Middle East.

The reality in Iran, however, is rarely examined by the mainstream media. Noted Iranian writer Nasrin Alavi, now based in London, argues that Ahmadinejad’s regime is decreasing in popularity due to its economic failures and overblown rhetoric:

The disillusion with the United States among many Iranians has meant that the hopes and energies for change are increasingly grounded in the domestic troubles of the regime. The people’s frustrations with the government’s economic mismanagement are rising at a moment when an important electoral test – elections to the 290-seat majlis (parliament) on 14 March 2008 – is approaching.  

In routine circumstances, the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters would at such a time seek to heighten the confrontational rhetoric against the US, mobilising nationalist sentiment against revolutionary Iran’s number-one enemy. On this occasion, the tactic may be less effective, for two reasons.

First, the US’s national intelligence estimate (NIE) published on 3 December 2007 controverted the White House’s portrayal of the alleged Iranian nuclear peril, thus going a little way to defuse tension and undermine the portrayal by Iranian authorities (and in particular by Ahmadinejad himself) of an immediate threat from the US (see “Iran: the uses of intelligence“, 6 December 2007). Second, most Iranian citizens are so hard-pressed by their daily circumstances that their concern is not with foreign policy or how their country’s nuclear-energy programme is perceived, but with their economic condition and how to improve it.

This is bad news for the president. Ahmadinejad had campaigned for the presidency in June 2005 on an economic platform, and won power by tapping into the vein of popular anger against corruption and cronyism and promising to create jobs and security for Iran’s poor and deprived. In the middle of his third year in office, the hopes he raised have largely dissipated: the government has introduced petrol rationing, and there has been disruption in gas supplies and more than sixty deaths amid a spell of severely cold weather – all this in the country that is the fourth-largest oil producer in the world, and has the second-largest natural-gas resources.

None of this suggests that a greater reformist period is coming, Alavi writes, but rather a new governing order.

A new documentary, Battle for Basra, outlines the struggles over the city and its vast oil reserves. Suffice to say, this is the real significance of the war and why the carnage will continue for years to come: