Furious discussions taking place in energy circles as to how much who is producing. "We are driving in the dark at full speed with our lights off."
The top link is to a good summary of the current Middle East crisis and includes the strangeness of trying to blame Iran for it. Dire warnings of a Bush attack on Iran, seen as inevitable. Brief mention is given of the Trilateral Commission Report - Is There a Plan B? - and plan for the region!
Ward’s presentation was remarkable for its depiction of Bush and Ahmadinejad as two sides of the same coin. Both need external conflict to maintain domestic legitimacy, and both are right-wing hard-liners supported by religious fundamentalists; they are also unpopular at home and habitually rely on bravado to boost their image....ADDED: More on the disaster of an Iran confrontation.
Questions about the real size of Kuwait’s oil reserves have emerged in the Kuwaiti National Assembly, leading the opposition party to call for production cuts. Remarkably, Kuwait appears to be groping toward implementation of the Oil Depletion Protocol, without ever having heard of it. However, from the standpoint of nations that want to keep the oil flowing so the global industrial party can continue, this is bad news.
Even worse news, potentially, comes from Saudi Arabia, where oil flows have shrunk by some 400,000 barrels per day over the past few months, despite astronomic prices. No one knows for sure what is going on....
Some commentators speculate that we are seeing the slow-motion commencement of World War III (or IV or V, depending on who’s counting). I have no interest in fueling apocalyptic speculations. My strong wish is for a quick and peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Hezbollah-Lebanese conflict, a US stand-down from confrontation with Iran, and a speedy, voluntary US exit from Iraq....
We have many reasons to hope that events are not spinning out of control.
2 comments:
Michel Chossudovsky asks “Is there a relationship between the bombing of Lebanon and the inauguration of the World’s largest strategic pipeline, which will channel more than a million barrels of oil a day to Western markets?"
http://www.thepeakist.com/the-war-on-lebanon-and-the-battle-for-oil/
The Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported in April 2003 that Israel was seriously considering restarting a strategically important oil pipeline that once transferred oil from the Iraqi city of Mosul to Israel’s northern port of Haifa. As The Asian Times reported at the time:
“Given the Israeli claim of a positive US approach to the plan, the Israeli project provides grounds for a theory that the ongoing war against Iraq is in part a joint US, British and Israeli design for reshaping the Middle East to serve their particular interests, including their oil requirements.”
As acknowledged by then Israeli National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky, a prerequisite for the project was both a new regime in Baghdad with friendly ties with Israel and a new regime in Syria, no longer allied with Iran, to support and protect the pipeline crossing its territory. The alternative, longer, route for the pipeline through Jordan was not discussed suggesting that the Israelis were optimistic at this point about a regime change in Syria in the near future.
see http://www.thepeakist.com/act-ii-in-the-war-for-middle-eastern-oil/
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