Petrocollapse roundup: Ruppert
Posted by Yankee on October 5, 2005 - 9:28pm in The Oil Drum: Local
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: government, peak oil, petrocollapse [list all tags]
As Stuart did for the Community Solutions conference, peakguy and I will be writing a series of posts over the next couple of days about the Petrocollapse conference that was held in New York City today. There were many interesting speakers, and we'll get to all of them, but I wanted to start with Mike Ruppert. Now, I know Ruppert is a controversial figure, and he's been discussed (not necessarily positively) on TOD before. Before seeing him speak today, I hadn't really read much of the From the Wilderness publications, but when I came home I scanned the website, and on the recommendation of JLA's comment in the above linked story, I read the Nation article about him. When it comes to 9/11, he seems pretty nutty. And with respect to peak oil, he's firmly in the apocalypticon camp. Still, he's a dynamic speaker, and I can see people being easily convinced by his message, at least as it was delivered today. Many of you will no doubt be worried by that.
Ruppert firmly believes that the government certainly knows about peak oil and has started preparing for it, although their solutions are not what the American people will want to see. He started off his speech by mentioning a comment made by Dutch economist Maarten van Mourik at the 2003 ASPO conference. As repeated on Kunstler's website, van Mourik reported to the ASPO attendees that "deep water drilling would not add significantly to the world's oil reserve, that it did not make sense economically, and ultimately could only produce five billion barrels. Van Mourik also made the interesting observation that, 'it may not be profitable to slow decline.'" With this in mind, Ruppert proclaimed that "until we change the way money works, we won't do anything to fix peak oil."
Ruppert reminded the crowd about the Hirsch report (I forget—was it ever re-released or not?), which said that if we only initiate action when the peak occurs, there will be a liquid fuel shortfall of 2 decades. Since Ruppert believes the peak is already upon his, he takes this to mean that there will only be a shortfall because after 2 decades, there will have been enough of a die-off to go back to a lifestyle where the populations may be able to use liquid fuels again.
Ruppert then outlined several steps that the government will take in the face of the energy crisis. If Ruppert is right about the timing of the peak, then we should see this as a set of predictions that will soon be verified or debunked.
- Rationing. Ruppert believes that because of treaties that have been signed with the IEA, they can come into the US and impose rationing on the American people without making the federal government look bad. [I think rationing is possible in the near future, but we'll have to wait to see see whether or not Ruppert was right about blaming it on the IEA]
- Coal. Brian Schweitzer of Montana thinks we can fuel US transportation for a long time using Fischer-Tropsch.
- Critical infrastructure. The government will do whatever it must to protect military, police, fire, internet, electral power generation, pipelines, airports, water supplies, food processing, highways, ports. [This doesn't sound so terrible to me, except that they might do it by increased domestic military powers—which was actually another one of his predictions.]
- Strengthening FEMA. Ruppert warns us that FEMA's primary job is to protect critical infrastructure, not human lives. [I'm not predisposed to believe this, but the handling of Katrina didn't do much to instill confidence.]
- Suspend minimum wage laws and change and tighten bankruptcy laws. The second has already been done, and the president has set a bad precedent regarding the former in New Orleans, where he suspended the Davis Bacon act, which requires federal contractors to pay prevailing wage.
- Allow and facilitate population reduction through famine and disease. [Yes, the message got increasingly hysterical. I think there was some mention of the bird flu here]
- No combination of alternative energy can replace petroleum [to maintain our current lifestyles, I think he meant]
- Even if it could, we'd need 30 years to develop a plan. PO is here now, and the current infrastructure simply cannot be maintained.
- No government will be able to do anything (federal or state).
- Until we change the way money works, we change nothing.
- All real solutions will be local and will originate at a grassroots level.
As an addendum, since I know you're all interested: the participants were about 80% business professional, middle class white American types. I was surprised at how few gray ponytails there were (no offense intended, of course).
I thought such talk was a crock of Shit. However, Bush commenting on using the military for purposes of quarantine during a flu pandemic had my jaw dropping to the floor (is this Bush testing the waters?). None of us should take democracy for granted and any developments in this direction should be followed closely. If other PO people have further info, please share.
There is actually a very brutal fact in this ... simulations show that to enforce a true quarintine, troops would have to be willing to kill Americans attempting to run roadblocks. In all simulations, even when the soldiers and National Guardsmen were shootin blanks ... they refused to shoot those blanks at the civilians.
This is harsh math, but in the simulations "not killing" a few hundred at roadblocks leads to (in worst cases) millions dying in other cities.
Not nice, but I believe that really is the way it goes.
* - I suppose a historian would say it goes by thousands of years.
When thinking about big picture, when the question is about saving human species, you have to give away such humanism-christianity which tells not to kill a human. When there is 5 billion large carnivorous too many on this tiny planet with huge consumption rate, this species nor, in the worst case, even the whole biosphere has no future if human population is so huge. If human species if important to you, start killing people. If not, why not kill yourself right away, how can one human life be important, while the whole species future is not. Every act of terror which decreases consumption and/or production will give this biosphere few more minutes, days or perhaps years.
That is a really crazy statement and I am sorry to see it repeated here. In their latest newsletter, ASPO made an oil depletion revision putting deepwater at 54 Gb and the (world) peak out to about 2010/2011 based on that revision. Deepwater probably peaks at about 2011 to 2013 based on what I've seen though there are technical challenges (as well as hurricanes) that make all this risky to predict.
We could really do very nicely talking about peak oil without this hysterical hyperbole.
Re: "diversity of opinions"
There is no significant diversity of opinions as far as expected outcomes goes from deepwater oil. What I don't want to see is for us to look like fools as far as CERA, Michael Lynch and some others think. I don't want to be associated with statements like the one I referenced above.
I imagine both are very good speakers. I was impressed with both of them in the movie End of Suburbia, which I found a very professional documentary.
But they are both stuck clocks. They are entertaining and amusing. But I really don't see either as harboring a great respect for truth. They produce the results they want to produce irrespective of the input data. Therefore I think, over time, they should be ignored. They are dead weights that will become more of a burden than a benefit.
Here's one example story about this:
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/05/bush.reax/
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist or totally falling in line with Mike Ruppert's comments, it sure sounds an awful lot like what Ruppert is talking about. Unfortunately, this type of thing is not unprecedented (i.e. Germany pre-WWII).
The slow but steady march that this Presidential administration has been making away from our hard won democratic freedoms, and their sheer lack of respect for real science worries me greatly.
In light of the fact that this administration is more connected to the oil industry than any other in history would lead me to believe that they know more about the Peak Oil situation than any of us bloggers do. There have also been some excellent and very reputable news publications that have detailed how the US military is realigning itself around the world and building "enduring" bases in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Who knows what to think anymore in this time of information overload. All I know is I don't have a real good feeling in my gut when I think about how our national leaders appear to be reacting to the growing uncertainties around the world.
In 1938 the word "fascism" hadn't yet been transferred into an abridged metaphor for all the world's unspeakable evil and monstrous crime, and on coming across President Roosevelt's prescient remark in one of Umberto Eco's essays, I could read it as prose instead of poetry - a reference not to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or the pit of Hell but to the political theories that regard individual citizens as the property of the government, happy villagers glad to wave the flags and wage the wars, grateful for the good fortune that placed them in the care of a sublime leader. Or, more emphatically, as Benito Mussolini liked to say, "Everything in the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state."
The theories were popular in Europe in the 1930s (cheering crowds, rousing band music, splendid military uniforms), and in the United States they numbered among their admirers a good many important people who believed that a somewhat modified form of fascism (power vested in the banks and business corporations instead of with the army) would lead the country out of the wilderness of the Great Depression - put an end to the Pennsylvania labor troubles, silence the voices of socialist heresy and democratic dissent.
Roosevelt appreciated the extent of fascism's popularity at the political box office; so does Eco, who takes pains in the essay "Ur-Fascism", published in The New York Review of Books in 1995, to suggest that it's a mistake to translate fascism into a figure of literary speech. By retrieving from our historical memory only the vivid and familiar images of fascist tyranny (Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys at Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives that sustained the tyrant's rise to glory. The several experiments with fascist government, in Russia and Spain as well as in Italy and Germany, didn't depend on a single portfolio of dogma, and so Eco, in search of their common ground, doesn't look for a unifying principle or a standard text. He attempts to describe a way of thinking and a habit of mind, and on sifting through the assortment of fantastic and often contradictory notions - Nazi paganism, Franco's National Catholicism, Mussolini's corporatism, et cetera - he finds a set of axioms on which all the fascisms agree. Among the most notable:
If we were going to make this movie (my term for a semi-plausible alternate reality), we'd do it with a President who was still believed when he talked about bogey men.
I don't mean to give him credit for ideas he didn't invent, but Mike does have an amazing way of plucking seemingly inconsequestial news items from the chaff of the MSM and making people notice them. I think part of that ability comes from his years as a detective with the LAPD -- an experince which I'm sure helped him finely attune his bullsh*t detector to get to the bottom of the important stuff.
Yeah, NOW Bush is talking about Avian Flu, Quarantines, mobilizing the military for domestic response. This is all stuff Ruppert started talking about a LONG time ago. Next we'll be hearing how FEMA (or some revamped version of it) will divide the country up into 10 more-easily governed regions as the case warrants. Mike's got his finger on the pulse of how this Government operates, so I wouldn't write him off as "nutty" so quickly. (I'm not so convinced with claims of gov complicity in 9/11, but at the same time, I also do recogize the need for the gov to find a new enemy in the post-Soviet/Cold War era -- so maybe he's not entirely off-base in this regard).
In the end, what it comes down to is the proverbial 'canary in the coal mine'. Will you act on that warning when you hear it by preparing... or just go about business as usual and find out the hard way?
I'm choosing the former.
Command and Control is a very interesting thing. We tend to hate it, but when we really need it, we beg for it. The obvious example of this is Hurricane Katrina. Notice that only when the threat of force was applied to the people, were they calmed and subdued enough to begin helping. In a perfect world, anarchy is king. But in a world where people are not making decisions based on the greater good, but decisions hard-wired into their brains through years of evolution, violence is appealing as it is an immediate trigger. There is nothing like the possibility of meeting instant, molten-lead death to make you compliant. And while it seems naseua inducing, if 10,000 American citizens are murdered in one city because they cannot overpower their instincts, and end up trying to violate a quarentine, then it's tragic, but it's the best alternative to cascading the problem and causing 10 million more deaths. This describes Control, and is a necessary evil in our evil society.
The two problems that come up on the other side, command, is where the lines between CaC and fascism blur. A) Who watches the watchers? Again, as Katrina showed, the people who are primarily in charge of enforcing control are tied to the people they are controlling. Not only are they compelled to not hold control so they can take care of their families during tragedy, they also are made up from the society. National guardsmen, for instance, are regular people, seperate from those who issue command. Since absolute control is needed, there is a cracking of the whip up the entire command chain, which in it's ultimate conclusion leads to extreme consolidation of power onto an individual or onto a close oligarchical group. It's at this point, free from opposition that the truely nasty things happen. B) What if command, as often the case, is ineffectual? The leaders in our society tend not to know much about the reins of control. Yes, they direct our government in normal operations, passing legislation, even authorizing military actions, but all of those are different than leading an operation bent on saving an entire society (especially when military leadership is about second against the wall behind the intellectuals). This particular case is nearly without precedent.
So, to recap.. control, unfortunently the tighter, the better.. command, necessary, but best if decentralized and effectual. Basically, the hardest combination to pull off in the best of times. Let's just hope, pray, or politick our own Hitler.*
*Yea, I know what you're thinking. Don't go there. You know exactly what I mean by this.
Untrue. I read many stories from Katrina in which people helped, both individually and in groups, without any threat of force. In fact, even in a power vacuum.
There were many other stories where people tried to help, and the authorities wouldn't let them.
And even a few stories of FEMA doing direct damage (cutting emergency communication lines).
Central government isn't always bad, but it sure was bad this time around.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/386
It would seem that our border issues are being ignored for a reason, welcome NAFTA PLUS. immigration is one thing. but it's really about securing resouces. esp OIL!
I think most folks simply lack understanding of what has happened in the past and therefore discount the possibility of what's going on right in front of our very eyes (Iran 1953, Chile 1973, Operation Northwoods, etc, etc...)
Of course I hope he is wrong but I think everyone should do their own DD and plan accordingly. It's your life.
When I read them all (and I do read them all with great respect and attentiveness), I distinctly detect that their prognostications for the future are intimately affected by their underlying value systems. In Kunstler's case, this can be summed up as a hatred of suburbia and an idealization of small-town rural living. In Heinberg's case, this can be summed up as a hatred of 20th century American culture with all of its attendant deceit, brutality, and hypocrisy, and an idealization of a hunter-gatherer's intimate connection to nature. In Ruppert's case (with whom I personally identify most closely in this regard), this can be summed up as a passionate, visceral, bottomless hatred of lies, hypocrisy, brutality, and injustice masquerading as virtue and goodness.
I teach logic, and I have a pretty keen sense for non-sequiturs. I think a close study of the writings of all the aforementioned will reveal significant non-sequiturs, whereby they stretch the evidence that they present to conclusions that extend beyond what is strictly in accord with logic. The purpose of these "stretches," of course, is to bend the data in a plausible yet still inconclusive way to fit their pre-conceived value systems. This tendency emerges most controversially when they prognosticate about the future.
But let's be real here, ladies and gentlemen: Do we not all do this all the time? Is any one of us perfectly logical all the time in our thinking patterns? Is any one of us free from the tendency to impose pre-conceived and inadequately examined value systems on our analysis of the data? Can any one of us really say - with justice - that we are any less prone to this than Kunstler, Ruppert, and Heinberg?
I have already announced what my own pre-conceived interpretive framework and operative value-system is, and I will repeat it here: All of these events, horrific as they may become, are unfolding within the guidance of God's loving Providence; and their purpose is to inaugurate Jesus the Messiah's Glorious Kingdom - which will bring the world to a state of peace and bliss better than any one of us can imagine.
That is my pre-conceived interpretive framework. I think I can ably demonstrate that faith in it is reasonable. All of you who doubt me - or who doubt Ruppert, Heinberg, and Kunstler - I ask you this: Have YOU asssured yourself that the value system that constitutes YOUR interpretive framework is based on anything other than blind faith? And have YOU, who doubt the conclusions that Kunstler, Ruppert, Heinberg, and myself draw by applying these interpretive frameworks assured yourself that you are NEVER guilty of glaring non-sequiturs along the way?
We are all fallible, ladies and gentlemen - Ruppert, Heinberg, Kunstler, myself - and all of you as well. Only God is infallible.
And it is because in our world facts do not exist. There are only interpetations of percieved facts.
Let alone when you try to interpolate the percieved facts to hypotetical facts in the future.
The fascinating thing is that most everyone discounts the Nazis even when its clear as day that they shouldn't.
Evil doesn't come with a flashing neon sign over its head, rather it's a warm bath that slowly but surely heats up until it boils you alive.
It would be nice to discount Ruppert because I prefer that he be crazy, but that doesn't mean he is. The one and only time I've ever seen him was when I went to one of his WTC lectures to laugh at the whackos. I wasn't laughing when I left. Anyone who doesn't think the official 9/11 story stinks needs to explain why WTC 7 collapsed: there is no logical explanation that fits with the offical story.
No one knows how or why WTC 7 collapsed. The visual evidence points to an implosion because that is how imploded building s come down. Now, if they imploded WTC 7 and won't admit it what else are they hiding?
Go to wtc7.net and watch the videos. If you want to see some comparison explosions check out implosionworld.com.
When The New Republic reviewed The Long Emergency, the synopsis was, and I'm paraphrasing: Important message. Too bad its delivered by someone lacking in credibility.
Maybe I'm wrong. Ruppert seems an opportunist. He is driven by conspiracy theories. Little more. I don't find any grander theme to his thinking. Kunstler, on the other hand, has a very sensible and respectable thesis on suburban life. I happen to think he's right in his reaction, e.g. his comments about the missalocation of resources, in particular the automobile and lifestyle hinged upon it. And Heinberg seems similar motivated--though less mean spirited.
But focusing on Ruppert. Let's use Occam's Razor here. I agree with Stuart. Be cautious attributing to conspiracy what can easily be attribute to incompetence.
But we have a problem with all these conspiracy theories. The US government spreads these fantastic stories about those evil terrorists that may have or almost certainly have or could get WMDs and are ready to use them in the US and everywhere. True or not but this is clearly a conspiracy theory. They claim that this very wide secret network really exists. They insist officially that there is a large conspiracy and many foreign governments are part of it. If we would call them "Illuminati" or "Jews" or something we would be considered nuts. If we call them "al-Qaeida" we would be serious. If we say that the US government has connections to terrorists we are considered as nuts. If we say that foreign governments have we are serious.
Conspiracy theories are usually not very useful in explaining social or political phenomena. Conspiracy people belong to the fringe. But if the US goverment says otherwise they are either nuts or those theories can be serious. Both ways it is really discouraging.
Al-Qaeda = conspiracy theory: Excellent point.
Double standard on conspiracy theories: Excellent point.
Lots of conspiracy theories are bogus, but rejecting them all just because of how they're framed is not wise. The way it is today, a gang of conspirators could get away with anything: they just need to start an Internet rumor of what they just did, framing it as a conspiracy theory, and anyone who tries to talk about it will be ignored.
Sure, parts of the gov't are bloated, incompetent, etc. but I struggle to believe that's the case at the highest levels of the military and intellegence in this country.
I think a lot of Peak Oilers don't want anything to do with Ruppert because he promotes ideas that many Americans just cannot accept, true or not.
Yes, most Americans don't want anything to do with the Peak Oilers, because they promote ideas that many Americans just cannot accept, true or not.
Amen. I've spent much of my career as a consultant to various federal agencies, and this is so true. You won't find many conspiracy theorists among the consultants and bureaucrats who actually run things on a day-to-day basis.
imo For 911, Griffin is the best for a treatment of the whole story that is readable and rational. Ruppert's "Rubicon" is an amazing work, but I wasn't able to digest the whole thing.
I also agree with most of the opinion here on Kunstler. I loved his book, even though it was rhetorically over the top. But at the same time, I think he will be proved correct on many of his prophecies. The fate of the southwest, the breakdown of maintenence of the highway system, the end of long haul trucking, end of big box stores etc... I also loathe and regret suburbia.
Thanks to all for this great discussion and to Oil Drum.
Since Ruppert has put himself in the business of predicting the probable outcome of events, whether we should put stock in him should be judged by the accuracy of his predictions. If his predictions are exaggerated and inaccurate, we should question why we should trust further predictions from him, and why he should continue as a spokesman for these issues.
Very recently, a couple of days before Rita hit, he predicted that barring divine intervention, Rita would be the finishing blow for America, our nation no longer exists in a recognizable form. He did not qualify his prediction other than to say 'barring divine intervention'. Now, we could say each time he is wrong that God must have divinely intervened. Or maybe he was just flat wrong and prone to exaggerated predictions.
Last time I checked, we still exist. We have some difficult problems to address, but our government and nation continues to function. We will struggle to some extent through this winter, with equal parts energy and finance problems. What happens after, only God knows.
Ruppert may have some good points; but on balance he has become a casualty of his own self-promotion and desire to be the first kid on the block with the most scintillating prediction. He exists in some kind of positive celebrity feedback loop with Kunstler and Heinberg independent of reality or accountability. They may be marginally useful