Cutting through the machinations and effects of the US empire
Rain followed by snow
A dusting, seen here on the old Honda, was nice after an inch of rain melted the ice
I won't complain about the weather the last few days. It has been dank and wet, but very mild in temperature until this afternoon. All the ice melted in the driveway, a good thing! Now with a cold fron has come a little fluffy snow to dress things up nice.
Crisis mounts while large refinery remains shut; cuts in fuel subsidies in the wake of policy-making demanded by IMF
US and US-puppet control of Iraq's oil industry has resulted in a failure to regain pre-invasion production levels. Meanwhile, Iraq's domestic fuel prices triple overnight.
According to a BBC report:Iraqi Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum has been temporarily released from his post amid a dispute over the government's petrol pricing policy. He is to be replaced for 30 days by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi.
Chalabi is the quintessential fraudster (see this Guardian story from April 2003 for full details, though Jordan has apparently forgiven Chalabi). Furthermore, no single human being is more responsible for generating the phony intelligence that led to war than Chalabi. There are plenty of stories on this, start here and here.
Corruption has been off the charts since the US took over international guardianship of Iraq's oil accounts in May 2003 with the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483. Billions of dollars literally have disappeared unaccounted since. This largely unreported scandal dwarfs in size and level of official corruption the much-ballyhooed irregularities of the Saddam-era Oil-for-Food program.
Deep Blade Journal has in the past covered aspects of this corruption here, here and here.
Now the whole Iraqi oil industry threatens to come apart over policies being insisted upon by the international financial class. Crime upon crime continue to be committed under the auspices of the US-Iraq regime.
Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on a trip to Iraq brought what was supposed to sound like good news to weary troops and the US public alike. News outlets typically followed the script, allowing Rumsfeld to to tout minor deployment changes that may mean there will be 7,000-fewer US troops in Iraq compared to some point over the past few months.
Today, Rumsfeld was out on a Christmas Eve happy-face pr shot in the troops serving line, dutifully reported by the Sinclair-owned Portland, Maine CBS affiliate with the quote, ``Certainly no one more than you deserves the Christmas wish of tidings and joy, for that's what you have selflessly given to 25 million Iraqis.''
But elsewhere in the Washington Post on Christmas Eve we learn that ``U.S. airstrikes in Iraq have surged this fall, jumping to nearly five times the average monthly rate earlier in the year, according to U.S. military figures''....
``...townspeople, tribal leaders, medical workers and accounts from witnesses at the sites of clashes, at hospitals and at graveyards indicated that scores of noncombatants were killed last month in fighting, including airstrikes, in the opening stages of a 17-day U.S.-Iraqi offensive in Anbar province. (via Needlenose)
Of course, the military disputes that it is killing anyone who does not deserve killing. Many Iraqis seem to have a different impression.
We need to careNo Relief To Offer
The December 22 decision states that America has imprisoned these men unlawfully, but the court ``has no relief to offer.''
by hilzoy
I have written previously about the case of Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu al-Hakim, the two Uighurs who are still being held at Guantanamo, four years after they were captured by bounty hunters and turned over to the US for cash, and nine months after a tribunal found that -- oops! -- they were not enemy combatants after all. Today the judge who is hearing their case issued an extraordinary decision....
Only when the people of America wake up from our deep dehumanizing slumber will these injustices be corrected. That is my pie-in-the-sky wish for Christmas. Right now I'm working on getting members of my own quite wonderful family to recognize the need for action on this front. The response so far makes me feel like we are on a slippery slope to hell and we don't even know it yet. There is a lot of work to do.
Dreary
Where roses go in winter
Christmas spirit
The weather is turning icky -- ice on the way. Cloudy and dank today... At least there are lots of Christmas figures and lights up in the neighborhood to drive away some of the darkness. Solstice has passed but noticable extra daylight is still weeks away.
One of the last unembedded journalists in Iraq explains what has been voted in
The reporting from Baghdad by Patrick Cockburn of the UK Independent has been invaluable these last few weeks. Here's the topper, published December 21, archived at Counterpunch with the following headline & lede: Iraq Election Spells Total Defeat for US; ``The election, billed by Mr Bush and Mr Blair, as the birth of a new Iraqi state may in fact prove to be its funeral.''
The whole story is worth a read, as are all filed by Cockburn.
Evidently, the US has all but given up trying to shape the elected spectrum in Iraq. (See this post and the Sy Hersh piece from last summer referenced therein about the way the US had thrown its weight around trying to influence the January election.) Now, despite another attempt by the US/UK to bolster their favorite, the hated Iyad Allawi, Islamic fundamentalist movements and Iran-friendly forces are solidifying their positions in the country with real electoral legitimacy and strengthening militia forces.
While not a peep is ever heard here in the US about these actualities of Iraqi politics, the pie-eyed lunacies issued by President Bush get the air play. On Sunday he spoke as a sort of flower child, preaching a togetherness of America and its Iraqi puppets, ``working toward the same goal -- a democratic Iraq that can defend itself, that will never again be a safe haven for terrorists, and that will serve as a model of freedom for the Middle East,'' where, ``the institutions of a unified and lasting democracy, in which all of Iraq's people are included and represented.''
Of course, on this Iraqi unity front, the ``news is encouraging,'' as a ``voter was asked, `Are you Sunni or Shia?' And he responded, `I am Iraqi.'''
Cockburn lays waste to these fantasies with a strong dose of reality,The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-western secular democracy in a united Iraq. Islamic fundamentalist movements are ever more powerful in both the Sunni and Shia communities. ``In two-and-a-half years Bush has succeeded in creating two new Talibans in Iraq,'' said Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator....
It is yet to be see how far away from US interests in key areas the new Iraqi government will be allowed to stray before it finds itself in open conflict with its belligerent occupying allies.
The elections are also unlikely to see a diminution in armed resistance to the US by the Sunni community. Insurgent groups have made clear that they see winning seats in parliament as the opening of another front. The US is trying to conciliate the Sunni by the release of 24 top Baathist leaders without charges. But the main demand of the Sunni resistance is a time table for a US withdrawal without which they are unlikely to agree a ceasefire even if they had the unity to negotiate such an agreement.
Congress and the American people are getting what we asked for in the days following September 11, 2001
The text of H.J. Res. 64, passed through both chambers of the Congress of the United States on September 14, 2001 is as follows:H.J. RES. 64
There's big a problem with all this. Nobody has ever asked President Bush to explain just how ``he determines'' who the ``terrorists'' are and who ``aides'' them. Out of these open-ended authorizations flows the ``legal authority'' President Bush now asserts.
Whereas, on September 11, 2001, acts of treacherous violence were committed against the United States and its citizens; and
Whereas, such acts render it both necessary and appropriate that the United States exercise its rights to self-defense and to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad; and
Whereas, in light of the threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by these grave acts of violence; and
Whereas, such acts continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States; and
Whereas, the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the ‘‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’’.
SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) IN GENERAL.—That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any further acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
(b) WAR POWERS RESOLUTION REQUIREMENTS. —
(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION.—
Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS.
—Nothing in this resolution supercedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution. [emphasis added]
The result has been a worldwide round-up of presidentially-declared ``enemy combatants'' who often disappear into black prisons for torture. These persons never are brought up on charges. The justice of public trials never are afforded these suspects who remain entombed in the American-run gulags.
Now a broad spying program against US citizens has been revealed late and grudgingly by the New York Times.
It's an insanely un-American net of unlimited suspicion for which Congress laid down before Bush in September 2001, and that the president continues to promulgate now:PRESIDENT BUSH, MONDAY: What we quickly learned was that al Qaeda was not a conventional enemy. Some lived in our cities and communities, and communicated from here in America to plot and plan with bin Laden's lieutenants in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. Then they boarded our airplanes and launched the worst attack on our country in our nation's history.
Despite the deadly spectacle of September 11, this is broad-brush over-reaction of the worst kind. It is and always has been absurd to view criminal terrorism as some kind of world war. It is downright defeatism to lay down our civil liberties while discarding legitimate law enforcement as the main tool to protect the country from what are at most a very small number of truly dangerous enemies.
This new threat required us to think and act differently. And as the 9/11 Commission pointed out, to prevent this from happening again, we need to connect the dots before the enemy attacks, not after. And we need to recognize that dealing with al Qaeda is not simply a matter of law enforcement; it requires defending the country against an enemy that declared war against the United States of America.
We need the cooperation of people around the world to root out the genuine terrorists. But conducting war against the people who live above the oil is in fact a surefire method of breeding terrorism instead.
Bush cannot be trusted with the power he accurately claims he was awarded in 2001, as he is proving every day. Will history record that HJ 64 enabled dictatorship in America? Is there a lesson of history from the German Enabling Act of 1933, which asserted that,Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed. [from How Hitler Became a Dictator by Jacob G. Hornberger, quoting a translation of the original declaration passed the day after the Reichstag fire]
President Bush angrily denied he had become a dictator, while denouncing the unnamed person or persons who had leaked details of the spying program to the press. The warning coded into these remarks says to me that we should fear Mr. Bush is fast becoming exactly what he says he is not.
Even if Bush leaves office on schedule in 2009, will the next president maintain the same broad powers? It would be difficult for a new president to resist holding onto them, even if that president projects a less messianic outlook.
Snow!
Several midweek temperature dips down to -12°C finally put this tougher-than-nails broccoli plant out of business
What a difference a week makes this time of year (see same scene last week)
Holly (Ilex opaca)
The snow is welcome. I dislike having the cold weather hit with everything bare, like it did this week. But the snowfall stopped below forecast at a disappointing 2.5 inches that made the roads a mess nonetheless. Meanwhile, data suggests heating oil and natural gas supplies seem adequate for the winter as prices slip from sky-high to sky-high but slightly lower.
``You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.''
That is a line the new Nobel laureate, playwright Harold Pinter, offered as part of an audition to be a speechwriter for President Bush. And my, oh my, the rest of his Nobel Prize Lecture captures the essence of Deep Blade Journal's own view, much better of course than I usually do. When I heard a short excerpt on the BBC hourly news yesterday afternoon (the part I quote here with emphasis) I could imagine the stiff newsreader laying an egg.PINTER: The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
Pinter closes with a message not unlike one Deep Blade Journal has given often -- a cautionary note -- the suggestion that the time for us as citizens of America and Britain to save our souls is slipping away:
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading as a last resort all other justifications having failed to justify themselves as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
Pre-recorded and shown yesterday in Sweden, the whole thing is definitely worth reading. Unfortunately, Pinter suffers from cancer and his health is declining.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us the dignity of man.
Seen at billoreilly.com:
Kos had a note on this and I had to try it myself! For the record, I celebrate the winter solstice because I was born right on it. And I am perfectly happy with a warm Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or whatever. There's far too little love in the world for us to rip on each other about what greeting we use.
There is something wrong if your gut is not churned by this
And it's a Grave Breach under the Geneva Conventions (Articles 50, 51, 130, 147, and the Additional Protocol l of 1977 (Art. 11 and Art. 85), specifically the ``unlawful deportation or transfer'' or ``unlawful confinement'' of protected persons.
What is it the American Terror Warriors do to commit these Grave Breaches? ``They picked up the wrong people'' then,the Rendition Group follow[s] a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.
For Condoleezza Rice to claim this all ``saves lives'' is frankly monstrous. Maximum lives -- American as well as those of citizens of other countries who have had to endure this American savagery will be saved if the architects of these vile policies -- including Ms. Rice --stand before an international tribunal and are held responsible for these crimes.
Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake: German Citizen Released After Months in 'Rendition'
Dana Priest, Washington Post; Sunday, December 4, 2005; Page A01
The president defines a permanent occupation and it is about the oil
In the wake of US Representative John Murtha's quite reasonable call to stop the killing and maiming in Iraq on a rapid timetable, President Bush has begun a sweeping war propaganda campaign. The White House released a ``Victory'' strategy outline and the president began a series of rallying speeeches, the first of which was delivered from Annapolis last Wednesday.
Of course, the Bush strategy is laden with fantasy. I'll just refer to Murtha, the only elected establishment figure, respected by the US military itself, who has come out telling it like it really is in Iraq. Here is how Sy Hersh analyzed the truth of Murtha's position in an interview with Amy Goodman on Tuesday's Democracy Now!:And so, for Murtha to suddenly say it's over, as he did three weeks ago or two weeks ago, as I wrote in this article, it drove the White House crazy. They were beyond mad, as somebody said to me, because they know that the generals are talking to him. So here you have a case where we don't have -- you know, the generals are terrified pretty much, as they always are. That's just the nature of the game. But they don't speak truth to power. They're not telling the American people exactly what's going on, and they're clearly not telling the White House, because the White House doesn't want to hear.
Despite this deep pessimism evidently emanating from the US military itself, President Bush has set forth his ``victory'' agenda in such a way that the US would never leave Iraq. The way President Bush defines ``victory'' -- ``defeating the multi-headed enemy in Iraq -- and ensuring that it cannot threaten Iraq's democratic gains once we leave'' -- in fact ensures permanent US troop presence because the ``democratic gains'' are all defined in terms of US advantage. Gains for the US in Iraq hardly represent the true will of the Iraqi people, so the fight against the ``multi-headed enemy'' is really a fight against most of the Iraqi population. It is clear that the bulk of the Iraqi population never will accept US control of their economy and resources -- making the need for direct US enforcement of its ``gains'' permanent.
So Murtha's message is a message, really, from a -- you can consider it a message from a lot of generals on active duty today. This is what they think, at least a significant percentage of them, I assure you. This is, I’m not over-dramatizing this. It's a shot across the bow. They don't think it's doable. You can't tell that to this President. He doesn't want to hear it. But you can say it to Murtha, you can say it to Inouye, you can say it to Stevens.
If real information can be located, it is not hard to discern just how deep this opposition by Iraqis to US control of their country runs. According to a secret poll commissioned by the British Ministry of Defense and obtained by the Telegraph of London, 82 percent of Iraqis are ``strongly opposed'' to the presence of foreign troops in their country. Not only that, 45 per cent of people feel attacks on those troops are justified.
Just a few weeks ago, even the American puppets inside the Iraqi government along with Sunni opposition figures agreed to language in a communiqué at last month's Cairo Conference sponsored by the Arab League recognizing ``the legitimate right of all peoples to resistance''. Furthermore, the sentiment that the war should be settled and foreign troops should be removed from Iraq was widely shared by conference participants and Baathist operatives (who were excluded from the conference but were present nonetheless).
There would seem to have been a diplomatic opening there for extirpating the US from Iraq with at least a chance of some sort of reconciliation and avoidance of civil war. But as with Murtha's proposal, the White House rejected the Cairo conference. Is it seen within the White House and some quarters of the Pentagon not to be in US interest to stop the violence in Iraq through US withdrawal and strong diplomacy? Without the US present, as Murtha I believe correctly suggests, the Iraqi forces would stand up on their own and could handle these matters without the bloodshed predicted all throughout the US media and governmental establishment.
Why UNSCR 1637?
Meanwhile, a month ago (November 8) the US ran Resolution 1637 through the UN Security Council. This went almost entirely unreported in US media. The main provisions in this resolution maintain the rapidly-narrowing ``multinational'' force (Italy, South Korea, and other formerly-willing coalition members are flying the coop in droves), and the DFI (Development Fund for Iraq). That buttons things up nicely ahead of the December 15 parliamentary elections, requiring a positive act by the new government in order for it to request removal of US troops and saves the embarrassing spectacle of a parliamentary vote requesting presence of the chiefly-American force – against the wishes of 82% of the Iraqi people.
The DFI has been the container for Iraqi oil revenue since May 2003 and was used by the US occupation administration (the CPA, or Coalition Provisional Authority) as a giant $20 billion slush fund that pales the much-celebrated Oil-for-Food program scandal. The underlying policy behind obtaining such a Security Council resolution would not seem to be an intention to leave Iraq anytime soon.
It is about the oil
Ananlysis of the real motivations behind the US attack, invasion, conquest, looting and indefinite occupation of Iraq leads to oil. While the White House Iraq ``Victory'' outline does have a few mentions of oil in its ``Progress on the Economic Track'' section, they are cursory and based on touting production numbers merely for propaganda effect:Oil production increased from an average of 1.58 million barrels per day in 2003, to an average of 2.25 million barrels per day in 2004. Iraq presently is producing on average 2.1 million barrels per day, a slight decrease due to terrorist attacks on infrastructure, dilapidated and insufficient infrastructure, and poor maintenance practices. We are helping the Iraqis address each challenge so the country can have a dependable income stream....
What the Bush ``Victory'' outline forgets to mention is that currently there are highly secretive negotiations being pushed for oil production sharing agreements or PSAs. A stunning new report from a UK group associated with the Institute for Policy Studies explains in great detail how a massive theft of control of Iraq's oil is being planned and executed as the touted ``democratic'' elections are being used to legitimate US ``gains'' from the process:
Even with this progress, Iraq continues to face multiple challenges in the economic sphere, including: Facilitating investment in Iraq's oil sector to increase production from the current 2.1 million barrels per day to more than 5 million per day....In October 2005, a new Constitution was accepted in a referendum of the Iraqi population. Like much of the Constitution, the oil policy section is open to some interpretation. Apparently referring to fields not currently in production, it states:
There should be no doubt about why the US faces an insurgency in Iraq. And like the situation of the mid-20th century when foreign oil companies held concessions to Iraq's oil on draconian terms, the insurgency is permanent as long as the US insists upon keeping its chokehold.
``The federal government and the governments of the producing regions and provinces together will draw up the necessary strategic policies to develop oil and gas wealth to bring the greatest benefit for the Iraqi people, relying on the most modern techniques of market principles and encouraging investment''...
...The debate over oil ``privatisation'' in Iraq has often been misleading due to the technical nature of the term, which refers to legal ownership of oil reserves. This has allowed governments and companies to deny that “privatisation” is taking place. Meanwhile, important practical questions, of public versus private control over oil development and revenues, have not been addressed.
The development model being promoted in Iraq, and supported by key figures in the Oil Ministry, is based on contracts known as production sharing agreements (PSAs), which have existed in the oil industry since the late 1960s. Oil experts agree that their purpose is largely political: technically they keep legal ownership of oil reserves in state hands (3), while practically delivering oil companies the same results as the concession agreements they replaced.
Running to hundreds of pages of complex legal and financial language and generally subject to commercial confidentiality provisions, PSAs are effectively immune from public scrutiny and lock governments into economic terms that cannot be altered for decades.
In Iraq’s case, these contracts could be signed while the government is new and weak, the security situation dire, and the country still under military occupation. As such the terms are likely to be highly unfavourable, but could persist for up to 40 years.
Furthermore, PSAs generally exempt foreign oil companies from any new laws that might affect their profits. And the contracts often stipulate that disputes are heard not in the country’s own courts but in international investment tribunals, which make their decisions on commercial grounds and do not consider the national interest or other national laws. Iraq could be surrendering its democracy as soon as it achieves it.
Rain persists
The shrubs have had plenty to drink.
Back to spring rains and ponding this week. Very green for December!
It's just incredible how wet it's been. A fair amount of slushy snow came down last Saturday. By Tuesday it was all gone as several more inches of rain came visiting over the rest of the week. Winter is supposed to try to get started again in the next few days...
The sickening story of US-led torture is told in a riveting, valuable chronology posted in a Kos diary...
For now
The oil news for late 2005 is that fears about shut in supply in the Gulf of Mexico causing widespread shortages this winter have abated. It seems that fuel inventories are stable or even rising a bit, prices have eased, and markets are even selling ``short'' -- betting on further crude price drop. Holders of oil supplies and stockpiles around the world seem to have been willing to send fuel-thirsty America enough shipments to slake its post-hurricane thirst.
This has turned out okay for the short term. But the long term view is darker. Here are two references to programs I have heard today where long-term energy future is discussed.
The first is an NPR interview with British Petroleum CEO Lord John Browne. Browne is somewhat sanguine about near to medium term oil supplies and prices -- he thinks the crude price will slip into the $40/barrel neighborhood and stabilize for the medium term. But the conversation about the long term delved into BP's exploration of alternatives to oil. Seemed like the urgency was muted, as Browne spoke in a fifty-year time frame. Reading between the lines, however, suggests that Browne may know more about the depletion situation than he was willing to offer. In fact, the words ``depletion'' and ``peak oil'' are unmentionable in this and other interviews like it.
What's between those lines is depletion and peak oil. Oilcast.com has a new program that gives an insiders view on depletion, that of a unnamed senior engineer from Mexican state oil company, Pemex. Oilcast merely reports the remarks and has insisted that even transcribing them is impermissible. A frank, realistic discussion about world oil pushes a very hot button evidently.
The engineer states flatly that ``the days of the Mexican super giants are over'' and that Pemex is ``in the middle of the Hubbert curve.'' This is not a sanguine view of world oil prospects, even in the medium term. Go to oilcast.com and get the audio, the reported remarks are worth the download.
