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Week 4 - January 27th - 2003 |
David
Seaton's Energy Links® Editorial At
any other time in history an attempt by the United States, or any other
country, to take over Iraq with the implied threat to then move against
Iran and even Saudi Arabia would have been enough to start a world war...
Great wars have started with much less cause. A global military response
to this grab for the world's principal energy resources is impossible at
this moment because the military power of the United States without the
Soviet Union to counterweight it is overwhelming. However the move on Iraq
does in reality put in jeopardy the sovereignty and independence of all
the European powers, Japan and China who depend on oil from that region.
If these countries, proud, great powers themselves, cannot go to war with
the United States to prevent this, to preserve their freedom of action
and access to oil, what can they do? Von Clausewitz said that war was a
continuation politics by other means; turning that concept around they
could follow Foucault's "politics is war by other means". Some of what
the threatened powers are doing we see in the press, but surely a fly on
the wallpaper in the chancelleries of the European powers, Russia, China
and perhaps Japan could tell us much, much more. Much is written about
the pressure the United States is applying to Turkey, but what kind of
pressure can France and especially Germany apply there? After all Turkey
has asked to join the European Union, not to join the United States. 832,000
Turkish workers live in Germany not in California. Although the United
States spends infinitely more on military hardware than Europe does in
fact the EU spends infinitely more on foreign aid than does the USA. The
USA's foreign aid, in terms of percentage of their GDP is the lowest of
any industrialized nation in the world. What weight does that have in this
unprecedented crisis? Within the European Union German taxpayers pay something
like 60% of the net contributions to the budget. What then could Schröder
be whispering into the ears of Bush enthusiasts and net recipients of Germany's
largesse such as Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller and Spain's José
Maria Aznar? We may never get the "fly on the wall's" story, but the rush
to war does seem to be slowing down... Of course we cannot trust those
appearances too much either. If Bush has, in fact, taken the final decision
to attack Iraq then any information coming out of the USA must be treated
as "misinformation", a ruse issued like a smoke screen in order to take
the Iraqis by surprise. A war could start this week, this spring, next
winter or never. With only "flies" having any real information investors
are not surprisingly holding back. David
Seaton
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| This
war is about oil (Fisk - Independent)
(...)Back in 1997, in the years of the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a bunch of other right-wing men – most involved in the oil business – created the Project for the New American Century, a lobby group demanding "regime change" in Iraq. In a 1998 letter to President Clinton, they called for the removal of Saddam from power. In a letter to Newt Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the House, they wrote that "we should establish and maintain a strong US military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests [sic] in the Gulf – and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power". The signatories of one or both letters included Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld's Pentagon deputy, John Bolton, now under-secretary of state for arms control, and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's under-secretary at the State Department – who called last year for America to take up its "blood debt" with the Lebanese Hizbollah. They also included Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defence, currently chairman of the defence science board, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal Corporation oil industry consultant who became US special envoy to Afghanistan – where Unocal tried to cut a deal with the Taliban for a gas pipeline across Afghan territory – and who now, miracle of miracles, has been appointed a special Bush official for – you guessed it – Iraq. The signatories also included our old friend Elliott Abrams, one of the most pro-Sharon of pro-Israeli US officials, who was convicted for his part in the Iran-Contra scandal. Abrams it was who compared Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon – held "personally responsible" by an Israeli commission for the slaughter of 1,700 Palestinian civilians in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre – to (wait for it) Winston Churchill. So this forthcoming war – the whole shooting match, along with that concern for "vital interests" (ie oil) in the Gulf – was concocted five years ago, by men like Cheney and Khalilzad who were oil men to their manicured fingertips. In fact, I'm getting heartily sick of hearing the Second World War being dug up yet again to justify another killing field. It's not long ago that Bush was happy to be portrayed as Churchill standing up to the appeasement of the no-war-in Iraq brigade. In fact, Bush's whole strategy with the odious and Stalinist-style Korea regime – the "excellent" talks which US diplomats insist they are having with the Dear Leader's Korea which very definitely does have weapons of mass destruction – reeks of the worst kind of Chamberlain-like appeasement. Even though Saddam and Bush deserve each other, Saddam is not Hitler. And Bush is certainly no Churchill. But now we are told that the UN inspectors have found what might be the vital evidence to go to war: 11 empty chemical warheads that just may be 20 years old. Click here to read more Contents |
| Car
wars (Guardian)
War in Iraq is inevitable. That there would be war was decided by North American planners in the mid-1920s. That it would be in Iraq was decided much more recently. The architects of this war were not military planners but town planners. War is inevitable not because of weapons of mass destruction, as claimed by the political right, nor because of western imperialism, as claimed by the left. The cause of this war, and probably the one that will follow, is car dependence. The US has paved itself into a corner. Its physical and economic infrastructure is so highly car dependent that the US is pathologically addicted to oil. Without billions of barrels of precious black sludge being pumped into the veins of its economy every year, the nation would experience painful and damaging withdrawal. The first Model T Ford rolled off the assembly line in 1908 and was a miracle of mass production. In the first decade of that century, car registrations in the US increased from 8,000 to almost 500,000. Within the cities, buses replaced trams, and then cars replaced buses. In 1932, General Motors bought up America's tramways and then closed them down. But it was the urban planners who really got America hooked. Car ownership offered the possibility of escape from dirty, crowded cities to leafy garden suburbs and the urban planners provided the escape routes. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, America "road built" itself into a nation of home-owning suburbanites. In the words of Joni Mitchell: "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." Cities such as Los Angeles, Dallas and Phoenix were moulded by the private passenger car into vast urban sprawls which are so widely spread that it is now almost impossible to service them economically with public transport. As the cities sprawled, the motor manufacturing industry consolidated. Car-making is now the main industrial employer in the world, dominated by five major groups of which General Motors is the largest. The livelihood and landscape of North Americans were forged by car-makers. Motor vehicles are responsible for about one-third of global oil use, but for nearly two-thirds of US oil use. In the rest of the world, heating and power generation account for most oil use. The increase in oil prices during the 1973 Arab oil embargo encouraged the substitution of other fuels in heating and power generation, but in the transport sector there is little scope for oil substitution in the short term. Click here to read more Contents |
| Pumping
Trouble (Fortune)
(...)The U.S. usually imports 14% of its oil--1.5 million barrels a day--from Venezuela, which until the strike began ranked as the world's fifth-largest petroleum producer. With the loss of the country's oil supply, petroleum reserves in the U.S. have fallen to their lowest level since 1975, threatening to complicate planning for a likely war with Iraq. "It's been a stealth crisis," says Daniel Yergin, president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a firm that tracks the international oil market. "It sort of sneaked up on everyone. We can make up for a disruption in supply from either Venezuela or Iraq, but not both." Already gasoline prices have risen by 5 cents a gallon in the U.S. as a result of the strike, and if production doesn't resume soon, they're likely to be a dime higher by summer. The crisis may also crimp earnings at several international oil companies. ChevronTexaco, ENI, BP, and ExxonMobil all have drilling operations in Venezuela, some of which have been shuttered by the strike. In addition, several U.S. refineries have announced production cuts or been forced to purchase expensive spot-market oil. The most exposed refiner is Citgo, owned by the Venezuelan state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Citgo, based in Tulsa, normally gets half of its raw crude from PDVSA, but since the strike began it has had to purchase about 400,000 barrels a day on the open market. (...)Chavez remains firmly in control. Small businesses have reopened, employees are gradually returning to work, and the black market is thriving. Many Venezuelans are pessimistic. They say that the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better--that blood will flow before the oil does again. Click here to read more Contents |
| Mexico's
Corrupt Oil Lifeline (New York Times)
(...)For more than 60 years, Pemex, the world's fifth-largest oil company, has been Mexico's economic lifeblood. A $50 billion-a-year enterprise, it controls every gas pump in Mexico, and it sells nearly as much oil to the United States as Saudi Arabia does. Today, with some oil producers like Iraq and Venezuela facing nation-shaking crises, Mexico looks like a sure and steady source of oil. The United States may be tempted to rely on it even more. But Pemex is in danger of breaking down. "Financially, we are falling," its director, Raúl Muñoz Leos, said in an interview. Nearly every peso of Pemex's profits goes to run the government of Mexico. The company, after paying taxes and royalties, actually lost $3.5 billion in in 2001. Without major restructuring or tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment, Mr. Muñoz Leos warned recently, "We would face, in the short term, a collapse." One reason is a rottenness at Pemex's core. The company loses at least $1 billion a year to corruption, its executives say, in a continuous corrosion of the machine that keeps Mexico solvent. Fixing Pemex is as crucial to Mexico's future as it is to American oil supplies. When Vicente Fox became president two years ago after defeating the political machine that ran Mexico for 71 years — the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI — he vowed to make his country more open and democratic and to make Pemex run like a 21st-century corporation. To change Mexico, Mr. Fox must first change Pemex. It has been a cash machine for the government, a slush fund for politicians and a patronage mill for party loyalists since the party created Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, in 1938. After nationalizing American and British oil interests, the party promptly changed the Constitution to bar foreign investment in underground oil and gas. It was a declaration of independence: "Expropriation Day" is still celebrated each year. Even today, the PRI, which still holds a plurality in Congress, is fighting changes to the Constitution and at the oil giant it created, in part on grounds of patriotism. President Fox's attempts at reform have been hamstrung by PRI resistance — and Pemex's history of corruption. Click here to read more Contents |
| Oil
spill inquiries frustrated (BBC)
An estimated 25,000 tons of oil from the shipwrecked tanker Prestige have polluted the coast of Spain, Portugal and France. The government of the Spanish region of Galicia, the French authorities, the Bahamas - where the Prestige was registered - and the ship's insurer, London Club, are all conducting separate investigations into why the vessel sank. The investigation by Galicia's government is in chaos. Opposition parties walked out of proceedings after Spain's Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, refused to allow national authorities and officials to appear before it. Paul Hinton, Chief Executive of London Club, the insurer of the Prestige, says their investigation is being made difficult by a number of hurdles:
Contents |
| Fry
and drive (Guardian)
According to Mike Hebson, the manager of Asda's store in Swansea, south Wales, there was no reason to be suspicious that sales of the company's cheapest bottles of cooking oil were running 20% higher than the previous year, way above any other store in Britain. "We just thought it was one of those things," says Hebson. Why should he and his staff have been remotely questioning, he suggests, if men in overalls and lived-in denims had started buying Smart Price vegetable oil in batches of six, eight and 12 litres at a time. When one customer came in and filled a trolley to the brim with plastic containers of the thin, urine-coloured liquid, the checkout operator barely gave him a second glance. "Naturally, we assumed they were buying on price," says Hebson, an Asda man to the soles of his own-brand brogues. There was another reason that his staff were unlikely to see anything untoward in bulk-buying cheap vegetable oil. "We just thought they were doing a lot of frying," he says. "You have to remember, healthy eating has not hit Swansea in a big way." It wasn't until the Department of Transport began a series of trial tests in the city last March that staff realised something odd had been going on. In an attempt to take diesel vehicles belching out illegal emissions off the road, department inspectors introduced experimental spot checks on roads in Bristol, Westminster, Glasgow, Middlesbrough, Canterbury and Swansea. It was in the latter that they found something surprising: a car with a fuel tank half full of cooking oil. "The funny thing was," says Hebson, "the driver told them he had been getting it from Asda Swansea for four or five months, because it was the cheapest around. When we read the report in the local paper we began to put two and two together." The enterprising motorist was, so the reports suggested, running his diesel-engine motor on a mix of Asda cooking oil and standard fuel. At 42p a litre, the supermarket chain's oil is considerably cheaper than the 73p a litre that even a discounted retailer charges for diesel. The astonishing thing was it worked. Without any need to modify the engine, the motorist could run his car on the mix with no discernible difference in its performance. What's more, instead of diesel fumes, the engine gave off a rather pleasing odour - like frying time at the local chippy. Click here to read more Contents |
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