The Peakist

Environmentalists now consider nuclear energy as clean
by Bruno Comby

As a dedicated environmentalist, I consider it paradoxical to see some environmental groups opposed to nuclear energy. Green opposition to nuclear power plants is in fact a major historical mistake. Their announced concerns are for health, safety, and the protection of nature. In these respects nuclear power is by far superior to the alternatives - burning fossil fuels (coal, petroleum and gas) which pollute the atmosphere, wind turbines or the use of solar photovoltaic cells for the production of electricity, and biomass (growing crops to be burned and burning crop residues) which alter the landscape and produce only minute amounts of energy.
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Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, thinks there may be a coordinated campaign to prepare for a military strike on Iran.

Cirincione writes: (more…)

“We had hoped this climate review would inject an additional boost to offshore wind to ensure it joined onshore as a major provider of new power and carbon savings to hit our 2010 targets.  The Government’s failure to act in this review must be addressed in the forthcoming Energy Review.  Without a vibrant offshore wind sector it is hard to see how the Government’s 2010 climate targets can be met and how our 20% renewable aspirations by 2020 can become a working reality.”    Marcus Rand, BWEA’s Chief Executive

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· Atomic agency says toll will not exceed 4,000
· Doctors ‘overwhelmed’ by cancers and mutations

John Vidal, environment editor

United Nations nuclear and health watchdogs have ignored evidence of deaths, cancers, mutations and other conditions after the Chernobyl accident, leading scientists and doctors have claimed in the run-up to the nuclear disaster’s 20th anniversary next month. (more…)

By Steve Connor The Independent

Dramatic new evidence has emerged of the speed of climate change in the polar regions which scientists fear is causing huge volumes of ice to melt far faster than predicted.

Scientists have recorded a significant and unexpected increase in the number of “glacial earthquakes” caused by the sudden movement of Manhattan-sized blocks of ice in Greenland. A second study has found that higher temperatures caused by global warming could melt the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets much sooner than previously thought, with a corresponding rise in sea levels. (more…)

Richard Heinberg, author of “Powerdown - Options and
Actions for a Post-Carbon World,” is setting up a project
to promote the Oil Depletion Protocol (sometimes refered to as the Rimini or Uppsala Protocol) and ideas about how to implement the protocol on the level of institutions, businesses and individuals. Richard is currently working on a book to promote the project and tells us a project co-ordinator will soon be in place.

Events are moving rapidly and with coal liquefaction emerging as the strategy for ‘business as usual’ the potential effects of the peak oil crisis on climate change are appalling. Just as the first step towards stopping climate chaos has been to communicate the reality of global warming, the first step in mitigating the effects of the ‘permanent energy crisis’ is to communicate the reality of the challenge the world faces.

In “How to Avoid Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse” Richard discusses the protocol and the idea of ‘Domestic Tradable Quotas.’ (more…)

Last week Al Jazeera reported that a slain al-Qaida leader,in a video recorded before his killing, warned Americans and the US-allied Saudi monarchy to leave the kingdom or face more bloodshed.

In the video, Fahd al-Juweir, one of five militants killed after taking part in the failed February 14th attack on a key oil facility, called on Muslims everywhere to join their fight to expel Westerners and install Islamic rule. It said the raid on the facility was within the framework of efforts by al-Qaida to prevent the theft of Muslims’ oil wealth by “crusaders and Jews” and to force “infidels” out of the peninsula. Two cars had exploded at the gates of the huge facility after security forces fired on bombers trying to storm it. This was the first such major strike in Saudi Arabia since bombers tried to storm the Interior Ministry in Riyadh in December 2004. The prospect of a direct attack on Saudi crude facilities has been a doomsday scenario for oil consumer nations heavily reliant on Saudi oil.
  
Oil prices jumped $2 a barrel on news of the attack in the world’s largest oil exporter, which came a year after Saudi-born Osama bin Laden urged his supporters to hit Gulf oil targets. (more…)

As head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, anonymously wrote ‘Through our Enemies Eyes,’ a damning indightment of the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ and a plea for sanity in confronting the global menace of jihadi insurgency. There was widespread controversy at the time as to who ‘Anonymous’, obviously someone senior in the US intelligence establishment, really was. In November 2004 he resigned from the CIA in disgust, after two decades of experience in national security issues relating to Afghanistan and South Asia. Now writing under his own name, in his recent book “Imperial Hubris,” Scheuer locates the reason for the ongoing conflict in US oil dependency. (more…)

The Pentagon have announced a strategy for fuelling the US war machine in the face of oil depletion and the failure of the invasion of Iraq to stabilise the Middle Eastern - coal liquefaction.

The Pentagon’s Assured Fuels Initiative is viewing the indigenous coal supplies of the US as the way to square the circle of peak oil and maintaining global hegemony based on the
military-industrial complex. As ever, wildly inaccurate claims are being made that the US has enough coal ‘for 250 years,’ without qualifying at what rate of consumption and
the Pentagon is claiming that US coal reserves, if converted en masse to liquid fuel (presumably they’ll just turn off the power stations and the steel works) represent 964 billion barrels.

As we noted at the end of February, Shell has also announced a strategy of coal liquefaction to mitigate peak - given the economics of coal liquefaction require significant investments in infrastructure to produce synthetic crude at a relatively high price (currently economic around $30 a barrel) we can safely assume that neither the Pentagon nor Big Oil see any drop in prices on the horizon. We are beginning to see the outlines of an emerging new world energy order and it does not look like one based on renewable energy resources. (more…)

Last Monday we posted concerning the geopolitical imperative of oil depletion behind the US invasion of Iraq (”Three Years on from “Operation Iraqi Freedom” - A Stable
Gulf?”). Having looked into the issue further it is apparent that the neo-conservative ambitions for the reshaping of the Middle East were far more ambitious than had first been supposed; but that the US ‘ultra establishment’ in alliance with Big Oil finally pulled the plug on them. Incredibly, the plan had the initial moniker “Operation Iraqi Liberation” which due to its unfortunate acronym was swiftly renamed “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (a semantic gaff only rivalled by Bush’s post 9/11 declaration of a ‘crusade’ against Islamic terrorism).

While Tony “45 minutes” Blair calls the idea that oil played a part in the invasion of Iraq a conspiracy theory, investigative journalist Greg Palast has uncovered a neocon planning document which details that the real aim of the invasion was to smash the OPEC cartel and institute a new world energy order. (more…)

Russia and China have signed an agreement to pipe large quantities of gas from fields in Siberia to China.

Officials said the pipelines, which could begin supply within five years, would deliver up to 80 bn cubic metres of gas annually.

The agreement came as part of a raft of economic deals signed between the two sides during the visit to Beijing of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But there was no deal on a separate pipeline to deliver Siberian oil.

Mr Putin said the two sides had agreed on a deal to supply large quantities of gas through two pipelines from fields in west Siberia and the Russian far east.

Alexei Miller, head of Russia’s gas monopoly Gazprom, told reporters that the timeframe and the scale of the deal had been agreed with China’s oil and gas company, CNPC, but he said the financial details were yet to be negotiated.

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Mexican President Vicente Fox has announced the discovery of a new deep-water oil field, which is believed to contain 10bn barrels of crude.

The field is in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mexico says it could be bigger than its largest oil field, Cantarell.

Production there is said to have declined sharply in recent years.

Mr Fox made the announcement as figures showed the country’s total oil reserves had fallen 2% between 2003 and 2005.
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On March 19, 2003 – three years ago next week – “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was launched against Saddam Hussein’s regime and on May 1st President Bush gave his ill-fated speech announcing the end of ‘major combat operations’. There is no need for to rehearse all that has subsequently ensued. What was the purpose of the invasion of Iraq?

According to the US Geological Survey the area with the probable largest amount of undiscovered oil lies in Iraq, Kuwait and western Iran. Despite its attractive potential for development only 17 of the 80 fields discovered in Iraq have been developed. A paper by the Global Policy Forum estimates total profit from Iraqi oil alone ranging from approximately $600 billion to $9 trillion. The “most probable” estimate yields annual profits from Iraq production of $95 billion per year for 50 years, a rate three times greater than the 2002 worldwide profits of the five largest international companies (more…)

Buddhi Kota Subbarao, a former Indian Navy Captain with a Ph.D in nuclear technology, looks at some unexplored angles of the Indo-US nuclear deal. As well as providing a nuanced account of the politics behind the deal, Subbarao’s critique of nuclear power is worth viewing given his record of technical publications on nuclear technology. Subbarno has previously written critically on the environmental consequences of uranium mining and the Indian nuclear industry . Subbarno writes: (more…)