David McGowan, March 13, 2004
The Most Important Center for an Informed America Story in
Two Years...
On February 29, 2004, I received the following e-mail message from Michael
Ruppert of From the
Wilderness:
I challenge you to an open, public debate on the subject
of Peak Oil; any time, any place after March 13th 2004. I challenge you to
bring scientific material, production data and academic references and
citations for your conclusions like I have. I suggest a mutually
acceptable panel of judges and I will put up $1,000 towards a purse to go
to the winner of that debate. I expect you to do the same. And you made a
dishonest and borderline libelous statement when you suggested that I am
somehow pleased that these wars of aggression have taken place to secure
oil. My message all along has been, "Not in my name!"
Put your money where your mouth is. But first I suggest
you do some homework. Ad hominem attacks using the word
"bullshit", unsupported by scientific data are a sign of intellectual
weakness (at best). I will throw more than 500 footnoted citations at you
from unimpeachable sources. Be prepared to eat them or rebut them with
something more than you have offered.
Wow! How does high noon sound?
Before I get started here, Mike, I need to ask you just one quick question:
are you sure it was only a "borderline libelous statement"? Because I was
really going for something more unambiguously libelous. I'll see if I can do
better on this outing. Let me know how I do.
Several readers have written to me, incidentally, with a variation of the
following question: "How can you say that Peak Oil is being promoted to sell
war when all of the websites promoting the notion of Peak Oil are stridently
anti-war?"
But of course they are. That, you see, is precisely the point. What I was
trying to say is that the notion of 'Peak Oil' is being specifically
marketed to the anti-war crowd -- because, as we all know, the pro-war crowd
doesn't need to be fed any additional justifications for going to war; any
of the old lies will do just fine. And I never said that the necessity of
war was being overtly sold. What I said, if I remember correctly, is that it
is being sold with a wink and a nudge.
The point that I was trying to make is that it would be difficult to imagine
a better way to implicitly sell the necessity of war, even while appearing
to stake out a position against war, than through the promotion of the
concept of 'Peak Oil.' After September 11, 2001, someone famously said that
if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, the US would have had to invent him. I
think the same could be said for 'Peak Oil.'
I also need to mention here that those who are selling 'Peak Oil' hysteria
aren't offering much in the way of alternatives, or solutions. Ruppert, for
example, has stated flatly that "there is no effective replacement for what
hydrocarbon energy provides today." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/052703_9_questions.html
) The message is quite clear: "we're running out of oil soon; there is no
alternative; we're all screwed." And this isn't, mind you, just an energy
problem; as Ruppert has correctly noted, "Almost every current human
endeavor from transportation, to manufacturing, to plastics, and especially
food production is inextricably intertwined with oil and natural gas
supplies." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html)
If we run out of oil, in other words, our entire way of life will come
crashing down. One of Ruppert's "unimpeachable sources," Colin Campbell,
describes an apocalyptic future, just around the corner, that will be
characterized by "war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the
extinction of homo sapiens."
(
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html )
My question is: if Ruppert is not selling the necessity of war, then exactly
what is the message that he is sending to readers with such doomsday
forecasts? At the end of a recent posting, Ruppert quotes dialogue from the
1975 Sidney Pollack film, Three Days of the Condor:
(
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/013004_in_your_face.html )
Higgins: ...It's simple economics. Today it's oil,
right? In 10 or 15 years - food, Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now
what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Turner: Ask them.
Higgins: Not now - then. Ask them when they're running
out. Ask them when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask
them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who've never known
hunger start going hungry. Do you want to know something? They won't want
us to ask them. They'll just want us to get it for them.
The message there seems pretty clear: once the people
understand what is at stake, they will support whatever is deemed necessary
to secure the world's oil supplies. And what is it that Ruppert is
accomplishing with his persistent 'Peak Oil' postings? He is helping his
readers to understand what is allegedly at stake.
Elsewhere on his site, Ruppert warns that "Different regions of the world
peak in oil production at different times ... the OPEC nations of the Middle
East peak last. Within a few years, they -- or whoever controls them -- will
be in effective control of the world economy, and, in essence, of human
civilization as a whole."
(
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html )
Within a few years, the Middle East will be in control of all of human
civilization?! Try as I might, I can't imagine any claim that would more
effectively rally support for a U.S. takeover of the Middle East. The effect
of such outlandish claims is to cast the present war as a war of necessity.
Indeed, a BBC report posted on Ruppert's site explicitly endorses that
notion: "It's not greed that's driving big oil companies - it's survival."
(
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/040403_oil_war_bbc.html )
On the very day that Ruppert's challenge arrived, I received another e-mail,
from someone I previously identified - erroneously, it would appear - as a
"prominent critic" of Michael Ruppert. In further correspondence, the
writer, Jeff Strahl, explained that he is (a) not a critic of Ruppert in
general, but rather a critic only of Ruppert's stance on certain aspects of
the 9-11 story, and (b) not all that prominent. This is what Mr. Strahl had
to say:
I'm a participant in a relatively new website,
http://911research.wtc7.net , which has done lots of work regarding
the WTC and Pentagon side of the 9/11 events, especially the physical
evidence which reveals the official story as a complete hoax. Under
"talks" you'll find a slide show I've done (and will do again) in public
on the Pentagon aspects. This is all simply to let you know I'm far from
an apologist for the status quo. Nor am I an apologist for Mike Ruppert,
with whom in fact I got into a donnybrook of a fight on public email lists
over his denial of the relevancy of physical evidence and the fact that an
article full of disinformation about the WTC collapse, written 9/13/01,
was still on his website, unedited or corrected, two years later. He
finally gave in and printed a (sort of) retraction.
That said, I have to take issue with your stance re Peak
Oil, something you say you wish were true, but deny, not on the basis of
any information, but on the basis that you seem to think it's too good to
be true, and that it's all info presented by Ruppert, which you thus
suspect since you suspect Ruppert. Matter of fact, Peak Oil was predicted
by an oil geologist, King Hubbert, way back in the mid '60s, before
Ruppert was even in college. It's been pursued since then by lots of
people in the science know-how, including Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Richard
Heinberg, Colin Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes. The information is quite
clear, global oil production has either peaked in the last couple of years
or will do so in the next couple, as Hubbert predicted decades ago (He
predicted Peak Oil in the US as happening in the early '70s, was laughed
at, but his prediction came true right on schedule). The science here is
quite hard, facts are available from lots of sources. Perhaps Hubbert was
part of a long-planned disinfo campaign that was planned way back in the
'60s, and all the others are part of that plot. I find it hard to believe
that, and I am quite a skeptic.
As for the relevancy of physical evidence, it would appear
that that is another bone that I have to pick with Mr. Ruppert. But I will
save that for another time. For now, the issue is 'Peak Oil' (which, as you
can see, I am continuing to enclose in quotation marks, which is, as regular
readers know, how I identify things that don't actually exist).
For the record, I never said that Michael Ruppert was the only one
presenting information about 'Peak Oil.' I said that he was the most
prominent of those promoting the idea. I also never implied that Ruppert
came up with the idea on his own. I am aware that the theory has a history.
The issue here, however, is the sudden prominence that 'Peak Oil' has
attained.
Lastly, let me say that, unlike you, Jeff, I am enough of a skeptic to
believe that an ambitious, well-orchestrated disinformation campaign,
possibly spanning generations, should never arbitrarily be ruled out. I am
also enough of a skeptic to suspect that when a topic I have covered
generates the volume of e-mail that my 'Peak Oil' musings have generated,
then I must have managed to step into a pretty big pile of shit. What I did
not realize, until I decided to take Mr. Ruppert's advice and "do some
homework," was that it was a much bigger pile than I could have imagined
I read through some, but certainly not all, of the alleged evidence that
Ruppert has brought to the table concerning 'Peak Oil.' Since I have no
interest in financially supporting his cause, I am not a paid subscriber and
can therefore not access the 'members only' postings. But I doubt that I am
missing much. The postings that I did read tended to be extremely redundant
and, therefore, a little on the boring side.
Ruppert's arguments range from the vaguely compelling to the downright
bizarre. One argument that pops up repeatedly is exemplified by this Ruppert-penned
line: "One of the biggest signs of the reality of Peak Oil over the last two
decades has been a continual pattern of merger-acquisition-downsizing
throughout the industry."
Really? And is that pattern somehow unique to the petroleum industry? Or is
it a pattern that has been followed by just about every major industry? Is
the consolidation of the supermarket industry a sign of the reality of Peak
Groceries? And with consolidation of the media industry, should we be
concerned about Peak News? Or should we, perhaps, recognize that a pattern
of monopoly control - characterized by mergers, acquisitions, and downsizing
- represents nothing more than business as usual throughout the corporate
world?
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Originally published at
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr52.html
More research that punches a big hole in the Peak Oil
hysteria