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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