DUCKPOND

The problem it seems it not so much the elephant in the room, but the elephant in the china shop. According to The Independent, the price of oil would be $40 per barrel and not the record $135 per barrel recorded last week. Of course at $40 per barrel, oil would have appeared to be much higher than previously, and no doubt many would have been bemoaning the fact. The invasion and occupation, that noble yet criminal venture, according to the newspaper have cost $6 trillion dollars in higher energy prices – however much that might be.

Now I have no way of knowing whether these figures are accurate, but suppose they were than the invasion of Iraq was not merely a criminal folly, it has become a calamity for the global society and not just the former uber power. The killing machine of the uber power is looking a little rusty on the ground in Iraq since it cannot run on human blood, but requires hydrocarbons suitably stored and cooked in the earth’s crust. The choice of empire is stark: either leave or massacre. Conventional wisdom is that the criminals responsible will never be brought to justice. Then there is the question of reparations.

The Independent reported:

Goldman Sachs predicted last week that the price could rise to an unprecedented $200 a barrel over the next year, and the world is coming to terms with the idea that the age of cheap oil has ended, with far-reaching repercussions on their activities.

Dr Salameh, director of the UK-based Oil Market Consultancy Service, and an authority on Iraq’s oil, said it is the only one of the world’s biggest producing countries with enough reserves substantially to increase its flow.

Production in eight of the others – the US, Canada, Iran, Indonesia, Russia, Britain, Norway and Mexico – has peaked, he says, while China and Saudia Arabia, the remaining two, are nearing the point at of decline. Before the war, Saddam Hussein’s regime pumped some 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, but this had now fallen to just two million barrels.

Dr Salameh told the all-party parliamentary group on peak oil last month that Iraq had offered the United States a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened up 10 new giant oil fields on “generous” terms in return for the lifting of sanctions. “This would certainly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price,” he said. “But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil.”

I suppose in ten or twenty years time we will know what happened to the world economy, and whether any good came out of the calamity. I am wondering, in ten or twenty years whether it will be politics as usual. In these circumstances it is imperative to imagine what will be a positive outcome, given the looming problem of global warming, has also to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

Postscript:

Predictably on this subject the automatically generated responses are interesting. (There will be more links, which I will add as I find them, hopefully with different expectations, but equally hopefully with some that agree with my general position. We shall see.)