‘Most people thought it would come but no man prepar’d for it; no man consider’d that it would come like a thief in the night.’
Political satirist Jonathon Swift (1667 – 1745), on the South Sea Bubble financial collapse of 1720.
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‘Oil production is in decline in 33 of the 48 largest oil producing countries.’
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Chevron
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‘There isn’t a company quoted on the stock exchange that doesn’t tacitly assume a business as usual supply of cheap oil.
When that isn’t there any more that means that virtually every company is over-valued on the stock exchange and as the financial community recognises this, well, that might trigger some kind of over-reaction and stock market collapse. I think it’s very likely. I wouldn’t be surprised personally if it triggers another great depression comparable to the one of the 1930s, if not worse, because this one is imposed by nature rather than being a speculative bubble.’
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Dr Colin Campbell, retired petroleum geologist and consultant to Exxon, Fina, Mobil, Shell, Total and others. Dr Campbell is the world’s leading exponent of the Peak Oil theory.
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‘At any given moment, there is a sort of all-pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.’
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‘The oil crisis is very, very near. World War III has started. It has already affected every single citizen of the Middle East . Soon, it will spill over to affect every
citizen of the world.’
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Ali Samsam Bakhtiari (1946-2007), senior expert in the Corporate Planning Directorate of the
National Iranian Oil Company
National Iranian Oil Company
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‘The doubling of oil prices from 2003-2005 is not an anomaly, but a picture of the future. Oil production is approaching its peak; low growth in availability can be expected in the next five to ten years. As worldwide petroleum production peaks, geopolitics and market economics will cause even more significant price increases and security risks.
One can only speculate at the outcome from this scenario as world petroleum production declines.’
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US Army Corps of Engineers
September 2005
‘It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We’ll use the next trillion in 30.’
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Chevron advertisement
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In 1956, Professor Marion King Hubbert, a Shell geologist, developed what became known as the ‘Hubbert peak theory’. With it, he worked out when America
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‘People just do not consider the UK
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The Times, March 26, 2009
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‘The low oil price and the financial crunch continues to have a terrible impact on Britain UK
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Oil Depeletion Analysis Centre newsletter, March 27, 2009
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And so by extension there will be a time when global oil production will peak and then drop away to nothing. Forever. That time is the subject of argument, but ever-growing demand does nothing to allay oil industry fears - until the 2008 recession, China
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Uranium will run out, or be left unmined; the gain not worth the effort to find. But before all that, there’s the oil wars. Barack Obama’s choice of National Security Advisor, retired US Marine Corps General James Jones, was elected to the board of directors of the Chevron Corporation on May 28, 2008. The official line for these close links with the oil industry is that people holding top government posts should have some business experience at senior level.
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‘The whole flimsy financial edifice has now crashed, and some of the sillier governments are now pumping yet more fictional money into the system to encourage new consumption. Such policies may briefly succeed, but will only make the subsequent crash worse. We enter a new world, as the principal energy that drove the anomalous past two centuries heads into decline from natural depletion.’
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‘It’s just a handful of people that run everything and that’s provable… I have this feeling that whoever’s elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what promises you make on the campaign trail - blah, blah, blah - when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist scum***ks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down… and it’s a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll… And then the screen comes up, the light comes on, and they say to the new president, ‘Any questions?’
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‘Just what my agenda is.’
‘First we bomb Baghdad
‘You got it.’’
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Ten years after Bill’s death, both presidential candidates (Republican and Democrat, Bush and Kerry), were former members of Yale University
priveledged men
and women are
selected yearly.
priveledged men
and women are
selected yearly.
The population of America
- if you’re not born into power -
you’ll need one.
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‘The world will experience a serious oil supply crunch within five to ten years unless there is a collapse in
oil demand. This is the conclusion of a new
oil demand. This is the conclusion of a new
Chatham House report, The Coming Supply Crunch,
which predicts a resulting oil price spike
that could exceed $200 a barrel.’
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‘The years ahead are likely to be as difficult as any of us have ever faced. Our economy is in severe difficulty, the depths of which are likely to surpass anything witnessed in our lifetimes.’
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Sir Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, March 31, 2009
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The pay-off? Who knows beyond Bill’s smoke-filled office? Scraps from the table when the fuel becomes scarce?
Or is it just temporary election-winning political support from a
media magnate consolidating his monopoly?
Or is it just temporary election-winning political support from a
media magnate consolidating his monopoly?
What will they think of our frivolous demand for fashion? How will they look on the designers and engineers using inbuilt obsolescence to drive up sales? In Japan
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‘We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil. Embrace the future and recognize the growing demand for a wide range of fuels or ignore reality and slowly - but surely - be left behind.’
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Ah but we’re not so easily manipulated.
No? An English Electric refrigerator bought by Shropshire farmers George and Ivy Ashley in 1947, and in continuous use since then, is believed to be
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Meanwhile, Britain ’s North Sea oil peaked in 1999, at over 2.5 million barrels per day, as opposed to the 2007 figure of less than 1.5 million per day. The largest decrease of any oil exporting nation in the world, leading Britain
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‘I don't think new technologies will have any impact on the date of peak, which I estimate to have been passed in 2008.’
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Dr Colin Campbell
myself on February 8, 2009
myself on February 8, 2009
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‘2009 will be the most difficult for the Russian and world economies. I cannot remember a worse year since the end of the Second World War. This will be the worst year for the economy in modern times.’
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Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, December 27, 2008
With oil, we have found a way to artificially – and temporarily – extend the world’s carrying capacity. Extended transport systems, refrigeration, global trade and industrialised agriculture all depend on oil.
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‘I would urge you to sell any sterling you might have. It's finished. I hate to say it, but I would not put any money in the UK
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American investment guru Jim Rogers, January 20, 2009.
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Leaving it all to market forces, British style, and the subsequent death of an industry - a Derbyshire steel plant is reduced to scrap, ready to be shipped abroad. The people in the local pub told me it was off to China North Sea oil all gone, coal and minerals scraped out of the bowels of the earth; climate change legislation virtually banning coal anyway. Chicken bones and scraps sliding into the bin, as the population stares at the hypnotizing machine in the corner.
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| Stanton Ironworks, Derbyshire |
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Nature abhors a vacuum.
When there’s a sudden availability of resources, there’s a subsequent explosion in population.
Common sense tells us that, once the bonanza has gone, this population will drop back to a normal, sustainable level. In 1806, when the internal combustion engine was invented, the world’s population stood at around one billion. Today there’s over six times that number. All consuming, all demanding more. Farmers use fantastic amounts of fossil fuel to keep the food flowing.
They’ve also become de-skilled in relation to the older methods of farming, methods that were perfected over millennia.
Is it possible, without oil, that our farmers could grow as much food as was grown a century ago, the peak, as it were, of pre-engine production? Enough to sustain that one billion? What’s left of the old infrastructure are museum curiosities. Our self-reliant forebears were feeding a billion people using honed skills and techniques – Shire Horses, intricate mechanical devices to dig and seed and reap, craft skills, life methods in harmony with the environment such as preserving what food was available and setting their waking and sleeping to the rising and waning of the sun.
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Funding for the world’s largest wave farm, announced by the Scottish Executive, stands at just £4 million – less than a year’s wage for a typical Premier League football player.
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And it took half of them, working long, back-breaking hours as the landed parasites stood by, to feed that billion. Today, even the bees are critically threatened, such is the state of the environment.
But despite bread and rice doubling in price, we all keep turn away, secure in some seeming knowledge that growth will go on forever.
It’s why we vote for them; they promise on-going prosperity. Why would we vote otherwise? Why would they promise otherwise?
Perpetual growth is the biggest lie of all. A better future, home ownership… it’s the drug that stuns all those on the treadmill into docile silence. Rock the boat and lose your home. Take a look at the street people – want to end up like them? Want to live on an ASBO estate? Now get back to fucking work.
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‘We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.’
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David Rockefeller, speaking at the UN, September 23, 1994
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President George W Bush
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Such as the theory that the vile,
cowardly playboy's minions
rigged two elections? Or shall we be spoon-fed the mainstream media's diet of crap and drivel?
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‘Now we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order.’
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President George Bush (W’s father)
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‘Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.’
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Aldous Huxley, Adonis and the Alphabet
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Perhaps we can learn from the political response the last time we faced such a deadly threat. When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said ‘I believe it is Peace for our time’ on his return from Munich in 1938, he finished off with the following words to the cheering crowd gathered in Downing Street … ‘Go home and get a nice, quiet sleep.’
‘Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.’
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‘The UK government's former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, predicts that with population growth, natural resources dwindling, and seas rising due to climate change, the squeeze on the planet will lead to more conflict.
‘Future historians might look back on our particular recent past and see the Iraq war as the first of the conflicts of this kind - the first of the resource wars.’’
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Guardian report on the British Humanist Association’s ‘Darwin Day’ lecture. Feb 13, 2009
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‘Break On Through (to the other side)’
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1967 song title, The Doors
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‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’
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William Blake (1757 - 1827)
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Trained from infancy to respect and obey authority, conditioned to expect ruthless big business and grubby politicians to solve our every need, we make our way in a mad world.
Evil flourishes around us as we nightly sit and stare at the electronic drivel box in the corner of the room, or drift into the fantasy world of computer gaming.
A vacuous media ensures we are lulled with frivolity just as honest reporting is needed most - as the resource wars and global recession begin in earnest.
For those who can think outside the mass indoctrination, Ralph Glasser’s ‘stage sets of make-believe’, it is time to wise up and prepare for a new way of life as we make our way down the slopes of
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++of Hubbert’s Peak ++
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| This concludes the stand-alone's in Conflict. All photographs by me, Neil Jackson |
