The now deceased Catholic spiritualist, Fr. Anthony DeMello, described three acts that human beings find particularly challenging. In no special order they are; to include the excluded; to turn the other cheek and to admit when we are wrong. The inability to exercise these options comes from an over-developed ego deeply entrenched in its illusions. If one is to be an unlearner, one must readily embrace the errors he or she is bound to make on the road to truth. In the case of Peak Oil, it is quite possible that this editor has been wrong.

“We look on China not as a strategic competitor but as a strategic partner,” said the Indian Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar during his January 10-13 visit to Beijing.

While in China, Aiyer, who was accompanied by representatives of major Indian petroleum firms, signed five memoranda on energy cooperation with the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission. And on January 12, the Indian delegation met with top officials from China’s main energy companies, including the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China Petrochemical Corporation, and China National Offshore Oil Corporation.

Nuclear Hypocrisy and Global Ambitions
The pace of diplomatic maneuvers, political charges, and military threats by the U.S. against Iran is quickening. This crisis has been building since George W. Bush, in his State of the Union speech four years ago, made Iran a target in the so-called “war on terror” by declaring it part of an “axis of evil” (along with Iraq and North Korea) and accusing the Iranian government of pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. Tensions escalated dramatically several weeks ago when Iran reopened its Natanz nuclear facility, which can produce enriched uranium.

In less than a year, India and China have managed to confound analysts around the world by turning their much-vaunted rivalry for the acquisition of oil and gas assets in third countries into a nascent partnership that could alter the basic dynamics of the global energy market.

IRAN
What is likely to happen in Iran? It is extremely difficult to tell. It would seem that for some time now the United States has been lining that country up as one of its possible next targets after Afghanistan and Iraq. The immediate pretext for such an attack appears to center on Iran’s nuclear program, and although anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist/anti-Israeli declarations by Iran’s Prime Minister Ahmadinejad have also brought reactions from Israel, these reactions appear also to be connected to Iran’s nuclear program.

Rocks into Gas

Geologists have long believed that the world’s supply of oil and natural gas came from the decay of primordial plant and animal matter, which, over the course of millions of years, turned into petroleum.

Petroleum might not have become such a key commodity in the world had certain U.S. oligarchic circles not successfully beaten off the ethanol movement in the United States in the 1930s¹, in particular, through the Rockefeller (oil and banking, among many other things), Dupont (chemicals) and General Motors alliance which overcame the attempts of the farming lobby, supported, perhaps surprisingly, by Henry Ford². The farming lobby sought unsuccessfully to get President F.D. Roosevelt to authorize ethanol for automobile fuel.

A key argument to Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil, is that energy resources are infinite, not finite. Craig Smith and I acknowledge that the argument is counter-intuitive. We are fighting the “Peak-Production” oil theorists who proclaim the common wisdom that we are running out of oil. Yet the argument we are making is not without precedent.

We refer to the work done by economist Julian Simon, who was a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland until his death in 1998. He was a noted population expert who frequently took on the theme of energy. Like Craig Smith and me, Julian Simon argued that we would never exhaust energy resources. In his 1996 book, The Ultimate Resource II, he wrote, “Energy trends toward exhaustion. It seems impossible to keep using energy and still never begin to run out – that is, never reach a point of increasing scarcity.” Yet that is exactly what Simon argued would happen:

“In the aftermath of a series of pullouts by Western oil majors, Vietnam has gone into partnership with its former Cold War ally Russia to develop its oil industry.” This development was reported by the Asia Times Online on Dec. 3, 1999, a report loudly rebroadcast by Vietnam News at the time.

The Russians were confident they would succeed where Western countries failed. Why? Armed with what has become known as the Russian-Ukrainian theory of the deep, abiotic origin of petroleum, the Russians planned to find oil where traditionally trained “fossil-fuel” petro-geologists had failed to look. So, in 1981 the Russians teamed up with the Vietnamese to form a joint venture oil company named Vietsovpetro (PetroVietnam). Together they headed into the South China Sea off Vietnam and drilled deep wells into the crystalline basement structure of the sea bottom.

New study shows methane on Saturn’s moon Titan not biological

December 1, 2005

NASA scientists are about to publish conclusive studies showing abundant methane of a non-biologic nature is found on Saturn’s giant moon Titan, a finding that validates a new book’s contention that oil is not a fossil fuel.

“We have determined that Titan’s methane is not of biologic origin,” reports Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center, a principal NASA investigator responsible for the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer aboard the Cassini-Huygens probe that landed on Titan Jan. 14.

Niemann concludes the methane “must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan, perhaps venting from a supply in the interior that could have been trapped there as the moon formed.”