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A Fog of Mendacity

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Published : February 27th, 2012
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Category : Editorials

 

 

 

 

Those frightening sounds, sights, and odors on the wind this foreboding snowless winter - like emanations from some back ward of a global psychiatric hospital - are the signs of a nation going completely mad. The traumatic rise of oil prices above the $100 level is one irritant, prompting a range of people-who-oughta-know-better to gibber and fulminate as though they'd been locked in the nation's attic since Thanksgiving with nothing to do but play with a box of pencils. Meanwhile, several absurd "narratives" circulate around the mainstream media that are sure to cause this country more trouble - as any set of pernicious untruths will.


One popular new lie is that US oil production is suddenly so robust that America is about to become a leading world oil exporter again - which is completely untrue. The lie arises at the intersection of wishful thinking and the willful misuse of statistics. It was trumpeted by the appallingly credulous Tom Friedman in his Sunday New York Times column, of all places, and it shows how effective the oil and gas industry's propaganda campaign has been.


A lot of the wishing comes out of the shale oil and shale gas sectors. Those TV commercials you see around the news hours on the cable networks are designed to extract investment capital from elderly people who have been swindled in the bond markets and don't know where to stick their dwindling retirement funds. Shale oil and gas must seem like a good bet to them, especially the ones marooned in retirement housing clusters in dismal places like Arizona and Florida, where not being able to drive is a virtual death sentence.


The US government is in on this propaganda offensive, especially the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (EIA), which routinely issues overly optimistic reports about future oil production. The political spin is a quixotic effort to promote another commonly touted lie about the future: that the US is approaching a point of "energy independence." You'll know we got there when you have to walk to your new job weeding the potato fields. The mendacity behind this propaganda is strictly the wish of politicians to avoid telling voters the truth, out of sheer cowardice for the consequences. US Energy Secretary Steven Chu will go down in history as a pathetically passive quisling, who thought he was honest and patriotic by standing in the background and keeping his mouth shut.


In fact, a lot of the propaganda behind the current madness is based on the incapacity of Americans to imagine daily life without all the cars. One very active drummer on the propaganda scene is John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil. About a week ago he debated Tad Patzek, a petroleum engineer from the University of Texas. Hofmeister's rap is based on one central fallacious idea: that American life can only continue if we keep all the cars and trucks running. Any other outcome is unthinkable, off the table. To put a finer point on it, he insists that our national identity and destiny are tied to "personal transportation," code for car dependency. The debate was therefore absurd and Patzek was way too polite. He never challenged Hofmeisiter's core idea.


The public's gross misunderstanding of these issues arises over a set of mis-statements made in recent years especially focusing on the Bakken shale oil basin on North Dakota, the various shale gas plays around the country, and the tar sands of Canada (which so many spinmeisters seem to regard as belonging to the United States). The true state of the US oil industry is that we only barely stalled a 40-year decline in oil production by throwing massive amounts of money (capital) at oil reserves that are very expensive and difficult to get. In so far as we've entered the terminal stage of a long debt cycle, one thing we can be sure of is a shrinking pool of real capital investment. Hence the frantic propaganda effort to funnel remaining available money into the shale plays.


A companion fantasy to all this is that the US has a hundred year supply of natural gas. President Obama is guilty of this whopper. (One commentator, financier Bert Dohmen, made the ridiculous claim in a recent podcast on the Financial Sense News Network, that the US has a thousand year supply.) These are the kinds of irresponsible statements that will eventually inflame a public yet again swindled by authorities they desperately want to trust. The truth is we probably have perhaps a seven-year supply of shale gas, and maybe 20 of all gas including the regular old conventional gas. And even that could easily be reduced by the disorders in capital formation now underway in the destabilizing banking sector.


In any case, all this wishing and lying is about to collide with price volatility to make the American voting public absolutely batshit crazy with dread and anger. That, of course, will only prompt more lying, whopper-spinning, and grievance-flogging in the political arena. It will be nearly impossible for the public to evaluate reality. In the meantime, those disorders in banking and financial markets are close to running out of control. Events are tending ever closer to criticality. I believe they will be expressed in political violence around the major party conventions this summer. Those will be interesting fog-lifting weeks.


 

 

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James Howard Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. His nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
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He's certainly right about the desperation of Americans to believe any seemingly hopeful interpretations of our current energy situation. It has been said that the amount of capital expended to get the gas and oil out of the ground and processed in the plains states has already surpassed the inherent value of those resources. It's true in other areas of American life as well: Foreign policy, politics, anti-civil liberties legislation, banking, manufacturing, consumption, employment (and unemployment), the state of our natural environment (No, the earthquake in Japan and its subsequent irradiation of almost everyone's environment is nothing to worry about. The same holds true for the oil gusher in the Gulf - Oh, nothing to worry about down there. Simply a minor glitch in our production mode. Voila! It's fixed!). It seems the more critical an area of our civilization and economy becomes, the more lies accompany any analyses, studies and investigations concerning them and the inescapable impact for the average American citizen/saver/investor is lost beneath the increasing tonnage of lies, deceptions, half-truths, misdirections and swindles flowing from the concerted efforts of the propaganda arms of the US Government and Corporate power structure which not only impede us from addressing our dilemmas, but from disarming the culprits and reducing the damage they are and have been leveling throughout our society. Almost everything crucial is attended by lies, big lies. Almost all sane attempts to respond to the litany of disasters which have become and continue to grow more severe are met with scoffing ridicule or patronizing silence. Whistleblowers are now vigorously prosecuted. Public displays of dissent are being violently responded to. Obvious truths are being ignored (Jon Corzine is still enjoying his freedom and those ultra-high radiation levels found by university scientists in the western USA are simply the fantasies of fear mongers - among a host of other things). It seems that the power structure's greatest efforts and largest financial outlays (aside from filling their own pockets) are directed at developing and administering the placebos they believe necessary to keep the rowdy masses not only docile, but cowed; yet placebos do not affect the course of a disease, they simply make one feel better as they're staggering to the grave.
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Kunstler should rename his article 'A Fog of Words' -- at least it would give him a crumb of honesty.

He has returned to his rant that "one central fallacious idea: that American life can only continue if we keep all the cars and trucks running." American life CAN only continue if we keep all the cars and trucks running. Without that we have society back in the horse and buggy era, which is exactly where Kunstler would like it --except that, even then, it would be too much technology for him. He would prefer a return to tranquil life of the caveman chipping out his flint tools -- everything made by hand.

Most non-left wing energy expects have stated that there is more oil yet to be discovered than can be used in 1,000 years. All we need to do is get the Obama's and the Kunstler environmentalists off our collective backs.

The solution: shake 'em off and drill, baby, drill.
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He's certainly right about the desperation of Americans to believe any seemingly hopeful interpretations of our current energy situation. It has been said that the amount of capital expended to get the gas and oil out of the ground and processed in the p  Read more
dennyc - 2/27/2012 at 5:04 PM GMT
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