I. Contents of Issue #4: "Moving Beyond the Peak"
Fifty-seven pages (8.5 x 11), PDF format, four articles:
"Relocating and Relocalizing in New Zealand"
by Matt Savinar
"Facing Peak Oil in an Ecovillage"
by Michael Kane
"New America versus American Century Daniel Yergin, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, James Woolsey and the Hegelian Dialectic"
by Michael Kane
"Review of the Boston World Oil Conference: ASPO Positions Itself as
a Major Player"
by Michael Kane
A. Excerpt #1, from "Relocating and Relocalizing in New Zealand" (900 words from 6,038 word article:
Several months ago I interviewed Kevin F., the editor of http://www.cryptogon.com and now http://www.farmlet.co.nz who has recently “made the jump” out of The States relocating in rural New Zealand. His wife, Becky, is originally from NZ. Kevin has been advising his readers who want to relocate to do so immediately. In his view, there is not much time to relocate with relative ease nor is relocation an easy process even when times are good. Kevin’s experience relocating – and re-localizing his life – is an excellent example of what one can realistically expect in the process.
LATOC: Could you tell us about your background prior to moving to New Zealand: education, social class, skill set, etc.
Kevin: Thanks for giving me the opportunity to reach your readers Matt. I grew up in a middle class household in Southern California. My parents worked extremely hard at their small business for over two decades before closing it down due to ever-increasing overhead and decreasing profits.
I originally wanted to be a photojournalist, and made some progress in that area. I didn't love it enough to tolerate the ups and downs of that field. (This was when I was still young and believed that a college education would result in stable and rewarding employment.)
I wanted to travel around the world and I'd always been interested in international politics. History and political science classes were my 'easy A’s' in school. The U.S. Foreign Service seemed like a pretty decent way to go
.
With the revised goal of becoming a career diplomat, I applied and got accepted to University of Southern California's International Relations program. Money was really tight. Eventually, I was able to finish my B.A. in International Relations at USC by taking the maximum number of units at a (cheap) community college and working at FedEx in the evenings.
Long story short: while I was fascinated with government, intelligence studies, foreign policy analysis, etc., I wasn't going to ever work in government. The research I did on my own during those years convinced me that I couldn't ever have anything to do with the U.S. Government.
Luckily, I'd always been a computer geek. In 1998 I started doing computer work full time. Over the years, I've done everything from level 1 tech support to running IT for an entire corporation. My last job was with a large Wall Street financial services company in the IT department of their mortgage capital division.
LATOC: How did you come to believe the American economy is heading serious dislocations if not total collapse?
Kevin: This is very difficult to answer precisely because things have seemed so weird for so long. Early on, I started investigating the financial links between U.S. industrialists and bankers and the Third Reich.
A little later, the creation of the CIA and the U.S. Government's employment of former Nazis caught my attention. Search Google for "Reinhard Gehlen" if you dare.
The events surrounding the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War convinced me that we were all in very deep shit, even decades later. In essence, I came to the conclusion that the United States had devolved into a subtle form fascism before I was even born. There are literally thousands of books and websites on this subject. I like Col. Fletcher Prouty's work.
CIA narcotics trafficking is such a vast area of inquiry that it's hard to know where to start. Peter Dale Scott, Gary Webb, Michael Levine and Daniel Hopsicker are a few authors who have written a lot about this. Mike Ruppert introduced this issue to many in the 1990s. I would like to know, more precisely, how the money enters the global financial markets. That's something I haven't been able to nail to the wall.
The first U.S./Iraq war was still topical when I was in college. I researched U.S. involvement with Iraq prior to Desert Storm. I was pretty cynical by that point, but I still wasn't prepared for what I found. The Reagan White House---read that as George H.W. Bush---armed Saddam Hussein, backed him and provided him tactical and strategic military intelligence. My site, and thousands of others, host images of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. U.S. geo-strategists had a plan they called "Active Neutrality." The book to read on this is the excellent, and almost unknown, Spider's Web by Alan Friedman.
Now that you've got me thinking about this, I don't even know where to shake the stick. If you were to print Cryptogon.com from start to finish, I think it's something like three thousand pages long. Really, it's all the same material, over and over again. The words are just being rearranged on a day-to-day basis at this point.
In summary:
Fascism is here. The global economic system is doomed. Energy scarcity
has been, is and will be the source of major conflict in the world. The
weather is changing. Technology is being used to enslave us all. The life
support systems of the planet are under attack. On and on.
And most people just can't see it. Actually, they're refusing to look
LATOC: Why did you pick New Zealand to relocate too?
Kevin: There were three primary reasons we chose New Zealand:
1) Low population
2) Physical isolation (insuring population stays low)
3) Natural environment allowing for just about any
gardening/agricultural/farming endeavor imaginable
We also considered Oregon but it had two problems:
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B. Excerpt #2, from "Facing Peak Oil in an Ecovillage" 331 words from 2,338 word article:
What should the goals of an Ecovillage or intentional community be, and what should the individuals within such communities strive to achieve? People join intentional communities for every reason you could imagine. But the words that resonate with me most in this regard come from Earthaven villager Chris Farmer, who says, “We should have started this ten years ago.”
What is he talking about?
Farmer has embarked on a very ambitious plan at Earthaven known as “Gateway” with his business partner and fellow Earthaven villager Brian Love. Gateway is the most inspiring re-localization project I have seen or heard of to date. Especially now that the data is in showing that global oil production likely peaked at the end of 2005, Brian & Farmer (as they are commonly known throughout Earthaven) have come to the same conclusion as Dr. Robert Hirsch of SAIC – you need many decades of preparation before Global Peak Oil to prepare for the post carbon world.
Regardless Gateway still has a very good shot at success.
Hopefully others are analyzing Gateway and making attempts to modify the plan for their own localities. Essentially Gateway is two men with tons of initiative attempting to implement a very ambitious plan that incorporates agriculture, livestock, ethanol, biodiesel, solar energy, wood gasification, wood milling, aquaculture, and anything else that will help their community – and hopefully the surrounding communities – survive Post-Peak through sustainable, bioregional strategies.
Earthaven villagers are very supportive of this project, but not everyone believes Gateway will ultimately lead to a sustainable survival plan. As an example, part of the plan involves producing 190-proof ethanol on a small-scale which is, in fact, a net energy winner. It is only 200-proof ethanol (what big business is producing) that is an energy loser. The big-boy ethanol producers waste the extra energy so that they can combine it with gasoline. 190-proof ethanol cannot be combined with gasoline, but it can run in the conventional automobile with only three minor tweaks to your vehicle.
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C. Excerpt #3, from "New America versus American Century Daniel Yergin, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Woolsey and the Hegelian Dialectic", 503 words from a 2,903 word article:
As Daniel Yergin and his Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) attack the well-supported reality of Peak Oil – again – and Peak Oil educators shoot down Yergin and CERA’s unsubstantiated claims – yet again – we should take a step back from the minutia of the debate and examine the situation as a dialectical construct.
The Hegelian Dialectic: thesis – antithesis – synthesis
Hegel never used “thesis – antithesis – synthesis” to describe his dialectics, but this has come to be the simplest explanation of what he was describing. For every thesis there inevitably arises an anti-thesis: for every opinion or position there is always the opposite opinion or position. The Hegelian Dialectic is essentially the process of conversation and debate striving towards an agreement (synthesis) between opposing views to form a new understanding (thesis). But once we arrive at a new thesis there is, of course, a new anti-thesis, and thus the process continues. The more exclusionary control that can be exercised over this process within public debate (think Democrats & Republicans / neo-cons and neo-liberals / right & left), the more control the elite can exercise over the masses.
A man who operates with precision and mastery in the dialogue of public policy decision making is Zbigniew Brzezinski; former National Security Advisor to President Carter (a Democrat), co-founder of the Tri-lateral Commission and registered Republican. In his now infamous book titled The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997, Brzezinski laid out the geo-strategic importance of the Middle East and Central Asia as being the regions where the next major global conflict(s) would take place. In this book Brzezinski says the “imperial mobilization” necessary to commandeer the world’s remaining hydrocarbon reserves would be hard to embark upon without a catastrophic and catalyzing event on par with Pearl Harbor.
A group of men who call themselves the “neo-cons” took up Brzezinski’s chessboard and created The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In 2000 these men took the Whitehouse. The neo-cons also recognized that a “catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor,” would benefit their dreams of imperial mobilization. Well, the new Pearl Harbor they all publicly prayed for came and went, and just as they had predicted, it helped to speed up the process of American imperial mobilization.
But now Brzezinski is singing a much different tune. When Israel embarked on its failed war in Southern Lebanon, Brzezinski publicly stated the following on numerous occasions:
These neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, are fatal for America and ultimately for Israel. They will totally turn the overwhelming majority of the Middle East's population against the United States. The lessons of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neo-con policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well.
Brzezinski publicly voiced this strong opinion on July 20, 2006 – about one week after Israel invaded Lebanon – at The New American Foundation American Strategy Program, where Daniel Yergin sits on the Board of Directors.
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D. Excerpt #4, from "Review of the Boston World Oil Conference: ASPO Positions Itself as a Major Player", 503 words from a 4,791 word article:
The Boston World Oil Conference that ran from October 25th through the 28th showed me that ASPO-USA has a much better understanding of the energy problems we are facing than they do of the local solutions we need. They are focusing on an ill-fated “Plan B” although, to their credit, they are not painting a rosy picture. The debate they are encouraging is relatively fair and balanced but only in the realm of big business ‘solutions’. My suspicions tell me that many in ASPO-USA largely agree with the “extreme” Peak Oilists (FTW, LATOC, CultureChange, Back-to-the-Land Movement, etc…) but will not outwardly say so. Albert Bates had a table at the conference where he was selling Crossing the Rubicon. Bates gave a presentation titled “Reducing our Fossil Fuel Footprint” at one of the ASPO workshops held on the final day of the conference.
Lynn Benander of Coop Power, a consumer owned cooperative building sustainable energy resources in New England and New York, was literally booed by a male-dominated audience when she dared to ask a very valid question – perhaps the most important question of the entire conference. I interviewed her after she was disrespectfully shutdown.
“I am concerned because all of the projections (in Hirsch Report 2) for how we are going to address Peak Oil issues are all very large business, significant interventions that have tremendous environmental impact issues,” said Benander. “They neglected 56% of our economy which is place-based businesses, non-profits, government entities, and cooperatives that are providing tremendous services and are also places people trust more.”
A very brief answer was given to her question from Robert M. Bezdek, who co-authored the Hirsch Report (fully titled Economic Impacts of Liquid Fuel Mitigation Options) Bezdek simply stated they don’t know how to estimate the impact of the sectors Benander brought up, so they are not included. Benander commented:
The government is making its decisions about how to transfer our dollars for solutions using this data which is focused only on large business. It continues the multi-billion dollar transfer of public dollars to private hands that’s already going on, and this is about making it even bigger. There’s such a tremendous flow of money from poor to wealthy individuals, and I believe it’s these kinds of policies based on this kind of data that contributes to the problem. We need a different paradigm.
Very well said. It is a shame that Benander did not get to say this to everyone at the conference. The findings of Hirsch Report 2, while focused exclusively on big business solutions, are very realistic and some would say pessimistic. FTW loves to see this type of hard data published because it tells us precisely where we stand, and what is clear from this report is that we have run out of time to mitigate Peak Oil with big-business-as-usual solutions. Coal to liquid fuel, LNG, coal bed methane, tar sands and every alternative we have combined are not going to mitigate this crisis in time. Place-based, decentralized local solutions are our only hope to build a sustainable society. I applaud Benander for pointing at the elephant in the living room.
