Well,
most of us knew it was bad. Once again the UK is revealed the sick man
of Europe, and as a nation we know it - we put ourselves near the
bottom of the table. We have a rotten government, rotten political
system and hopeless politicians. We have the highest crime rate and the
highest drug abuse rate in Europe while boasting a useless criminal
justice system. (Remember twister Tony's "tough on crime and tough on
the causes of crime" statement? As with everything else these New
Labour spin doctorers have said, it was complete rubbish.) Then there's
Council Tax which has doubled in ten years, for what gain? The general
tax burden is burgeoning and stifling, while the county is being
crippled by political correctness and over-regulation. The heath
service is unable to cope with our needs, inflation and interest rates
are rising, petrol and home energy prices have spiralled. These are
just a few reasons why, as a nation, we are heartily and
utterly fed up with the state of our country. What a mess.
Well it's worse than that.
If you think all that is bad enough, just
consider what our government and governments the world over are
concealing from us:
Blair and Bush are concealing the fact that unstoppable economic
disaster could be just around the corner. This economic collapse will
be even worse than the depression of the 1930's, so if climate change
and global warming don't wipe us all out, then something else could.
Could it?
Well, according to award winning investigative journalist David
Strahan, we could well be on the very brink of economic collapse
leading to the complete breakdown of our civilization.
Maybe we should all have a think about this:
The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man
Book by David Strahan
Synopsis:
This may be the most important book you or anyone else will read in the
next fifty years. Assuming humanity survives that long. Draining the
lifeblood of industrial civilization, the terminal decline of oil and
gas production will spark a crisis far more dangerous than
international terrorism, and just as urgent as climate change. World
leaders know it, so why aren't they telling? The last oil shock is the
secret behind the crises in Iraq and Iran, the reason your gas bill is
going through the roof, the basis of a secret deal cooked up in Texas
between George Bush and Tony Blair, the cause of an imminent and
unprecedented economic collapse, and the reason you may soon be kissing
your car keys and boarding pass goodbye.
David Strahan explains how we
reached this critical state, how the silence of governments, oil
companies and environmentalists conspires to keep the public in the
dark, what it means for energy policy, and what you can do to
protect
yourself and your family from the ravages of the last oil shock.
People need to get hold of this, read it, pass it on and then do
something positive with the valuable knowledge they have gained.
Strahan produced two documentaries on Peak Oil for the BBC, and we will
be well served if this book gets picked up for production and seen by
the millions that need to know what is inside this book.
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Please sign The Petition:
The petition was created by Jacob Gordon and reads:
'We
the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to acknowledge that global
oil and gas supplies are peaking and will soon decline; a situation
requiring immediate action.'
Click on the link below:
http://www.peakoil.org.uk/petition
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See these links:
http://www.evworld.com/news.cfm?newsid=14752
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Oil-Shock-Extinction-Petroleum/dp/0719564239
http://www.odac-info.org/welcome/welcome.htm
(Remember the film Soylent Green? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green)
This extract is from EVWORLD NEWSWIRE http://www.evworld.com/news.cfm?newsid=14752
"It is becoming increasingly clear that global oil production will soon
go into terminal decline, with potentially devastating economic
consequences. Although the idea of peak oil has traditionally been
ridiculed by the industry, now even some of the world's most senior
oilmen concede the case. Last year Thierry Desmarest, chairman of
Total, the world's fourth largest oil company, declared that production
would peak by around 2020. He urged governments to find ways to
suppress oil demand growth and put off the witching hour.
Other forecasters are convinced the peak date is even closer. But many
environmentalists continue to resist the idea. Some seem to suspect
that anybody who argues that oil production is set to fall must be a
closet climate change denier with a secret agenda. Others, like Stephen
Tindale of Greenpeace, instinctively distrust forecasts of an imminent
peak, but wish fervently that it would come soon. "Let's hope that the
oil does run out", he told me, "and that the world has to develop
alternatives to oil seriously quickly, and from a climate point of view
that would be an excellent outcome."
Neither position could be more wrong.
Dirty growth: It is mathematically impossible that peak oil will solve
climate change. Although oil is the biggest single source of
energy-related greenhouse gases, coal and gas combined are bigger
still, and the expected growth in their emissions would overwhelm any
reduction from oil.
As I demonstrate in The Last Oil Shock using the International Energy
Agency's "business-as-usual" forecast, even if oil production peaks in
2010 and immediately starts to fall at 3% a year, total emissions would
still rise by 25%, reaching 32 billion tonnes in 2030. Yet by that
time, we need to be well on the way to at least a 60% cut in emissions.
So it is quite possible to run out of oil and pollute the planet to
destruction simultaneously.
In fact peak oil could even make emissions worse if it drives us to
exploit the wrong kinds of fuel. Burning rainforest and peatlands to
create palm oil plantations for biofuels releases vast amounts of CO2,
and has already made Indonesia, according to some ways of calculating
it, the world's third biggest emitter after the US and China.
Synthetic transport fuels made from natural gas using the
Fischer-Tropsch process emit even more carbon on a well-to-wheels basis
than conventional crude; and when the feedstock is coal, the emissions
double.
None of these alternatives are likely to fill the gap left by
conventional crude - at least, not in time. But because they are so
much more carbon intensive, it is quite easy to conjure scenarios in
which we still suffer fuel shortages while emitting even more CO2 than
in the current business-as-usual forecast - the worst of all possible
worlds.
Land fill: Although these fuels are likely to prove inadequate, we may
be driven to use them because cleaner alternatives are even more
inadequate, for a variety of reasons. Biofuels can be produced
sustainably and with real CO2 reductions, but in the industrialised
world there simply isn't the land. In the developing world, however,
there are vast swathes of land which could be put to sugar cane in a
sustainable fashion; but the scale of the task of replacing crude oil
would still be monumental. I calculate that to substitute the fuel lost
through a post-peak oil production annual decline of 3% would mean
planting about 200,000 sq km - equivalent to the land area of Cuba, Sri
Lanka and Papua New Guinea - every year.
Alternatively, if we decided to run Britain's road transport system,
say, on cleanly produced hydrogen - electrolysing water using
non-CO2-emitting forms of generation - our options would be:
67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations
a solar array covering every inch of Norfolk and Derbyshire combined
or a wind farm bigger than the entire southwest region of England.
Price sores
When oil production starts to fall, the economic impacts could well be
devastating. Soaring crude prices could tip the world into a depression
deeper than that of the 1930s, and collapsing stock markets cripple our
ability to finance the expensive clean energy infrastructure we need.
As the unemployment lines grow, the political will to tackle climate
change may be sapped by the need to keep the lights burning as cheaply
as possible.
Many environmentalists seem to dismiss or ignore peak oil because they
simply cannot see it as significant when compared to climate change.
But this is to miss the point. Oil depletion is deadly serious in its
own right, but it also has the capacity both to worsen emissions and
destroy the wealth needed to fight global warming. For this reason -
among others - it too has the power to destroy our civilisation.
David Strahan is an investigative journalist and documentary film-maker
The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man is published by John Murray"
Sign The Petition:
The petition was created by Jacob Gordon and reads:
'We
the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to acknowledge that global
oil and gas supplies are peaking and will soon decline; a situation
requiring immediate action.'
Click on the link below:
http://www.peakoil.org.uk/petition
.
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Do you want to hang up your car keys for good and forget about ever flying away on holiday again?
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