Peak Oil

"Bill Bonde { ''Direct And On Point'')" > wrote
in message ...

>> But that's an attribute that's hardly unique to gas/oil
>> as an energy source. Coal and uranium are both
>> basically "pumped out of the ground"; hydroelectric,
>> geothermal, tidal, wind, solar etc., are all "energy
>> from natural sources," and I don't see that the
>> distinction "comes out of the ground" is a particularly
>> useful one.
>>
> If you can stick a straw in the ground and out pops bubbling crude,
> black gold, that does give you an idea about the costs to produce,
> not much.

And if you could pour crude oil into your gas tank, you
might have a point there.

Do you think the costs of an oil refinery, tankage,
pipelines, oil tankers, trucks, etc., are truly negligible?
How do you think they compare to, say, a dam with
hydro generators, the appropriate distribution network,
etc., delivering comparable amounts of energy to a
similar number of customers? I don't know which
actually has an advantage, frankly, but I doubt that
either one represents a negligible infrastructure cost.

Bob M.

Bob Myers wrote:
>
> "Bill Bonde { ''Direct And On Point'')" > wrote
> in message ...
>
> >> But that's an attribute that's hardly unique to gas/oil
> >> as an energy source. Coal and uranium are both
> >> basically "pumped out of the ground"; hydroelectric,
> >> geothermal, tidal, wind, solar etc., are all "energy
> >> from natural sources," and I don't see that the
> >> distinction "comes out of the ground" is a particularly
> >> useful one.
> >>
> > If you can stick a straw in the ground and out pops bubbling crude,
> > black gold, that does give you an idea about the costs to produce,
> > not much.
>
> And if you could pour crude oil into your gas tank, you
> might have a point there.
>
> Do you think the costs of an oil refinery, tankage,
> pipelines, oil tankers, trucks, etc., are truly negligible?
> How do you think they compare to, say, a dam with
> hydro generators, the appropriate distribution network,
> etc., delivering comparable amounts of energy to a
> similar number of customers? I don't know which
> actually has an advantage, frankly, but I doubt that
> either one represents a negligible infrastructure cost.
>
I'm not sure what the argument is here. Production costs in Saudi
Arabia might be a dollar or two bbl. Oil is very scalable. It also
provides the power to run its own process of production and
refinement. You can't say that for power sources that are not
available on demand. But I'm not arguing against coal because it
doesn't get mined out of the ground. But you'll notice that it
isn't "pumped" out of the ground, it's either strip mined or
underground mined, messy and/or dangerous.




--
"It happens sometimes, people just explode, natural causes."

-+Alex Cox, "Repo Man"

wrote:
> On Thu, 22 May 2008 16:59:18 -0500, Brent P said:

>> The US got involved in the 1950s with the UK to overthrow Iran's
>> government

Indeed.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0810-06.htm

Even worse, they put the Shah in power, and his brutal,
oppressive regime had the worst human rights record on the
planet. But it did cater to the corporate interests of its
puppet masters, which is all that matters.

> Yes. To overthrow Iran's democratically elected government using
> subversive means including terrorist attacks. The US and the UK are
> terrorists. But we all knew that.

It's funny how some sheeple will acutally believe
that the Bush regime is trying to bring democracy
to Iraq, given that as recently as 2002, the Bush regime
aided in a Coup against the Democratically elected and
very popular Government of Venezuela. The U.S. has
a history of destroying freedom and democracy, not
encouraging it.


--

http://911research.wtc7.net
http://www.911truth.org
http://stopthelie.com/1-hour_guide_to_911.html


Here's what happens to steel framed buildings exposed
to raging infernos for hours on end.

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/anal...are/fires.html
http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr69c.html

On 9-11-01, WTC7, a 47 story steel framed building, which
had only small, random fires, dropped in perfect symmetry
at near free fall speed as in a perfectly executed controlled
demolition.

http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/videos.html
http://wtc7.net/articles/FEMA/WTC_ch5.htm

Ever wonder who benefits from the 700 MILLION
U.S. taxpayer dollars spent each DAY in Iraq?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0223-08.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=21

"They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
warfare or morality."
-bu$h describing his own illegal invasion of Iraq.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

http://www.commondreams.org/
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...

Petie "I'm not psychotic at all" Roehling amused his betters with:
> "Brent P" > wrote

>> Laugh it up fuzzball. Sit down and read Exxon's annual report... nahh
>> you're too lazy to do that... you'll just believe what the mainstream
>> media tells you to believe.

> Yeah, nutjobs invariably love that "mainstream media" line. It's all a
> *plot*!

But the really intelligent people believe whatever they
see and hear on Meet the Press, CNN, and FAUX news, right
Petie? Corporate sponsors would *never* censor a potentially
damaging story. That's crazy talk, right Petie? <chuckle>
Here's just one of hundreds of examples of important news
that you will not see on the mainstream media.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/may2008/fbi-m23.shtml

FBI files indict Bush, Cheney and Co. as war criminals
By Bill Van Auken
23 May 2008

The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department
Inspector General?s report released this week was that agents of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a ?War Crimes? file,
documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US prison
camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their
reports.

The World Socialist Web Site, together with human rights groups and
other opponents of US militarism and repression, has long insisted that
the actions of the Bush administration?the launching of wars of
aggression, assassinations, the abduction and detention of civilians
without trial and, most repugnant of all, torture?constitute war crimes
under any legitimate interpretation of longstanding international
statutes and treaties.

To have this assessment confirmed, however, by the IG of the Justice
Department, the only senior official there not answerable directly to
the White House, and by agents of the FBI, an agency not known for its
sensitivity to questions of democratic rights, is an indication of the
rampant character of these crimes as well as the crisis they have
engendered within the US government and America?s ruling elite as a whole.

The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered and
planned in detail at the highest levels of the government?including the
White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Justice
Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic grounds by
individuals within the government were systematically suppressed, and
evidence of this criminal activity covered up.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House on these new
revelations. Responses from other agencies directly implicated in the
crimes at Guantánamo were indicative of the general atmosphere of
impunity in which the torture detailed in the IG?s report continues to
this day.

?There?s nothing new here,? said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. A
State Department spokesman, meanwhile, described the charges contained
in the report as ?pretty vague.?

Pretty vague? One can?t help but wonder what the spokesman would
consider explicit. The report contains page after page of testimony by
FBI agents on the sadistic and sickening practices carried out at
Guantánamo.

In one section, the report states: ?[An FBI Agent] recalled that, at
some point during the interrogation, the military officer ?put water
down? a seated detainee?s throat. He said he guessed that the purpose of
the water was to give the detainee the sensation that he was drowning,
so that he would provide the information that the interrogator wanted.
[The agent] stated that the detainee was gagging and spitting out water.
He said that the detainee appeared to be uncomfortable, and assumed that
he had trouble breathing.?

Consider the account of the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a
Mauritanian national who was arrested by his own government, turned over
to US forces and brought to Guantánamo in 2002:

?He was left alone in a cold room known as ?the freezer,? where guards
would prevent him from sleeping by putting ice or cold water on him...

?He was subjected to sleep deprivation for a period of 70 days by means
of prolonged interrogations, strobe lights, threatening music, forced
intake of water, and forced standing.

?He was deprived of clothing by a female interrogator;

?Two female interrogators touched him sexually and made sexual
statements to him;

?Prior to and during the boat ride incident, he was severely beaten.?

In addition, the document says, he was ?led to believe he was going to
be executed, and urinated on himself,? and was told that his mother and
family would be detained and harmed.


Hundreds of FBI agents witnessed torture

Similar episodes were described, according to the IG report, by
literally hundreds of FBI agents, who witnessed CIA, military and
private contractor interrogators carry out illegal acts of torture and
abuse against detainees.

In addition, the report cites: several agents who reported instances of
beatings, 30 agents who reported witnessing prolonged shackling of
detainees in stress positions, 70 agents who reported detainees being
subjected to sleep deprivation, 29 agents who had information on the use
of extreme temperatures in order to ?break the detainees? resolve to
resist cooperating? and 50 agents reporting the use of extended
isolation to ?wear down a detainee?s resistance.?

In addition, four agents reported the kicking and beating to death of
two detainees in Afghanistan who had been subjected to prolonged
shackling in a standing position.

The episodes of torture detailed in this report are the tip of the iceberg.

They do not include the treatment of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen
born in Germany, who was arrested during a trip to Pakistan in the fall
of 2001 and was handed over to US officials for a $3,000 bounty. First
taken to the US base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he was then transferred
to Guantánamo. While by 2002 the US authorities concluded that Kurnaz
had nothing to do with terrorism, he was imprisoned until the middle of
2006 and released only because of pressure from the German government.

Barred from entry to the US, he testified via video link to a sparsely
attended hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week.

?I did nothing wrong and I was treated like a monster,? he said. He told
how he was subjected to electric shocks, being suspended by his wrists
for hours and subjected to the ?water treatment,? in which his head was
stuck into a bucket of water and he was punched in the stomach, forcing
him to inhale the liquid. (The Justice Department Inspector General?s
report, it bears noting, affirmed that this last form of torture did not
constitute ?waterboarding,? but did represent ?an effort to intimidate
the detainees and increase their feelings of helplessness.?)

?I know others have died from this kind of treatment,? said Kurnaz. ?I
suffered from sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, religious and
sexual humiliations. I was beaten multiple times.?

?There was no law in Guantánamo,? Kurnaz concluded. ?I didn?t think this
could happen in the 21st century.... I could never have imagined that
this place was created by the United States.?

The inmates held at Guantánamo represent barely 1 percent of those
detained at US prison camps and secret jails run by the military and the
CIA in Iraq, Afghanistan and other points around the world. An estimated
27,000 people are being held without charges, much less trials, many of
them simply having disappeared into Washington?s global gulag. Some are
held on prison ships, others in secret dungeons run jointly by the CIA
and regimes to which it ?outsources? detainees, like Egypt, Jordan and
Morocco, where other, cruder forms of torture?being buried alive, given
electric shocks or slashed with scalpels?are employed.

The report also reconfirms that the revolting scenes captured in the
photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that came to light
four years ago?naked and hooded men being subjected to torture and
sexual humiliation by US guards?were no aberration. The methods
described in the report?forced nudity, the use of attack dogs in
interrogations, chaining detainees in ?stress? positions, leading them
around on dog leashes, draping them in women?s underwear?were identical
to those officially blamed on a ?few bad apples? at Abu Ghraib.


Sadistic torture ?orchestrated? from the White House

The uniformity of abuse at these widely separated facilities is evidence
that the psychopathic and criminal sadism inflicted upon those detained
by US forces was planned and orchestrated from the top.

Indeed, as ABC News revealed last month, top administration officials on
the so-called Principals? Committee?Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director
George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft and National Security
Council Adviser Condoleezza Rice?conducted detailed discussions on
?enhanced interrogation techniques,? which, according to ABC, ?were
almost choreographed?down to the number of times CIA agents could use a
specific tactic.?

Bush subsequently told ABC that he was ?aware our national security team
met on this issue. And I approved.?

The report establishes that FBI and Justice Department officials advised
the White House National Security Council of their concern that the
practices witnessed by the agents were ?gravely damaging ... the rule of
law? at Guantánamo.

In the end, however, they were told to back off, and they complied,
thereby becoming accomplices in this criminality and its cover-up.

The revelations in the FBI report have provoked no significant protests
or demands for action from the Democrats in Congress, or for that matter
from the party?s presidential contenders, Senators Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton, neither of whom have made torture an issue in their
campaigns.

The New York Times Tuesday carried a lead editorial titled, ?What the
FBI agents saw,? which laid out the details of the report and stated
that it ?shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of
defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American
law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of
prisoners.?

The paper?s conclusion: ?The Democrats must press for full disclosure?
through hearings to uncover ?the extent of President Bush?s disregard
for the law and the Geneva Conventions.? This, they tell their readers,
?is the only way to get this country back to being a defender, not a
violator, of human rights.?

Such is the impotence of erstwhile American establishment liberalism.
The extent of the Bush administration?s outright criminality has been
thoroughly exposed over the course of several years.

The wholesale and deliberate violations of the Geneva Conventions and
the Convention against Torture are, under international law, war
crimes?just as the FBI recognized they were. What is demanded is not
another toothless congressional hearing, but rather the constitution of
a war crimes tribunal. Those responsible must be held accountable.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft should be
placed on trial. Those like former White House counsel and Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales, Cheney?s chief of staff David Addington and
Justice Department deputy assistant secretary John Yoo, who crafted the
pseudo-legal arguments legitimizing torture, should be prosecuted as
well, together with those military and intelligence officials who
directed the criminal practices at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and
other CIA and military camps and prisons.

The Democratic leadership has no desire or intention to fight for such a
reckoning. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders have
repeatedly insisted that impeachment of the president and vice president
is ?off the table.? They have no interest in pursuing the administration
on the issue of torture because they themselves are complicit, with
Pelosi and other senior congressional Democrats having been briefed
extensively on the criminal methods employed at Guantánamo, which they
approved and concealed from the American people.

On a more fundamental level, the Democrats have been complicit in a
policy of global militarism and aggression?carried out under the mantle
of a ?global war on terrorism??which is directed at using armed force to
further the interests of America?s ruling oligarchy. It is this criminal
strategy?resulting in the loss of over 1 million Iraqi lives?that has
given rise to the crime of torture itself.

Nonetheless, the deepening crisis of American capitalism is creating the
conditions for profound shocks and changes in political and social
relations that may well result in Bush, Cheney and Co. standing in the
dock as war criminals.

Such a trial is vitally necessary from the standpoint of halting these
ongoing crimes, preventing the use of similar methods against political
opposition within the US itself and politically educating the American
people.

See Also:
FBI agents created ?war crimes file? documenting US torture
[22 May 2008]
2003 Justice Department memo justifies torture, presidential dictatorship
[4 April 2008]
Bush defends torture
[16 February 2008]



--

http://911research.wtc7.net
http://www.911truth.org
http://stopthelie.com/1-hour_guide_to_911.html


Here's what happens to steel framed buildings exposed
to raging infernos for hours on end.

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/anal...are/fires.html
http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr69c.html

On 9-11-01, WTC7, a 47 story steel framed building, which
had only small, random fires, dropped in perfect symmetry
at near free fall speed as in a perfectly executed controlled
demolition.

http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/videos.html
http://wtc7.net/articles/FEMA/WTC_ch5.htm

Ever wonder who benefits from the 700 MILLION
U.S. taxpayer dollars spent each DAY in Iraq?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0223-08.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=21

"They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
warfare or morality."
-bu$h describing his own illegal invasion of Iraq.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

http://www.commondreams.org/
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...