Peak Oil and 9/11
Dave McGowan smacks down Mike Ruppert yet again on Peak Oil. Although I enjoy reading McGowan a lot, I sense he is a bit of a contrarian, and his take on Peak Oil isn't the general consensus.
Certainly Ruppert pushes Peak Oil very heavily-- the most important reason being that he thinks it was the main reason behind the US setting up the 9/11 attacks which he thinks provided incentive to attack oil rich nations. But, Ruppert does seem to push the most apocalyptic version of Peak Oil, in which some three-quarters of the people in the world will die when oil and natural gas runs out. Ruppert also rules out absolutely that any alternative energy supply can take the place of oil and natural gas.
This is where I have a problem with Ruppert's take on Peak Oil. Although certainly if oil ran out all of sudden, it would cause an unprecedented catastrophe for humanity, I don't see it running out suddenly. Rather I expect oil supplies to dwindle and taper off, raising the cost of oil, then making alternative energy much more feasible. Oil shortages will also likely cause a severe global recession that will dampen the demand for oil, and which will prolong the global supply of oil.
Thus I don't buy into the extreme scenario Ruppert projects. The fact is, Peak Oil has been predicted to occur for some time now, and it never seems to come. It may well come in the very near future, but I'm not sure I'd want to wager a lot of money on it. The bottom line for me, is that I am not going to spend a lot of time worrying about Peak Oil.
But this is all really separate from the issue of whether Peak Oil had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. And on this account, I think Ruppert is right. Certainly every indication is that Bush and Cheney are very worried about Peak Oil. And this may well have been a major motivation for setting up 9/11. Thus, in terms of 9/11, it doesn't matter if Peak Oil is real or not-- the important point is if Bush and Cheney were worried enough about Peak Oil to do something about it. Given their background as oil men, I think they very well likely did want to go into Iraq (and Saudi Arabia, and central Asia through Afghanistan) to secure the oil there. And they needed a really good excuse to mount these wars-- hence 9/11.
Dave McGowan think that Peak Oil is all a huge scam, and that Bush and Cheney know this, and they used Peak Oil as a secret cover for their plans. McGowan thinks that what the Peak Oil people really want to do is CONTROL all the world's oil, so as to control the price and make a lot of money. Thus, Peak Oil is a cover for this operation.
McGowan seems to be postulating that Bush and Cheney engineered 9/11 with a false front of terrorism, with a SECOND false front of Peak Oil, and that the REAL reason for 9/11 and the wars it produced was to establish control over the world's oil supply so as to maintain the illusion of Peak Oil and drive high oil prices. This theory really seems a bit too convoluted to me.
I think George W. Bush basically does whatever Dick Cheney talks him into, and I think Dick Cheney, being a somewhat gullible fellow, REALLY believes in Peak Oil.
After all, Dick Cheney seems to believe Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, and that US troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. While it is possible that Cheney really is a master of disinformation, I think it is more likely he just is prone to believing in extreme theories-- such as Peak Oil. This is, after all, Cheney's whole political career-- he is an extremist.
As far as Cheney being a mastermind behind 9/11, I am not convinced he planned it like it worked out. Although I think Cheney is about as sick a person as you'll find in Washington, I think more likely he was duped to some extent by 9/11. Perhaps Cheney helped set-up the hijackers in some other way-- such as a sting operation, and this went horribly awry.
With Cheney, I am more inclined to believe in incompetence than pure malevolence. Read this amusing story on Cheney from Suck.com, and I think you'll get the idea.
Dick Cheney is clearly a man prone to wild military plans, and this would explain a lot about the last four years. Will we ever really know what Dick Cheney had in mind for 9/11?
Overall, I thnk it is highly likely that Dick Cheney:
1) believed in the concept of Peak Oil,
2) knew he needed a good excuse to invade Iraq and other oil-producing countries,
3) knew about the 9/11 hijacking plan before 9/11
4) ran some aspect of the wargames that were central to 9/11.
I'm just having a hard time believing Dick Cheney devised the entire plan for the 9/11 attacks, and that it went off the way he planned.
Certainly Ruppert pushes Peak Oil very heavily-- the most important reason being that he thinks it was the main reason behind the US setting up the 9/11 attacks which he thinks provided incentive to attack oil rich nations. But, Ruppert does seem to push the most apocalyptic version of Peak Oil, in which some three-quarters of the people in the world will die when oil and natural gas runs out. Ruppert also rules out absolutely that any alternative energy supply can take the place of oil and natural gas.
This is where I have a problem with Ruppert's take on Peak Oil. Although certainly if oil ran out all of sudden, it would cause an unprecedented catastrophe for humanity, I don't see it running out suddenly. Rather I expect oil supplies to dwindle and taper off, raising the cost of oil, then making alternative energy much more feasible. Oil shortages will also likely cause a severe global recession that will dampen the demand for oil, and which will prolong the global supply of oil.
Thus I don't buy into the extreme scenario Ruppert projects. The fact is, Peak Oil has been predicted to occur for some time now, and it never seems to come. It may well come in the very near future, but I'm not sure I'd want to wager a lot of money on it. The bottom line for me, is that I am not going to spend a lot of time worrying about Peak Oil.
But this is all really separate from the issue of whether Peak Oil had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. And on this account, I think Ruppert is right. Certainly every indication is that Bush and Cheney are very worried about Peak Oil. And this may well have been a major motivation for setting up 9/11. Thus, in terms of 9/11, it doesn't matter if Peak Oil is real or not-- the important point is if Bush and Cheney were worried enough about Peak Oil to do something about it. Given their background as oil men, I think they very well likely did want to go into Iraq (and Saudi Arabia, and central Asia through Afghanistan) to secure the oil there. And they needed a really good excuse to mount these wars-- hence 9/11.
Dave McGowan think that Peak Oil is all a huge scam, and that Bush and Cheney know this, and they used Peak Oil as a secret cover for their plans. McGowan thinks that what the Peak Oil people really want to do is CONTROL all the world's oil, so as to control the price and make a lot of money. Thus, Peak Oil is a cover for this operation.
McGowan seems to be postulating that Bush and Cheney engineered 9/11 with a false front of terrorism, with a SECOND false front of Peak Oil, and that the REAL reason for 9/11 and the wars it produced was to establish control over the world's oil supply so as to maintain the illusion of Peak Oil and drive high oil prices. This theory really seems a bit too convoluted to me.
I think George W. Bush basically does whatever Dick Cheney talks him into, and I think Dick Cheney, being a somewhat gullible fellow, REALLY believes in Peak Oil.
After all, Dick Cheney seems to believe Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, and that US troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. While it is possible that Cheney really is a master of disinformation, I think it is more likely he just is prone to believing in extreme theories-- such as Peak Oil. This is, after all, Cheney's whole political career-- he is an extremist.
As far as Cheney being a mastermind behind 9/11, I am not convinced he planned it like it worked out. Although I think Cheney is about as sick a person as you'll find in Washington, I think more likely he was duped to some extent by 9/11. Perhaps Cheney helped set-up the hijackers in some other way-- such as a sting operation, and this went horribly awry.
With Cheney, I am more inclined to believe in incompetence than pure malevolence. Read this amusing story on Cheney from Suck.com, and I think you'll get the idea.
Dick Cheney is clearly a man prone to wild military plans, and this would explain a lot about the last four years. Will we ever really know what Dick Cheney had in mind for 9/11?
Overall, I thnk it is highly likely that Dick Cheney:
1) believed in the concept of Peak Oil,
2) knew he needed a good excuse to invade Iraq and other oil-producing countries,
3) knew about the 9/11 hijacking plan before 9/11
4) ran some aspect of the wargames that were central to 9/11.
I'm just having a hard time believing Dick Cheney devised the entire plan for the 9/11 attacks, and that it went off the way he planned.
posted by spooked at 5:22 PM
2 Comments:
I always wondered why they had bu$h lined up to be in the school with all those little kids around...and that weird school terror attack in Russia might have been a big messed up black op.
Just thinking out loud.
Frankly I am more suspicious of Ruppert's motives than I am of McGowan's judgment. I wonder about Ruppert's CIA ties and his views on depopulation.
As to Peak Oil, I take a less conspiratorial view than McGowan. That is, I think there is a genuine scientific controversy. I suspect that it is not finally known whether or not oil is produced by geological processes beneath the earth's crust, simply because humanity does not yet possess the instruments to determine the nature of deep-earth processes, indeed the deeper you go the more speculative the science becomes.
That said, Western oil companies do have a history of suppressing science that would tend to weaken their market position (see the checkered history of oil shale mining for an example of this) so I am sure that somebody's thumb, so to speak, is on the scale somewhere. You can call it a conspiracy or a business plan based on rational self-interest, but the result is the same.
Because of this tendency for self-interested corporations to produce bad science, I am willing to believe that the Russian/Ukranian studies may be based on better speculative science than the oil company's speculative studies. What we need is better instruments and more objective experts!
As for the policy implications, access to oil has been a major foreign policy goal for many governments for almost a century. Pearl Harbor, for example, was a part of a desperate oil grab by Imperial Japan. It wasn't a matter of there not being enough oil, it's that there wasn't enough oil for Japan to sustain its Imperial ambitions. Oil doesn't need to be running out for governments to go to war to get it.
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