Nick Clegg has a piece in The Guardian today:
The world watched in horror yesterday as the conflict in Gaza claimed its latest innocent victims in the rubble of a UN school. Any hopes of reconciliation are being snuffed out as anger spills into protests around the world.
The past two weeks have been a telling indictment of the international community. We have an outgoing US president sanctioning Israel’s military response and an aching silence from the president-elect. We have a European Union encumbered by clumsy decision-making and confused messages.
And at home we have a prime minister talking like an accountant about aid earmarked for Gaza without once saying anything meaningful about the conflict’s origins…
My proposals to stay Israel’s hand in this conflict may be unwelcome to some, but they have the country’s long term interest at heart. No terrorist organisation has ever been defeated by bombs alone. Only a new approach will secure lasting peace for Israel itself.
You can read the full piece here.
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13 Comments
Spot on Nick.
The top story of the year is that global crude oil production peaked in 2008.
The media, governments, world leaders, and public should focus on this issue.
Global crude oil production had been rising briskly until 2004, then plateaued for four years. Because oil producers were extracting at maximum effort to profit from high oil prices, this plateau is a clear indication of Peak Oil.
Then in July and August of 2008 while oil prices were still very high, global crude oil production fell nearly one million barrels per day, clear evidence of Peak Oil (See Rembrandt Koppelaar, Editor of “Oil Watch Monthly,” December 2008, page 1) http://www.peakoil.nl/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/2008_december_oilwatch_monthly.pdf.
Peak Oil is now.
Credit for accurate Peak Oil predictions (within a few years) goes to the following (projected year for peak given in parentheses):
* Association for the Study of Peak Oil (2007)
* Rembrandt Koppelaar, Editor of “Oil Watch Monthly” (2008)
* Tony Eriksen, Oil stock analyst and Samuel Foucher, oil analyst (2008)
* Matthew Simmons, Energy investment banker, (2007)
* T. Boone Pickens, Oil and gas investor (2007)
* U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (2005)
* Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Princeton professor and retired shell geologist (2005)
* Sam Sam Bakhtiari, Retired Iranian National Oil Company geologist (2005)
* Chris Skrebowski, Editor of “Petroleum Review” (2010)
* Sadad Al Husseini, former head of production and exploration, Saudi Aramco (2008)
* Energy Watch Group in Germany (2006)
Oil production will now begin to decline terminally.
Within a year or two, it is likely that oil prices will skyrocket as supply falls below demand. OPEC cuts could exacerbate the gap between supply and demand and drive prices even higher.
Independent studies indicate that global crude oil production will now decline from 74 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time, demand will increase. Oil supplies will be even tighter for the U.S. As oil producing nations consume more and more oil domestically they will export less and less. Because demand is high in China, India, the Middle East, and other oil producing nations, once global oil production begins to decline, demand will always be higher than supply. And since the U.S. represents one fourth of global oil demand, whatever oil we conserve will be consumed elsewhere. Thus, conservation in the U.S. will not slow oil depletion rates significantly.
Alternatives will not even begin to fill the gap. There is no plan nor capital for a so-called electric economy. And most alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment. The independent scientists of the Energy Watch Group conclude in a 2007 report titled: “Peak Oil Could Trigger Meltdown of Society:”
“By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame.”
With increasing costs for gasoline and diesel, along with declining taxes and declining gasoline tax revenues, states and local governments will eventually have to cut staff and curtail highway maintenance. Eventually, gasoline stations will close, and state and local highway workers won’t be able to get to work. We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel and gasoline powered trucks for bridge maintenance, culvert cleaning to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, and roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, large transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables from great distances. With the highways out, there will be no food coming from far away, and without the power grid virtually nothing modern works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated building systems.
It is time to focus on Peak Oil preparation and surviving Peak Oil.
http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/
http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html
Virtually the entire LD party enthusiastically supported bombing civilians when it was being done to “untermensch”, not as an allegedly “disproportionate” response to an attack on British civilians but purely to assist the openly genocidal KLA in massacres, genocide, ethnic cleansing, child sex slavery & the kidnapping & dissecting of living human beings to steal their organs for our hospitals.
Clegg knows this as does every single LD MP. The hypocisy of these monsters in now lecturing the Jewish “untermensch” that they should just accept rockets is wholly obscene.
Anyone, within the party or outside who who opposes Israel must either show that they have a long history of opposing NATO’s genocide & are currently calling for all politicians who supported it to be brought to trial or accept that they simply cannot say one word against Israel themselves without proving that they personally are not motivated by any concern for human rights but simply for Nazism.
Clifford: Dont you think the drop in oil production might be due to the huge drop in oil prices? Last year you were aruing the rise in oil price proved it was peak oil. You cant now use a different argument to say that falling prices mean it is still peak oil.
Neil: Bollox. Loads of people saw the hypocrisy of bombing Serbia. Unfortunately Paddy Ashdown was strongly in favour (as he was of Iraq), and he has lots of weight in the party.
MBoy if you are saying those in the party interested knew bombing civilians to help the KLA commit genocide was immoral but kept silent for a quiet life then that is even more reprehensible.
Indeed you are right that everybody knew that the reason Ashdown was in Albania rather than Parliament during the war was that he was helping organise the genocidal KLA in preparation for the NATO occupation & these animals being appointed as our “police” to murder, cleanse, rape & dissect.
Now tell me that anybody in the party who did that has 1,000th as much decency as the most militant Jew.
You are obviously a nutter. I have no desire to debate with nutters.
You obviously know everything I have said is true & that you are considerably morally inferior to those German government employees who ran the Auschwitz trains. Had they refused they would have been punished – you would only have found it inconveniencing your sucking up to the war criminal Ashdown.
I doubt you a qualified psychologist & that your remark is pure gratuitous rudeness, enlike everything I have said which is merely proven fact.
@Mboy,
No, the price of oil was above $80 per barrel when production dipped in August, after being on a plateau for 4 years. Thus all producers were pumping like mad and could not get it up. July 2008 is the all time high.
The price had peaked at just over $140 (& all the eco-fascists were predicting $200 this year because of peak oil). It had not “plateaued for 4 years” at $140.
This is simply a total & deliberate eco-fascist lie, completely in line with what Orwell wrote of.
I predict every single remotely honest supporter of environmentalism in the LibDems will comment on here calling you a liar Cliff.
IO am pleased that my prediction war proven correct & that every single “environmentalist” party member who cares in the slightest degre about the truth dissociated theselves from Cliff’s ridiculous lie.
The number of such honest people in the party were pretty much what I had expected from having some experience of the willingmess of eco-fascists to tell & maintain absolutely any lie whatsoever, no matter how obvious the lie.
I expect Cliff will also be willing to maintain that it isn’t cold. Or even that he & his chums are, in some way, liberal.
Well said Nick.
israel has no friend & no allies. it has only enemies & slaves. the USA & , canada & europe are its slaves and the rest of the world are its enemies. better be a free enemy than a slave ally.
I take it Purple believes the Elders of Zion secretly run the world. Does such out & out Nazism really appeal to members of a party, however genocidal, that officially calls itself Liberal Democrat? OK silly question.