Cheney Speech In 1999 To The API Spells It All Out (Unbelievable)

Say what you like about Dick Cheney, but you can't accuse him of not giving us fair warning. A year, almost to the day, before he was dubiously elected Vice-President of the United States - while still chairman of the energy giant Halliburton - he gave a riveting insight into the thinking that has since guided the administration's oil policy. In a speech to the Institute of Petroleum in November 1999 he shed light on our front-page revelation - that in the wake of the occupation of Iraq, Western companies are to be let loose on its vast, and previously state-owned, oil reserves. Perhaps even more importantly he flagged up an impending crisis that the world urgently needs to grasp - that supplies of oil may be about to shrink alarmingly.

The "basic, fundamental building block of the world economy" was, he warned, in danger of becoming extremely scarce. Estimates suggested that production from existing reserves would soon decline sharply, by 3 per cent a year, even as world demand for oil grew by 2 per cent. That meant that the world would soon need to be producing "an additional 50 million barrels a day", more than half as much again as the 82 million now being wrested from the ground. "So where is this oil going to come from?" he asked. His answer: the Middle East was "where the prize ultimately lies". The problem was that "governments and national oil companies" controlled almost all of the "assets", and "even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow".

Lest there be any doubt about what was at stake, the man who was to become one of the most powerful proponents of the invasion of Iraq went on: "Oil is unique because it is so strategic in nature. We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear ... The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality." Well, seven years on, Mr Cheney's solution to the impending oil crisis is well on its way to being implemented. In the aftermath of another war, Iraq's Council of Ministers is today expected to throw open the doors to the country's oil reserves - the third-largest in the world - to private companies, the first time a major Middle Eastern producer has ever done so.

Whether this will work for the oil giants depends on an end to the insurgency being achieved, while a compliant government is maintained, which looks more unlikely as each week goes by. But whatever the practicality - and morality - of his solution, the Vice-President's diagnosis is sound enough. Indeed it probably understates the crisis facing the world. For a start, as Mr Cheney put it, "oil is unlike any other commodity". The world is deeply hooked on it, and any reduction in its massive daily fix will cause devastating, and possibly catastrophic, withdrawal symptoms.

EDIT

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2132501.ece

:mad: :grr:

The house here in the 'burbs is up for sale, and I'm eying a 1BR w/loft cabin on 5 acres - heated by woodstove and solar, powered somewhat by solar (especially in summer, 24 hours of daylight) and hopefully by water (small stream on property).

Garden space, room for chickens, and I can fish the Yukon any summer (friends with a fish camp).

Bicycles and horses.

Barter goods.

Look for it folks. It's coming.

Edited to note: K&R5, hatrack you are an inspiration with your research. Thank you.

7 acres, w/in 1 hr of a major airport, surrounded by reservations and Nat. Forest land. We are having the wood burning stove conversion done in 2 weeks. The neighbors already have Nubian goats for sale, and there is an old chicken coop on the property.
Our Pagosa Springs property is now worthless to me due to the 42' condominiums going up 12 feet from our property line - on the south side = no light. Sad.


Whats really sad is that I feel the need for these types of properties.

in the future. I'm hoping to join with other like-minded Fairbanksans who know the climate here and can deal with the weather extremes, and possibly "build" a self-sustaining community before I shuffle off.

In October, we left our urban home in St Paul for 8 rural acres in the Ozarks adjacent to National Forrest...Log cabin, wood and passive solar, small pond, underground spring with well. No Industry for 100 miles, and none upriver.
By spring we should have the coop ready for a dozen chickens, 4 goats, a large "critter proof" garden patch, 12 fruit trees planted, and two bee hives.

Planning on Wind & Solar.

We chose the Ozarks for the longer growing season, low property taxes, access to "clean" water, and cheap unspoiled land.



Good Luck.

pines to burn in that wood stove! We lived on 47 acres between Durango and Pagosa and nearly froze to death every night. I'd stuff the wood stove with as much wood as would fit in at 1 am, then at about 5 am the fire would go out. Our dish detergent and shampoo would be frozen every morning.

Still, it's a lot better than being stuck in the Metrosprawl with no source of water or food within 100 miles, should the unthinkable happen. Many times I wish we could have stayed there.

As far as the speech referenced in the OP is concerned, every day reveals the facts that underscore the intuition many of us felt when Bush asked Cheney to find his VP... That's when I saw this shit actually happening, but I didn't realize it would get this bad.

More and more every day, I realize the chaos that Iraq has evolved into is by design. When public support wanes for this first phase of the permanent occupation, they roll out or harp on a new, improved boogeyman. With our new bases in Iraq, we can suppress the enemy du jour and keep the oil flowing. As the drama with Iran escalates, Bush asks for a troop surge. The military is stretched too thin - recently deceased troops receive recruitment letters and they're testing the draft machinery, just to check to see that it still works - but we will not stop short of total victory in Iraq.

They said this war would shock and awe the enemy, and it did. Apparently, I'm the enemy, because as much as I will say I saw it coming, I was shocked and awed to see that this chaos from which the US military cannot be extracted, is the means to the end of securing a permanent military security installation, protecting the military-industrial complex while they bleed the Iraqi ground dry of its "assets." This chaos makes political will irrelevant, since every day pushes a solution farther out on the horizon, past Bush's second term, past Kerry/Gore/Clinton/Obama/_____'s first term, etc. It defies that elusive crushing "victory" Bush demands, ensuring he'll be a "war president" during his remaining three years. And it gives the world to private oil companies, who can open the spigots to full blast or a mere trickle in order to maximize profits. And if you can count on anything in this world, it's that the oil companies will maximize profits at everyone's expense.

Now I knew the last part was coming, that getting the oil under US control was the plan and everything else was just meaningless little details - but I was shocked and awed to see they had the balls to create a bloodbath of this magnitude of American boys and girls, Iraqis and Afghanis, with no end in sight, to make it happen.

Never, ever forget that mankind lived for the (great) majority of its existence WITHOUT using petroleum drilled from the ground. We did it before, and we can do it again.

While I agree that there will be some changes--and some of them may be alarming--I really believe that the world will NOT end when we resume our existence NO LONGER using petroleum drilled from the ground. It will happen, some day. I wish I could see that day, but it is still far in the future.

Forty acres or so of mixed Iowa farmland/timber, close to or in a town of 2,000 to 10,000 population.

In the interim:

Currently drive my car once a week, to the store.

Work commute and errands on bicycle.

In process of laying in three month supply of food.

60 gal. diesel (car), 20 gal. kerosene storage capacity (5 gal. on hand).

Kerosene heater/stove.


And my ear to the ground . . .

From the standpoint of the oil industry obviously - and I'll talk a little later on about gas - for over a hundred years we as an industry have had to deal with the pesky problem that once you find oil and pump it out of the ground you've got to turn around and find more or go out of business. Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you've got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. This is as true for companies as well in the broader economic sense it is for the world. A new merged company like Exxon-Mobil will have to secure over a billion and a half barrels of new oil equivalent reserves every year just to replace existing production. It's like making one hundred per cent interest; discovering another major field of some five hundred million barrels equivalent every four months or finding two Hibernias a year. For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world often greet oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow..

- Cheney At London Institute of Petroleum, 1999

"I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government would we have? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular along the lines of the Ba’ath Party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic? I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all.”

April 7, 1991

Well, seven years on, Mr Cheney's solution to the impending oil crisis is well on its way to being implemented. In the aftermath of another war, Iraq's Council of Ministers is today expected to throw open the doors to the country's oil reserves - the third-largest in the world - to private companies, the first time a major Middle Eastern producer has ever done so.

Just long enough to get the oil privatized. If they get it I hope their facilities are blown up and their investment lost.

After a short-lived slump in the late 1980s and early 1990s, caused by low oil prices and the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster, production built up to a peak of more than 2.9 million barrels a day in 1999, the very year in which Mr Cheney delivered his speech. Since then it has slumped by almost half.

Crucially, it has now fallen so low that Britain, for the first time in a quarter of a century, has become an overall importer of oil.

Claiming the Prize: Bush Surge Aimed at Securing Iraqi Oil
Click Name for Bio of Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 09 January 2007
by Chris Floyd

I. The Twin Engines of Bush's War
The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," say the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion – indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush Administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and The U.S. Takeover of Iraqi Oil.




From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush Administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation's oil industry – while letting Bush's Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits – more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes.

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/619/81/

:banghead: