Geopolitics & resource wars

According to an often cited saying, "If you want peace, work for justice." But, most economic justice work is currently premised on the view that greater economic equality requires continued economic growth. This constitutes a wholehearted embrace of a cornucopian future; it recognizes no limits to growth that are implied by climate change, world peak oil production, and the rapid depletion of other resources including metal ores, water, soil and fish.

-Push for Afghanistan troop increase continues on deadly day
-Success elusive for U.S. policy in Afghanistan
-Former Marine captain resigns in protest of Afghanistan war
-The great gamble
-A Crash Course in Democracy

-Biofuel Displacing Food Crops May Have Bigger Carbon Impact Than Thought
-Biofuels rather than electric cars to meet renewables target
-Tanzania Suspends Biofuels Investments
-Who says it's green to burn woodchips?
-Carbon advantage of biofuels may be overstated

-Oilwatch Monthly October 2009
-A post-oil world gets less sci-fi by the day
-The Truth About Energy
-Global oil supply: Separating fact from fiction

Even as we've been going through years of hand-wringing about security of supply, and about how Russia was an unreliable gas supplier, it comes out the European gas buyers are themselves increasingly refusing to pay the price that underpins the security of their Russian supplies, and are breaking their contractual obligations towards Gazprom, making Europe, erm, a less reliable customer...

"Peak oil can be a very tricky topic, the way I talk about it and deal with it at the end of the day is: We need to revolutionize the way we consume and produce energy... We need to really be the leaders in saying: the future for our children and our grandchildren as far as energy consumption and as far as production, it looks like this" with those words Colorado Governor Bill Ritter started his closing speech at the ASPO conference in Denver that took place from 10 to 12 October 2009.

The price of oil has more than doubled from its nadir of $30 a barrel earlier this year. To explain the resilience of oil prices in the face of a severe economic slump, the oil optimists have turned to an old standby argument: resource nationalism.

-Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says
-Will EPA veto or regulate the plunder of Appalachia?
-Global Warming Accelerating While The U.S. Backpedals

-Obama at the Precipice
-Fighting the Taliban
-Is Escalation Obama's Only Choice in Afghanistan?
-Pakistan targets key Taliban town

-India’s quest for uranium
-Putin’s China Visit Helps Russia Become Global Energy Supplier
-Iraq cuts foreign deals for major boost to oil output
-The U.S. military’s battle to wean itself off oil
-What’s yours is mine
-Big Oil Front Group Fights for Tar Sands
-Saudis Seek Payments for Any Drop in Oil Revenues

Oil prices rose this week breaking the $75/barrel mark for the first time this year. The gains were mainly fuelled by rising equity prices and a falling dollar...

-Qatar Airways uses natural gas fuel on flight from London
-Sellers on the spot ahead of gas war
-Assembly of peak oil experts look at shale gas

A weekly round-up including:
- Prices and production
- China

Speculative bubbles have become an increasingly common feature of modern economies, as concrete wealth has been replaced by its abstract representations. Behind the ever more fictive finances of an industrial world caught in the trap of trying to meet concrete needs with manufactured money lies a vaster speculative bubble focused on money itself. When it pops, as it will, the detonation may echo for a very long time. The third and last post of a series.

-A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth
-Liberal Education, Stewardship, and the Cosmopolitan Temptation
-Decline of a tribe: and then there were five
-Last Call at Descartes’ Bar and Grill
-The Vindication of a Public Scholar