Jack and Jihad

Sept 11, 2006
     This was the day five years ago that war began between the US and Jihad, an unincorporated combine of Islamic nations, gangs, sects and tribes united in a campaign to harm, disable, defeat, and exterminate "infidel" Christians and Jews. There are various explanations for why this started. I have my own.

      It's essentially an ecological crisis, conveniently pegged on an old religious beef. The population of many Islamic nations, fed by oil wealth, has reached critical overshoot. In particular, there are too many young men with no positions, no incomes, no prospects, and no hopes. Their glandular energies have been enlisted to act out the righting of real and imagined grievances against their"infidel" enemies. Their actions range from the sheer sadistic thuggery of small gangs to the strategic geopolitical maneuvers of major nation states.

     We will be fighting with them for as far ahead as anyone can see, because our society can't function without their leading (in some cases only) resource, oil, and we are used to getting regular supplies from them. To aggravate things, the world is in a peculiar situation with this resource. The shorthand phrase for it is "peak oil."

     Peak oil means that the oil-producing nations have reached their all-time maximum output and now face a certain relentless decrease in this resource and the wealth derived from it. This is especially problematical in a global economy based on steady incremental growth. Peak oil promises only incremental contraction in everything from industrial activity to available food. The people of the world will fight over what's left and they will divide into teams to do this. Right now, two teams facing off in the arena are the US and Jihad. Perhaps a few years from now Team China, Team Russia, Team Europe, and Team Japan will jump into the contest. Anything can happen now. Peak oil has the capacity to drive the world crazy.

     It is certainly driving the US crazy. Last week, Chevron announced the discovery of a major oil "play" in the Gulf of Mexico, a collection of deep-water fields code-named "Jack." The announcement was uniformly greeted by the news media with headlines that said, in effect, ENERGY PROBLEM SOLVED.

     There are reasons to be unpersuaded. Chevron's "Jack" has been estimated to contain as little as 300 million barrels and as much as 15 billion barrels of oil. Nobody really knows yet. It will be years before we find out. During those years, production from the other oil fields of the world will decline by an amount that will cancel out any purported gain from even the best estimates of "Jack." The world uses about 30 billion barrels of oil a year. The US alone uses about 7 billion.

     The oil from "Jack" will be expensive and difficult to produce. It is more than a mile underwater and another four miles under the rock under the water. It will require a lot of pipe and a lot of pressure to move that oil up, and the seabed in these deep-water operations is too far down for pipelines, so the oil will have to go directly into tankers. If oil's future is in deep-water, then its future is expensive and precarious.

     It was interesting to see the price of oil on the futures market plummet down into the mid $60 range last week. I take two conclusions from that. One is that the psychological stress of peak oil has increased the emotional dimension of the trade to a dangerous degree, i.e. driven the traders crazy. The intense wish to solve the energy problem has momentarily overcome the reality of it not being solved. The second is that the US economy may be in greater trouble than the news media realizes, especially the economic "engines" of "home" building, real estate sales, and the associated mortgage rackets, with their spin-offs in the financial markets. There may be a hell of a lot fewer 18-wheelers shlepping chipboard and sheetrock around the nation this fall, fewer family trips to the WalMart, fewer Di-tech Mortgage customers dredged out of the sub-prime muck, and fewer bundles of interest-only ARMS passed through to the hedge funds.

     Thus we would have a profile of exactly what oil geologist Colin Campbell and other peak oil opinion leaders have predicted: roller-coaster-style economic activity pegged to up-ratcheting oil prices, with increasingly deep economic troughs and ever higher oil price peaks. In short, massive economic instability.

     Meanwhile, in the deep background of all this looms Jihad. We will have to be resolute in the face of Jihad and much more adaptable at home. So far, on the home front we have done nothing but defend and rationalize a stupid mode of existence -- suburbia -- and an insane economy based on building more of it -- the housing bubble. We have no leadership in politics, business, science, news media, or education informing the public that we have to make other arrangements for daily life -- not ten years from now, but right away.

     Five years after 9/11/2001, the "progressives" want to wish away Jihad and the "conservatives" want to wish away the need to change daily life in America. Real political leadership, if it emerges at all, will have to come from some place off the normal political scale.

Comments

[Bushwick]

Good critique of the Mexico find and look back at 9/11. Everyone should check out this new movie, 9/11 Press For Truth.
http://tinyurl.com/hucft

[bud4wiser]

JK, sure, you're right about all that "peak-oil stuff". But what about those new 'THEY WANT TO KILL US'pac commercials....? Those guys are ALL crazy madmen... You claim this Jihad bullshit might be related to oil.... I thought all those Camel- jockeys just hated our FREEDOM.

Now which is it?

[read everything]

Articles such as this one are the reason why you may not piss me off enough to stop buying your books.

[JB2]

Jim -

Your best post in many weeks; my only beef: the word "problematical" in paragraph 4. "Problematic" works just as well, without the extra syllabal.

[samiam]

Why does JHK always consider the Muslims superfluous people and never the Jews or Christians?

[A Tykhyy]

JB2 -- syllabLE :)

[JB2]

Jim -

Your best post in many weeks; my only beef: the word "problematical" in paragraph 4. "Problematic" works just as well and you save yourself a syllable.

[david]

I would like for Kunstler to address EROI (energy return on
investment) with these slight modifications on the acronym:

1. EROI (energy returned on Iraq),
2. EROI (energy returned on invasion).

My sense is that using Bayesian analysis of EROI #1 coupled with the
history of man will lead to a very low expectation of energy return
from future EROI #2's.

david

[grok]

JHK says:The population of many Islamic nations, fed by oil wealth, has reached critical overshoot.

The industrial nations of the world faced a similar problem in the early 1930's with the Great Depression.

Industrial overproduction and saturated markets led to massive unemployment, hunger and low morale. By entering a war footing governments could draft the young men, and put the rest back to work building munitions. It "worked" in the late 30's and until 1945.

[Mike]

As we look to the 5th "anniversary" of 9/11, I can't really tone down my emotions. Maybe I will tomorrow.

But today, my thoughts can't go anywhere except to that beautiful, crisp Tuesday five years ago. The clear blue skies unsullied by clowds, yet stained with a black plume wafting across the East River.

I can't speak for all of America, but in New York, something died that morning. It hasn't come back yet either.

And something was born that day in the rest of the country, maybe in the rest of the world. And that certainly hasn't gone away yet.

My best to anyone who lost someone that morning. And my best to all of us who lost something else.

I can't kick the sadness today.

[Corrie]

Jim - great post, thanks for keeping "Jack" in perspective - the Oil Drum guys picked that one apart as well - in addition to the fact that its likely to produce more natural gas than anything else.

Also, love the new pic, much better than the b/w one.

[Jeff-Bob]

James -

Is there some way I could presuade you that the conflict between the West and "Jihad" did not start 5 years ago, or 10, or 20?

Who was it that put the Shah of Iran in power? Who was it that put the Baath Party in power in Iraq, which led directly to Saddam Hussain?

Who has it been that has propped up every ugly, nasty, backward dictatorship all over the middle east, as long as they kissed up to the US and Britain?

Can you imagine, just for a moment, that some foreign country overthrew one of our Presidents and installed a Shah? How would you, as a citizen of this country, feel? Would you possibly hold some gruge? Would you act on it?

I work one block from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan - my window looks into the great hole. A chunk of the second plane landed 20 feet from me, 5 years ago today, at the corner of Church and Vesey.

I mention this because I understood that day, and I still understand, how the actions of the US and Britain have aggravated the situation in the Middle East since before 1945 - but getting ever so much worse since.

I do not excuse the actions of Osama and his allies - I would still like his head. But I think he was quite deliberately allowed to escape by the same government that manipulates us all, daily, with its fear mongering.

Is there any way, Mr. Kunstler, you can acknowledge that the other side might have some reason to hate what we have done to their countries?

Once you think you are part of the Chosen people, the "other" will always be the "other", right?

Cheers,

[kd]

Jim,

Excellent comments about suburbia & the Gulf of Mexico oil find, but your first two paragraphs are marred by muddy thinking. You speak of Jihad as "young men with no positions, no incomes, no prospects, and no hopes" yet whose actions include the "strategic maneuvers of major nation states." This is, of course, an absurd statement.

Later, you say that "progressives...want to wish away Jihad" whic is entirely untrue. They do not, however, like the Bush administration & their supporters, seek to paint the so-called US vs Jihad situation of being more perilous to world security than the Cold War (in which, recall, untold millions of persons could have been killed in the course of one hour). This is either gross ignorance or wanton fear mongering for the purpose of political & economic gain.

[Matt]

Interesting read this week.

Couple of things I want to put in the mix:

The population crisis is worldwide and not constrained to countries with plentiful reserves of oil. I live in London and have to live with overpopulation everyday - and its done crazy things to the housing market.

Next thing:

I strongly believe the recent fall in oil prices must be significantly correlated with the recent reduction in air travel in the US and UK. If around 20% of flights were cancelled then this takes the oil supply/demand model off from the boil. The price fall is also synchronous with this event which further backs that idea up.

For this reason I regard the oil price fall as temporary and, as always, some slight disturbance in the supply will make the price jump up again.

[centerdeal]

Good luck, Jeff-Bob. Unfortunately, Kunstler has fallen prey to a psychology of previous investment in his own deluded promotion of neo-con bullshit.

[Tom]

To JB2 : SPELL MUCH ??

[just a thought]

Here is info on al-Qaida's newest video. The absence of bin Laden from it makes me think he is dead.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060911/D8K2MC280.html

Whether alive or dead, bin Laden was the winner on 9/11. It didn't have to be that way, but with the invasion of Iraq, America followed his playbook. As bin Laden wanted, we are now wasting our resources plus acting as a recruiter for the Islamofascists.

We should have pursued bin Laden as a criminal. The militarization of the struggle against terrorism has hurt America. Will we ever recover?

I can't believe we were so stupid that we would do exactly what bin Laden wanted. Then again, we also have chained ourselves to a resource that is running out...

[Peter]

[Third attempt at posting this.]

Jim misses the point again: "The population of many Islamic nations, fed by oil wealth, has reached critical overshoot. In particular, there are too many young men with no positions, no incomes, no prospects, and no hopes."

Who was it that helped to create this situation by propping up despots in these countries since WW2? Think Saudi Arabia which supplied most of the 9-11 attackers.

As someone so eloquently put it last week, "Why do they hate our freedumbs?"

As Morris Berman says in his latest book, "They hate us because we don't even know why they hate us."

In America there is no longer such a thing as the law of cause & effect anymore with regards to foreign policy.

[Peter]

"I can't believe we were so stupid that we would do exactly what bin Laden wanted. Then again, we also have chained ourselves to a resource that is running out..."

Neocon stupidity is boundless.

[one Eye Open]

kd sez:

"They do not, however, like the Bush administration & their supporters, seek to paint the so-called US vs Jihad situation of being more perilous to world security than the Cold War (in which, recall, untold millions of persons could have been killed in the course of one hour)."

The cold war was kept "cold" because of Mutually Assured Destruction. A nation-state would be able to source the offending nation-state and theoretically apply tit for tat. Terrorists with nuclear capabilities do not fit the old equation. There is no deterrence for bad actors. One need not be a supporter of the Bush admin. or any other admin. to make the case that Jihadists with nuclear capabilities could conceivably be more perilous than our cold war adversaries.

[jonny quest]

It's the 5th anniversity of 9/11 and I feel like one of Howard Beal's viewers in "Network," i.e., "I'm mad as hell..." but I'm taking it. If one believes, as I do, that 9/11 was an inside job, I bet you are feeling a bit queasy today as well, esp. when Geo Bush & co are busy wrapping themselves in the flag when they themselves, if not exactly the perps of 9/11, at least allowed and even facilitated its happening. If this country's leaders will stoop to such depths as to kill innocent citizens during a workday morning in order to get popular support for an Iraqi invasion, what AREN'T they capable of doing?

To those that don't believe as I do, please ask yourself how WTC 7 managed to collapse without being struck. The owner even slipped out that the building was to be pulled. Folks, it takes a lot longer than 8 hours to plan and set the explosives necessary for a controlled demolition.

[Peter]

Every American should reflect on these two points tomorrow:

Have you no decency, sir?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

Greg Palast: "Right after 9-11, on which 19 non-Americans attacked us, Bush and the Neocons made all Americans the 'suspects'".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abeF7oM71m0

bin Ladin must be having a good laugh at our expense.

[Bojax]

Jonny,

Please read this about WTC #7:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=5&c=y

Thanks, Bojax

[Pissed Off Liberal]

It's good that at least someone is exploring the WHY of Sept, 11. It has long been a pet peeve of mine that nobody seems to know or care about WHY someone would be willing to strap a bomb to their chest or hijack and airplane and take their own life for the cause of taking that of someone else.

[one Eye Open]

Johnny Q.

Granted its not an easy read but the proof is in the pudding:

"In response to the WTC tragedy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a 3-year building and fire safety investigation to study the factors contributing to the probable cause (or causes) of post-impact collapse of the WTC Towers (WTC 1 and 2) and WTC 7; expanded its research in areas of high-priority need such as prevention of progressive collapse, fire resistance design and retrofit of structures, and fire resistive coatings for structural steel; and is reaching out to the building and fire safety communities to pave the way for timely, expedited considerations of recommendations stemmng from the investigation."

Site here:

http://wtc.nist.gov/