The CERA Report

November 20, 2006,
     Last week, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) released a report saying that there was no imminent global oil problem and that enough new oil would come on-line to permit current levels of consumption -- and beyond! -- for more than a hundred years into the future. CERA's stunningly disingenuous report flies in the face of everything that is known about the current world oil situation.

      CERA is fronted by Daniel Yergin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil industry, The Prize. Apparently, Yergin has parlayed his legitimacy as an historian into running a disinformation service wholly owned by the IHS Corporation, a lobbying and public relations firm serving the defense, oil, and automotive industries. Apart from making a lot of money as executive vice-president of a company with about $300 million in net annual profits over about $500 million in gross revenues, it is a little hard to discern what Yergin's motives might be in shoveling so much bad information into the public arena.

     Much of CERA's "story" hinges on the supposition that snazzy technology will allow the recovery of "oil" (liquid hydrocarbons) from solids that require costly mining and processing operations to covert them to liquids. In effect, CERA says that tar sands, kerogen shales, coal-to-liquids, plus super-deep ocean drilling will not only make up for currently depleting fields of easily-acessed liquid sweet crudes, but actually surpass current total production. This would seem, on the face of it, to violate everything that is known about Energy Returns on Energy Invested (ERoRI). And, in fact, the very companies working the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, have just this year steeply raised their dollar estimates of what it will take to convert that stuff into usable liquids -- it ain't a pretty story.

     CERA does not acknowledge some of the fundamental facts of the current situation, for instance that the world's four super-giant fields responsible for at least 15 percent of total global production since 1980 (Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, Burgan in Kuwait, Daqing in China, and Cantarell in Mexico) have all passed peak and turned down into depletion. CERA doesn't acknowledge that discovery of new oil peaked worldwide in the 1960s with more than 40 years of steady decline since then. Or that there has been almost no provable meaningful discovery the past several years (and Chevron's as yet unproved deepwater "Jack" claim of 3 to 15 billion barrels total is not significant in the context of a world that now burns through 30 billion barrels a year.) CERA doesn't acknowledge that the predicted US peak of 1970 was absolutely on target and that our domestic production of regular crude has fallen from around 10 million-barrels-a-day in 1970 to under 5 m/b/d now (still declining yearly, including the Alaska North Slope fields). CERA doesn't acknowledge that current total global oil production through 2006 is at least absolutely flat and more likely falling (depending on whose numbers you look at), which would tend to indicate that the world has bumped up against the ceiling of its all-time total capacity. CERA doesn't acknowledge that exports are down nine percent this year because the nations with export capacity have growing populations and economies that require more and more of their own oil.

      The CERA story also tragically gives aid and comfort to those who deny that climate change needs to be taken seriously, since it is saying, in essence, that we can easily continue pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- by burning as much coal as we can. The CERA report amounts to "don't worry, be happy."

     Perhaps most tragically, there is no corrective for this mendacious PR. It's not against the law to spread lies about a business venture -- which is what the oil industry is -- even if its truthful condition is critical to the functioning of our society. There's no oversight committee or agency authorized to investigate public relations activity. It's a basic case of buyer beware. Unfortunately, the buyers in this case are America's political leaders and the news media responsible for informing the public.

     The mainstream media last week swallowed CERA's PR hook, line, and sinker, without a single reflective burp. It even drove the prices on oil futures markets down a few dollars a barrel -- though the price was back up by Friday. The only cogent analysis of the CERA report took place on the Internet, and for the most part on a single site: TheOilDrum.com, which is the best-informed forum of debate on these issues operating in the United States.You can go directly to their initial response, composed by Dave Cohen by clicking on this link. It's worth taking the trouble to read.

Comments

[jonny quest]

Jim Pulpava also bought and read the CERA report. His take is midway in this link, http://www.financialsense.com/captain/log.html

Puplava also interviewed Dennis Gartman, http://www.thegartmanletter.com/ , in this week's radio show. Gartman publishes an expensive daily letter, $500/mo subscription. Gartman's research is telling him that we'll have all the oil we need as long as it priced between $60-$80/barrel.

JHK, like you, I believe we're facing an energy crisis, but you can't discount the ability of the Western economies to maintain our standard of living. Right now the consensus is that Peak Oil, if it even exists, is a fixable problem, like Y2K. Only time will tell.

PS: I feel "Peak Consumerism" is a much greater danger, short-term, in bringing down the financial house of cards than Peak Oil. Once Joe and Jane Sixpack are tapped out, that's when we'll have to start worrying whether there will be a recession/depression or hyperinflation.

[gene]

WOW am I the very first to comment. Thats a first. I read the CERA report and my first thought was "I sure hope this individual knows what hell he is talking about" based on all I have read about peak oil. I was certainly in doubt. Believe I can now safely say he is a tolal fucking idiot. So many of them around these days. Just look at our government.........excuse me while I go puke. Morons running almost everything, destroying whats left. Our whole society for all the obvious resons (at least obvious to a few) has surely arrived in the proverbeal (gone to hell). Whats left?.....well all I can see is eventual total destruction of our free ride. Its about time, just how perverted can all this shit become. Another good one Jim.

[Abrey]

Dear Jim: Many Thanks for commenting on the CERA report, which I originally saw published on MSNBC.com. (http://ori.msnbc.msn.com/id/15715342/)

I also waded through the entire commentary from TheOilDrum, thanks to your link, and even though I won't be able to digest all of their sharp-eyed and cogent analysis, I have come to appreciate that it is a gathering place for people of 'critical thinking'. We need forums like this more than ever.

I didn't bookmark the MSNBC link when I first read the story, which has turned out to be a Good Thing. Going back to do a search for that story turned up this one:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15081349/site/newsweek/

Barely a month old, Yergin's commentary basically discredits CERA's current press release. If oil companies are having trouble keeping their profits now, how will that provide any incentive for them to keep the oil flowing for another 122 years? Or even the next 12?

[Laura Louzader]

Everyone around here gleefully waved the CERA report in my face last week, just as they did with Chevron's little "Jack" discovery.

I'd rather believe it, too, which shows you what we are up against in pursuading people to take the measures they need to take to be able to stay alive down the line, let alone live comfortably.

The politicians, with a few lone exceptions such as Congressman Bartlett of Maryland, won't address the situation because they get elected by making people Feel Good. Bartlett is a voice in the wilderness. I'm sending the PDF file of his speech, along with copies of the Hirsch report, to every official in Chicago, but I'm sure they're so busy cheering the CERA report they won't bother to read them.

I'll be grateful if Chicago's "green" mayor diverts so much as $5 MM from all the TIF districts grabbing hundreds of millions of dollars of our tax monies for private purposes, to the battered CTA, or insists upon competent management at that agency instead of installing his lackeys and cronies there.

[Jerry Johnson]

The CERA Report will be considered the more correct because the authors know without a shadow of doubt that every energy source to maintain the status quo will be pursued out of necessity to survive. The key, the price of oil , must be very high as jonny quest points out above. A lot higher given the problems involved. I have no doubt the water needed for tar sands will be pumped in heated and insulated pipelines.

I personally view the entire peak oil movers and shakers as knowing full well this will be the path pursued. This does not detract from their honest convictions as to the facts of declining conventional oil or global warming. Their pursuit of public awareness about peak oil helps to raise oil prices to the levels needed to sustain long term investment in tar sands, shales and coal GTL, as well as gas based liquids. Mostly though, it protects the current market position organizations turf and past investment.

Chicken little may be correct but will not have a following. After the fall, Chicken Little will still be reviled for being correct. Of course, the policies and investment pursued as result of understandings discussed in the CERA Report must be achievable with respect to maintaining the status quo. Geopolitics will attempt to advance the status quo arrangements into the indefinite future . The US geopolitical oil policies will be pursued at all costs. The last decade is proving a geostrategic bust but other avenues will be tried. The one avenue that will not be tried until it is too late for the current elites will be the " Chicken Little" route. The current elites structures must come down before change is made by replacement elites.

The real question underlying all this is the time gap between current easy oil depletion and the time needed to raise and invest the capital in producing structures to replace oil decline and satisfy increased needs. The poor EROEI of alternates makes this very difficult on a marginal basis. I see this gap as at least 15 years in North America. This investment will be the last gamble for the current system. In the meantime, oil & gas prices must permanently remain very high.

There are some ingenious ideas on the way to being put in play. None are the panacea and some like " green fuel" might be downright dangerous with respect to global warming. In the end though, global warming is unstoppable. The attitude will be " bring it on", it's coming anyway.

[Bor]

The ignorance is bliss.
Perhaps people who do not believe in the imminence of Peak Oil believe that inside the globe there is another globe much bigger than the outer one.
I envy these people. They are happy, all right. But the reality is that they belong with the lunatic asylum. In the lunatic asylum one can pass himself off as God Almighty, the Virgin Mary, the Pope, the Emperor of Roman Empire or St. Wenceslas. Of course, they can believe in the Tar Sand, the Hybrid cars or ethanol. There, it is their undeniable right – to believe in nonsense.

CERA author resembles of one lunatic who pretended that he was St. Cyril and St. Methodius at the same time just to get a doubly portion of gruel from orderlies.
CAPA will get it triple from Oil Industry.

[one Eye Open]

Peak Oil? We don't need no stinkin' Peak Oil.

Long before PO rears its ugly head the upwardly mobile pricing of petroleum prices will have already done their damage. Want to know the future? Look at the present. Read the following story from Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Read it and weep.

"Energy shock hits the upwardly mobile poor hardest
in Africa’s Guinea. Riots, blackouts cripple cities.
A hospital’s incubator shuts down
By CHIP CUMMINS

Story here:

http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2006/11/18/the-wall-street-journal-as-fuel-prices-soara-country-unravels/

[Bustin Justin]

Exxon (formerly Standard Oil) released their investor's annual report, which featured a short interview with Yergin, looking very much the average aging boomer suburbanite.. very much Kunstler's evil twin. The message was in line with CERA's reportage.

It included a centerfold with snazzy graphics illustrating a deepwater project off the coast of Nova Scotia that is entirely theoretical. The amount of engineering and technology involved was staggerig. In other words it was a simple statement to the effect: We are going to invest our recent huge profits in highly risky, speculative drilling, or at least, thats what we're going to tell everyone.

These deepwater projects are so vast and complex, its difficult to imagine the effort being profitable without significant increases in price per barrel.

[Spring Chicken]

Interesting thread over at DU today:

More on Edmonds, Hastert, Abramoff, GOP, Turkey, Israel, ATC, AIPAC, Feith, Perle, SunCruz, etc.

In Al Gore's January 16 speech, he laid out a programmatic five points to address the threats to our freedoms. Somewhat surprisingly, the number two demand was:

... new whistleblower protection should immediately be established for members of the executive branch who report evidence of wrongdoing, especially where it involves abuse of authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

(see Washington Post transcript)

Why the emphasis on whistleblower protection? Because the bureaucracy is imploding, with defections within the government, threatening to unveil a tsunami of revelations that will possibly link the Plame scandal, Sibel Edmonds's case, the Abramoff scandals, with the build-up to the Iraq war, if not the 9/11 attack itself.

Tinfoilhatters, hold onto those hats, because your day may be almost here...

SNIP

Time magazine reports the Bushies "scrambling to find photos of President Bush and Abramoff"? (link is from 1/9/06 NY Daily News) Why so scared of a picture or two? Surely the Rove machine can explain them away. Or is there something much bigger behind the Bush-Abramoff connection? Bigger even than the Susan Ralston connection. While this is very speculative, could it be something that connects them to the Edmonds grouping, financed with both Al Queda and Abramoff money? Or were the Abramoff millions (billions?) used to buy the U.S. elections? Or both? Or more?

Am I crazy? Well, why did the Associated Press report on September 27, 2001, that terrorists from the 9/11 hijackings were seen on Abramoff's SunCruz gambling boats in Florida a week prior to 9/11? And Atta's known to have jetted to Vegas prior to 9/11. The confluence of mob money, deep cover, and assassination/terror/drug money/money laundering is well covered in the political classic, UC Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott's book, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2754725

[one Eye Open]

"Because of his complexity, Rumsfeld often is misread. His politics are deeply conservative but he was radical in his drive to force change in every area he oversaw. He is strong-willed and hard-driving but he built his defense strategies and Quadrennial Defense Reviews on calls for intellectual humility.

Those of us in his inner circle heard him say over and over again: Our intelligence, in all senses of the term, is limited. We cannot predict the future. We must continually question our preconceptions and theories. If events contradict them, don't suppress the bad news; rather, change your preconceptions and theories.

If an ideologue is someone to whom the facts don't matter, then Rumsfeld is the opposite of an ideologue. He insists that briefings for him be full of facts, thoughtfully organized and rigorously sourced. He demands that facts at odds with his key policy assumptions be brought to his attention immediately. "Bad news never gets better with time," he says, and berates any subordinate who fails to rush forward to him with such news. He does not suppress bad news; he acts on it."

Full story here:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/guests/s_480350.html

[Jerry Johnson]

OEO, do you know who Douglas Feith is! He ran the phoney intelligence bureau for Rumsfeld to provide the WMD arguement to invade Iraq for Rumsy. He is the guy Tommy Franks Called " the dumbest fuck in the entire world". He is one of the central characters in every book about the failure in Iraq.

The man is very, very brilliant. So brilliant he is unable to connect real dots.

Look up what Woodward says about him.

[ross]

Excellent, everyone agrees that we have reached a permanently high plateau (with thanks to Irving Fisher) in the price of oil. I agree, unless of course we experience a Depression that collapses global GDP by several percentage points. This is a small if in my view, since there are numerous things that could cause such a collapse, a peak dept implosion, a flu pandemic, even the effects of peak oil itself. Navigating through all these risks so as to avoide the big D will be very tricky going forward.

[bulldozer]

This show called "Trading Spouses" is on Fox Television. Last week it highlighted what I consider some of the worst people in this country. I had to create a new word to describe them. "Mindless sophisticates". They were completely Vain.

http://www.fox.com/tradingspouses/bios/s3_solomon.htm

Thorstein Veblen is making more sense every day.

[Nudge]

Yesterday I was fueling up and noticed the new low-sulphur diesel pump at the station. The diesel price was at $2.79, while the regular gasoline was $2.21. I'm aware of the different refinery loops used to make the different products, and how these things can affect the relative prices. But it made me question two things:

Here in the USA, the gasoline price thing can sometimes be an incredibly raw nerve for many people. There was lots of that on the news this year. Any Google News search for “suv gas prices” back then would yield a goldmine of similar articles wherein the reporters would inevitably interview the stupidest loser driving the biggest SUV most needlessly ~ like the guy driving his V-10 powered pickup truck 2 blocks to the corner store for smokes & beer. Predictably, said SUV driver would whine about how unfair the gas prices were to him and his lifestyle. The nice thing about those stories is that they all did a good job basically painting the f-tard word on the foreheads of folks like that, ie, them too clueless to connect their own behavior with the consequences of their own behavior. Yes, dear SUV driver, if you insist on using the resources required by 5 normal people, you may someday find your activities costing you 5x more. But I digress.

Back to gas prices. Is it at all conceivable that the fuel industry (for lack of a better term) would ever keep gasoline prices low (just to keep more people in the “don't worry, be happy” zone) at the expense of raising the prices of other petro-derived products such as diesel, kerosene, bunker oil, road tar etc? Do they move enough of those other products to be able to slosh their profits from one area to another? Most of the consumers of those other products can, in some part, pass on their cost increases to their own customers. We've all seen grocery prices rising steadily for awhile now. They've risen by a lot in the last 5 years, yet there's no huge public outcry here in the happy motoring utopia like there was with gasoline cost increases this year.

The other thing is that here in Mass, there's an ill-conceived election-time promise to eliminate road tolls outside of the 128. More than anything else this is probably just a sop to the trucking industry, whose vehicles pay bigger tolls for their bigger, heavier vehicles which do so much more road damage than cars to. With the trucking industry already hurting from diesel prices that stay up and never come down, is it unrealistic to think that whoever made this proposal is just taking it on the side from the teamsters union and their hanger-ons, and this is their payback?

Jim, thanks for the link to the oil drum.

[Doug]

That's some excellent debunking, JHK.

[bulldozer]

Peak Consumerism is enabled by Oil Maximizing.

This is all ultimately the fault of the free traders and Globalists. Ultimately, every mainstream macro-economist.

We need to reduce trade to being less than ten percent of our economy. That is to say, imports need to be less than 5 percent of the total goods purchased and consumed here.

[Xtraspatial]

JHK wrote:

"there is no corrective for this mendacious PR [the CERA report]."

I disagree and so does the editorial staff at the Energy Bulletin:

http://www.energybulletin.net/22633.html

To his credit, JHK has provided many of us with our first comprehensive inquiry into the implications of PO thru "The Long Emergency." Anger, despair and resignation to the status quo may naturally follow such a rude awakening. However, I think POers might be better served by thought-out rebuttals to Yergin thru the same media channels that first promulgated his opinions and conjectures.

[one Eye Open]

from wikipedia:

"United States Army General Tommy Franks, according to Bob Woodward's 2004 Plan of Attack, described Feith as the "fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth" (p.281). [31][32]. In his autobiography, American Soldier, Tommy Franks clarified the context of this phrase by stating that he was talking to his subordinates who were upset with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith and Franks said that his actual words were "word is going around that Feith is the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth"; thus, he says he was reporting what he heard about Feith rather than expressing his own personal opinion.
On the April 14 edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews, Franks changed his assessment of Feith in the following exchange:
HOST CHRIS MATTHEWS: What did you think on a scale of one to 10 of the military expertise, of the civilians surrounding Secretary Rumsfeld, the people like Wolfowitz and Feith? How would you on a scale of 1 to 10, where would you put their military savvy?
FRANKS: I would put the dipstick at oh—-with a reasonable degree of understanding, I would put Doug Feith in a category as a brilliant man with some military understanding, but both of these gentlemen were apt to think out of the box. And candidly, Chris, for all I know, maybe that's what Don Rumsfeld wanted them to do.
MATTHEWS: Were they ideologues or were they analysts?
FRANKS: In my personal [opinion], they were analysts. Now, that does not imply that I'm making some statement that they were not ideologues, maybe so, but that's not the way that I saw them. [33]"

[David Mathews]

I filled my tank for $19.54 this morning and wondered how long this is going to last. The Christmas season is already here, unofficially, soon to become official on the day after Thanksgiving. America's obsessive-compulsive consumers are poised to go on their yearly shopping binge and pile on billions of dollars more debt in order to honor Jesus.

Poor Jesus, how could such a great man have amassed so many foolish followers? They consume the world and claim Heaven as their eternal home ... I doubt that God wants them, and Satan is bored to death by them.

How many years does America have left? I am looking forward to James Howard Kuntsler's predictions for 2007. Wrong in 2006, wrong in 2005, but he is bound to be right some day. We just might have to wait a bit longer.

The Third World is going to starve to death before America gives up the American Way of Life. America's going to burn up all of Canada's and Mexico's remaining oil before Americans give up their SUVs. There won't be any war with Iran but neither will there ever again be peace for Iraq, three thousand soldiers have died for Iraq's oil and we're going to keep it no matter what.

The world isn't in good shape. I was talking to a woman yesterday and she had that insane-consumer look flash in her eyes while she told her daughters that she wanted a Hummer for Christmas. Big old fat America honoring child Jesus by becoming bigger and fatter. If God doesn't destroy America for that sort of blasphemy I'll completely lose respect for God.

Everyone should keep in mind that in dealing with Homo sapiens we are not dealing with a rational, intelligent animal. Rationality and intelligence are virtues which Homo sapiens lack absolutely. Humans have gained control over the Earth by virtue of our violence and destructiveness. We are intelligent, it is true, but only in a manner which serves human violence and destructiveness.

Humans have decided to consume the entire Earth and we are going to accomplish this goal to our own harm. There is no hope whatsoever for Homo sapiens. You can classify this species among the walking dead, inevitably fated to become extinct.

We live for today because there is no tomorrow. We destroy the Earth because we know -- at some subconscious level -- that there is no future whatsoever for our species on the Earth. We long to escape the Earth because we know that this planet is abused and exhausted and soon to become inhospitable to human life.

So my advice to Americans is simple: Keep on shopping, keep on driving, keep on consuming. You are destroying your own and humankind's future but you really don't care. You are slaves of your own stomachs, lusts and the corporate marketers who tell you what to think and what to do and how to spend your money.

But humankind's destruction is a process which is already occurring all over the impoverished world. The process of self-destruction occurs quickly within the context of geological time but very slowly in the human timescale. We might have to wait five years or ten years or fifty years to see this egg of destruction hatch within the confines of our own nation, but it will most certainly hatch.

Those who are desperately seeking to save humankind via technological innovation are accelerating the process of destruction. The tarsands and oil shales and ethanol and biodiesel are all serving to preserve a lifestyle which cannot possibly endure for another century.

Too bad for Homo sapiens. Those who are wise might as well begin writing humankind's obituary because at this point we have already crossed the boundary between survival and extinction. There is no future for America, there is no future for civilization, there is no future for Homo sapiens.

But there is a future for life on the Earth. Nature has endured greater catastrophes in the past. Nature will fill the Earth with life again and erase all memories of humankind's existence from the Universe. Soon enough even God will forget that humans existed. God does forget His mistakes.

[jonny quest]

In my posting above, I opinied that once the American consumer is tapped out and an economic retrenchment begins, look out below. After all, western economies are built upon growth and when growth retracts, the Central Banks have problems propping up their fiat currencies. Anyway, if anyone bothered to listen to Puplava's radio broadcast for this week, his last guest in the third hour portion, Brian Pretti, made the observation that his research is showing that mutual fund outflows started overtaking inflows in May 2006, just when the Dow started it's run. So if Joe Sixpack is cashing in his mutual funds instead of riding the past 6 months of Dow gains, this does not bode well for consumer spending in 2007. If the average American is having enough problems making end meets that he/she has to cash in his/her investments, what will happen should real estate continue imploding into next year? Will the Fed lower rates in '07 to protect the consumer or raise rates to protect the dollar. That is the $64 billion question.

[Spring Chicken]

DM said:

"Too bad for Homo sapiens. Those who are wise might as well begin writing humankind's obituary because at this point we have already crossed the boundary between survival and extinction. There is no future for America, there is no future for civilization, there is no future for Homo sapiens."

Well the elephants have apparently decided they've had enough of us humans and its time to fight back.

The elephants are going mad
Nov. 19, 2006. 10:15 AM
CHARLES SIEBERT

SNIP

Just two days before I arrived, a woman was killed by an elephant in Kazinga, a nearby fishing village. Two months earlier, a man was fatally gored by a young male elephant at the northern edge of the park.

African elephants use their long tusks to forage through dense jungle brush. They've also been known to wield them, however, with the ceremonious flash and precision of gladiators, pinning down a victim with one knee in order to deliver the decisive thrust.

Okello told me that a young tourist was killed in this fashion two years ago in Murchison Falls National Park, north of where we were.

These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings.

SNIP

For a number of biologists and ethologists, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have attributed aggression to the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans.

But in "Elephant Breakdown," a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental sciences program at Oregon State University, and several colleagues argued that today's elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma.

Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they say, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild that what we are witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1163890209824&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&t=TS_Home

[OEOjob]

Here's what you MIGHT have demonstrated, OEOhole, regarding General Tommy Franks comments on Douglas Feith.

That Franks doesn't think Feith is the " fucking stupidest guy..." but that some number of Franks's colleagues did. This is hardly encouraging with respect to Feith's putative competence And while Woodward may have misquoted Franks, we must consider that Franks might be displaying a selective, self serving memory.

It's also interesting how General Franks avoids giving Feith a ranking. My own view of Franks is not terribly favorable as he was a complete WMD dupe for starters. As for "Mr. Hardball", Chris Matthews, he's a softheaded git.

Here's some more on Feith. One can see how he and Rummy would've been simpatico.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050509fa_fact

[David Mathews]

"Well the elephants have apparently decided they've had enough of us humans and its time to fight back."

Yes, it's about time. Nature is becoming weary of dealing with humankind.

I don't see much of a future for Homo sapiens, either. Those who really want to solve humankind's problems fail to notice humankind's real Problem.

Look at the gentle manatee:

http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1/onm.html

And consider the dramatic contrast between the manatee's civilization and humankind's. Manatees have successfully inhabited the Earth for 24,000,000 years. Homo sapiens will not.

[asoka]

As long as there's money to be made from energy I think we'll see a steady supply. It may not be oil, but there will be other sources developed.

"Nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the atomic level, may lead to new energy sources not contemplated before. Nanotechnology when combined with energy, maybe express an entirely new paradigm of sustainable energy.

NanoEnergy may accelerate the efficiencies of solar, geothermal or hydrogen sources speeding up the access to these renewables.

NanoEnergy may actually enable the production of more costeffective even cheaper sources of energy; perhaps new hybrid energy sources. Also, nanoEnergy may accelerate the transition
towards a clean, sustainable, and renewable energy resource that promotes self-reliance from our current petro-energy dependence.
--Executive Summary, The Future of NanoEnergy

[Dave]

Dear DM
Regret having to say if but I agree with you. The species has losts its right to its place the drama of earthly life having been the agent for so much destruction. It a return to margins we face and the question is are we going to be able to find a viable niche even there. JHK is in many ways an opitimist and a realist. I value his work because of that but I despair when I survey what we have done and what we face as a life system and as a species. The life system will continue even if its not multicellular again for a long time after which the life form may may well be forgotten moment in the drama of life on earth. Sure would like to see it be otherwise but given the increases in Temps that lie ahead and the state of the world's oceans I can't help but think that the end of the cenozoic age is the end of us !