"There is likely no such thing as Peak Oil."

Libertarian Truths and the Big Lie of Peak Oil … Now Confirmed?

Daily Bell

In 1980, official estimates of proved oil reserves in the United States stood at roughly 30 billion barrels. Yet over the past 30 years, more than 77 billion barrels of oil have been produced here. In other words, over the last 30 years, the United States produced more than two and a half times the proved reserves we thought we had available in 1980. Thanks to new and continuing innovations in exploration and production technology, there’s every reason to believe that today’s estimates of reserves are only a fraction of what will be produced and delivered tomorrow—not only here in the United States, but across the entire North American continent. – Institute for Energy Research, North American Energy Inventory, December 2011

Dominant Social Theme: There’s hardly any oil in the world and free-markets are just a big trick!

Free-Market Analysis: There is no doubt the elite dialectic is shifting. Used to be that the mainstream mediafaithfully reported the meme that the world was running out of oil, and this was later refined into the Peak Oil meme.

Now, thanks to the Internet, the powers-that-be are confronting a realigned dialectic. They are being forced to live with it in order to keep up with the times – and before they lose all credibility. In this article, we want to examine the larger dialectical shift and what it means … using Peak Oil as the chosen example.

This white paper excerpted above appears at the Institute for Energy Research, which is loosely affiliated with the CATO Institute via founder and CEO Robert L. Bradley Jr. Here is a bit of his bio:

Bradley is a visiting fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, an honorary research fellow at the Center for Energy Economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and an adjunct scholar at both the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is a member of the academic review committee at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.

Bradley is affiliated with a “softer” libertarian school. The controlled dialectic may be making more use of these outlets in our view. It is expanding in any case, and shifting. Today it is not unusual to read about the “American empire” or controversies as regards central banking.

The Economist, for instance, appropriates the Daily Bell analysis of the Internet as a modern day Gutenberg Press. But the Economist’s bought-and-paid-for elitist editors make one major change: They claim that SOCIAL MEDIA is the heart and soul of modern-day Gutenberg technology. That’s because the elites control social media but don’t control blogs like ours. Just Google “Economist Magazine” … “Gutenberg Press” and “Daily Bell.”

This is how the elites subtly distort the conversation and create dialectics that continue to skew the dialogue in ways that are of benefit to them and their quest to create world government. Alternatively, as with Peak Oil, they simply begin to beat a retreat in order to retain even a smidgen of credibility.

A False Dialectic?

The elites are nothing if not persistent. (We figure they’ve been around thousands of years one way or another.) Lately, there have arisen accusations that the ENTIRE free-market movement is an elite dialectic.

In our view, this is yet another attack launched on free-market thinking by those who seek to build a case, apparently, for the sustained relevance of modern regulatory democracy. These arguments are being put forth, in part, by confusing the muscular Rothbardian wing of libertarianism with the softer free-market approach of the Chicago Fresh Water School and other such entities.

This is not surprising, as the patron saint of a certain kind of ethnic-focused conspiracy theory, Eustace Mullins, was seemingly confused about free-market economic theory and believed that the Austrian school and, say, the Freshwater School were one and the same thing. (He also seems to have believed the Austrian School was founded in the 1920s instead of the mid-1800s.) Mullins had great sense of intuitive history, but his lack of footnoting and seeming factual inaccuracies warn us to take his reporting cautiously.

The idea, in fact, that genuine free-market thinking itself is a “dialectic” and controlled by the elites does not make sense. Such free-market thinking, at root, is anarchical. Anarchy is merely the absence of government. It was the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard who elaborated on anarchy in the late 20th century.

In order to claim that Rothbardian Austrian economics is a manipulated dialectic, one must confront the history of anarchy that goes back tens of thousands of years. This is patently impossible as Austrian free-market thinking has only been around for about 150 years.

Money and Innuendo?

Almost any intellectual movement can be impugned by attributing malevolent motives to funding sources. Not so long ago as a spoof, we showed how the historical Jesus Christ could be tied directly to Genghis Khan of Mongolia.

We entitled the article, “New Elite Meme? … Dialectical Parallels Between Jesus Christ of Nazareth and Genghis Khan of Mongolia” and even though we all-but-stated it was satire, people STILL took it seriously. Here is the beginning of the article:

In the depths of the Internet, we have come across several articles explaining not only that Genghis Khan was the logical successor to Jesus Christ, but that the two may even have been funded by the same Money Power. One such article is entitled, “The Glorious Concomitance of Christ and Khan – a Revisionist View of the Greatest Figures of the Age.”

It is apparently written by “Comrade Khorijin Of the Borjigin clan (sub clan: Basut)” and has caused quite a stir in certain circles. Using a long and complex narrative derived in part from brief excerpts via partially-published books on various websites, he attempts to show that the Money Changers Christ drove from the Temple actually became supporters of his. He claims they funded Christ’s travels around Israel and much of his proselytizing.

Paraphrasing Marx, Khorijin writes, “While initial efforts at empire building may appear at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing, appropriate analysis brings out that capital is a rigid prerequisite. When we lift a corner of the yurt, we once again find a familiar sight: Organized Jewry.”

We could have, for instance, linked George Washington to Julius Caesar or Dolly Parton to, say, Popeye. Funding sources are always myriad within the context of large socioeconomic movements and it is easy to cast aspersions and draw dark conclusions that are, in fact, unwarranted.

Free-Market Thinking, Soft Versus Hard

Why continually confuse the Chicago Fresh Water School with Rothbardian/Misesian economics, as Mullins did? Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard’s teacher, is the initial standard-bearer for the muscular libertarianism that has emerged in the 21st century.

The billionaire Koch Brothers provide much of the funding for assorted “soft libertarian” think tanks and publications. It is well known within libertarian circles, anyway, that there is a great deal of acrimony between the modern Koch-supported wing of “soft” libertarianism and the muscular version preached by Rothbard and elaborated on within modern, larger anarchical movements.

Friedrich von Hayek, who settled at the Chicago Fresh Water School, is part of the soft libertarianism that Rothbard came to reject. Ludwig von Mises himself walked out a Mont Pelerin Society meeting claiming disgustedly the society was “socialist.” After a few short years, Rothbard himself had an acrimonious parting of the ways with CATO, run by the Kochs.

The Chicago School, CATO, the Mont Pelerin Society, GMU and numerous journals and publications purveying free-market principles can be seen as part of what might be called the “soft libertarian” movement. But it is a great leap of logic (and an unfortunate one) to conflate those involved with Rothbard’s Mises Institute with less ideological facilities. One of the dividing lines is the outright rejection of central banking … something Koch supported entities often seem not especially enthusiastic about.

Hayek himself, a socialist as a young man, was apparently a chosen vehicle for soft libertarianism and his book the Road to Serfdom was relentlessly marketed to provide Hayek, and thus the Chicago School a higher profile. The leading thinker of the Chicago School was Milton Friedman who, throughout his adult life, provided various justifications for the ruinous price-fixing of central banking.

Rothbard, on the other hand, proved fairly impervious to the blandishments of those who would control his anarchic impulses, walking out of CATO when he realized he would have to moderate his views to suit the Kochs.Libertarianism, as we can see, is not a single movement!

In fact, there is a good deal of difference between the Rothbardian perspective and the softer, Koch-influenced libertarianism of mainstream free-marketing (academic) thinking. Of course, we are not arguing that some of Hayek’s insights were invalidated by his participation in soft libertarianism. Milton Friedman, too, made many good libertarian points (in between his defense of a certain kind of central banking).

The dialectic that conflates the Chicago School with Rothbardian/Misesian perspectives confuses the larger, intellectual history of the freedom movement. The way to escape this “matrix” is to read enough about free-market thinking so that the easy solutions of ethnic blaming and greenbackerism become less attractive. Knowledge is a powerful antidote.

The Great Conversation eventually winnows lies from truth. Austrian economics, for instance, is merely a feeder into a freedom conversation that goes back thousands, even tens of thousands of years. Concepts such as “human action” and the business cycle are relevant no matter who provides us with their insights. Ultimately, humankind’s progress, such as it is, is dependent on IDEAS.

Back to Peak Oil …

Let us return to Peak Oil. These elites have maintained control – certainly in the past 100 years or so – by using what we call dominant social themes. These fear-based scarcity promotions frighten middle classes into giving up wealth and power to globalist facilities like the UN.

We know that the “oil scarcity” theme is one of the hoariest and most malicious because we understand its history. M. King Hubbert created the Peak Oil lie back in 1956. Hubbert was apparently an agent of the elite.

He was what they call a technocrat, someone who believed in the rule of society by scientists, engineers and bankers. Sound familiar? Of course, a technocrat just took over Italy, and Greece, too. The European Union is in a sense a technocratic project.

How many faux theories – often disproven – have the kind of staying power that Hubbert’s theory has evidenced? Why? Because it is evidently and obviously an elite supported meme. There is little in the world, or so it would seem, that remains popular and current within the mainstream if it is not supported by the power elite. (Soft libertarian Hayek is probably another example.)

The top elite’s goal is to create world government and scarcity memes are incredibly helpful to this process. By artificially suppressing the amount of oil available in the world, the power elite continues to manipulate society and move it toward its long-awaited New World Order.

But as a result of the Internet, the ability of the elites to support its scarcity-based propaganda is failing. We are seeing more and more evidences of this lack of control. The utter implosion of the Kony 2012 video campaign is but one example. Global warming, the “war against terror” and “vaccines are a cure-all” all are memes in various stages of collapse.

Now here we have to caution here that we are not attempting to enter into a discussion over whether the Institute for Energy Research is “controlled” by some shadowy elite. We simply observe that its seemingly truthful analysis of the fraud of oil scarcity will of necessity receive considerable play throughout the Internet. In fact, its pro-offered analysis provides us reasons why IDEAS and RESEARCH are more important than variants of “conspiracy theory.” Here’s more from the article:

Even with steadily increasing rates of economic and population growth, as well as increasing energy consumption, the United States today possesses greater recoverable supplies of oil, natural gas and coal than at any point in its recorded history. How can that be? Have vast new sources of hydrocarbon fuels magically materialized beneath our feet over the past 100 years? Or is it possible that, despite what you’ve read, heard and have been told, our continent has always had a lot more energy available to it than some would have us believe?

The answers lie in the data. In 1980, official estimates of proved oil reserves in the United States stood at roughly 30 billion barrels. Yet over the past 30 years, more than 77 billion barrels of oil have been produced here. In other words, over the last 30 years, the United States produced more than two and a half times the proved reserves we thought we had available in 1980. Thanks to new and continuing innovations in exploration and production technology, there’s every reason to believe that today’s estimates of reserves are only a fraction of what will be produced and delivered tomorrow—not only here in the United States, but across the entire North American continent.

The way to handle thematic collapses is to get out ahead of them. The elites cannot control the Internet dialogue and cannot undo the damage the Internet has already done. All they can do is tolerate a realignment of the larger dialectic. This is what’s called a LIMITED HANGOUT. It’s happening whether the elites in aggregate want it or not.

We don’t know exactly how the elites will rebrand oil scarcity, given that fracking is boosting recoverable oil and gas estimates radically. And Internet reports about the large amounts of available oil and gas around the world are increasingly dispersed and common. Last year, one of the Forbes brothers claimed there was enough oil and gas just in the US alone to last 1,000 years at current consumption rates. Probably that’s an under-estimate, too.

And this report from the Institute claims massive resources of oil and gas in North America: nearly 4 trillion barrels of oil in the US alone, another nearly 2 trillion in Canada and 100 billion in Mexico.

There are 14 quadrillion cubic feet of total natural gas in the US, 31 quadrillion cubic feet in Canada and 750 trillion cubic feet in Mexico. There are 10.3 trillion short tons of coal in the US, 353 billion short tons in Canada and 1.3 billion in Mexico. The world may be running out of many things, including civility, but one thing it is not running out of is energy.

Increasingly, in fact, there is evidence emerging that oil is abiotic and not the product of “fossils” (as in fossil fuel). Even the name “fossil fuel” is an obvious attempt by the powers-that-be to brand energy as scarce and non-renewable. We see such truths with increasing wonder as the Internet Reformation gains traction.

There is likely no such thing as Peak Oil. There is plenty of oil, gas and coal. The elites manipulate the basics of human life, food, water and energy to scare people into giving up their power to a chosen few … includingtechnocrats. But as real information continues to come out thanks to the Internet, it is increasingly difficult to keep up the facade. Thus, the dialectic must migrate.

This is a big challenge for the elites as we have pointed out in the past. How they will surmount it, we don’t know. They seem increasingly to be turning to the age old tools of economic chaos, military brutalization and legislativeauthoritarianism. Like the Gutenberg Press before it, the Internet is making it increasingly impossible for elite memes to survive, much less thrive.

Conclusion: There are six billion who are not elites and a handful who are, mostly within a few dynastic families. Pushing around increasingly enlightened billions is a tough task. As the manipulation subsides, we wonder what will take its place in the long term …

Link:
http://thedailybell.com/3716/The-Big-Lie-of-Peak-Oil-Now-Confirmed