20-03-2016 08:15
| Energy Crisis
| History
| Iraq
| Sheffield
| World
This week, we conclude our adaption of The Seven Sisters and supplement it by the research of James Corbett on the influence of the US "Oiligarchs" over the rest of US society. As he notes, the US oil barons were effective in their takeover of other aspects of US society including the money, educational and food supply systems.
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23-02-2016 11:21
| Analysis
| Energy Crisis
| Social Struggles
| Sheffield
| World
This week, a look at the stuff of empire, that is, the resource of preeminent importance to understanding geopolitics in the 21st century - petroleum. We adapt a documentary on The Seven Sisters, supplemented with the research of Russ Baker.
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30-12-2015 06:56
| Energy Crisis
| World
Valuation of crude oil is one of the main issues of concern for financial analysts all over the world now because of the stable trend to oil prices’ fall, outlined in 2014. In just two years ‘black gold’ price slumped by almost 60%, provoking a number of negative macro-economic processes and the fever hitting the global currency market.
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29-12-2015 08:37
| Analysis
| Energy Crisis
| World
Nowadays, at the time of high-tech solutions and inventions of new energy alternatives this question seems less pressing for the global population than twenty years ago, for instance. In addition, the question wording is incorrect. It should rather be, “when are proven developed oil reserves (normally at least 90% confidence) over?”
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28-10-2015 20:22
| Climate Chaos
| Energy Crisis
| Repression
| World
It is cutting season in hambach forest, a forest occuption in germany, where they want to destroy more and more forest for the expansion of one of europes biggest lignite open cast coal mine. This area is one of the most polluting areas in europe, with as leading killkill companie RWE. Now 3 comrades are imprisoned.
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28-09-2015 14:12
| Climate Chaos
| Energy Crisis
| World
Representatives of fifty groups from twenty-two countries who are opposing coal mining and working for climate justice have signed an open letter against UK opencast coal mining. The letter, addressed to the Planning Inspectorate and Derbyshire County Council, asks for two opencast coal mine applications to be refused, as “English law enables applications to be refused on the basis that it is not in the local, national or international interest to approve development, as is the situation in these cases.”
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28-01-2015 17:02
| Analysis
| Ecology
| Energy Crisis
| World
Less emission reductions than appropriate, higher electromagnetic pulse risk than necessary, a golden honey pot of intelligence failures – the balance of the capitalist system is sobering, and best expressed in an image from its own presentation: The truth-weary fear-monger of a diplomat accusing African independence movements of using several exhausting assassination methods in a row against the same target, as if it were an exercise in a fitness room. Allegedly Al-Shabab were burying people alive before they stone them. Well, maybe he wanted to say that they burn them alive when they drone them, or whatever he is clinging to here, but that would have been diplomatically akin to shooting oneself into the foot. One has to call the undocumented leftovers of the imperialist killer robot attacks into mind to make sense of hysterical statements of that type. And by getting stoned, he did not mean hemp either, although it would have been the best example to illustrate that it is wrong to throw a burden of proof at these who cannot move. A considerable distinction between Buddha and Newton remains even when both are sitting under this or that tree. Why should Africans prove that they are not manually producing the same mayhem as (African-)Americans do automatically? Even the worker at the sewing machine does not need to swallow the fraudulent all-of-the-above approach of the corrupt minimum wage campaigner, and might find a pedestal income on which the former can be operated without corporate identity architecture risks significantly more favourable than unsubstantiated into-your-face expectations. The “drone diplomat” grabbed for a straw man to hide behind, because it requires to be filled in on the definitive meaning of its blame-shifting approach – it is the admission that there is something that could be shifted in the first place.
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15-01-2015 10:24
| Bio-technology
| Climate Chaos
| Energy Crisis
| Sheffield
| World
We hear a group of speakers from a conference on "Techno-Utopianism & the Fate of the Earth" organized last month by the International Forum on Globalization. A range of speakers offer perspectives on humanity's efforts to improve on nature, including critical looks at GM, synthetic biology, nanotechnology and electrosmog. Geoengineering, as we hear, is setting a new precedent - a technology designed not to improve life on earth but to mitigate the effects of older technologies.
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09-01-2015 13:54
| Analysis
| Climate Chaos
| Energy Crisis
| World
The dialectics of power and weakness makes it that when power becomes weak by Nature its strength is turning into an open wound. The bleeding of the oil monopoly is such a case, it illustrates why it is wise to calm down before death, though in the case of the oil industry it is the monopoly power which is dying, not necessarily the populations depending on it as sort of ecological hostages. What is bleeding here is the futurological formula of the Saudi monarchy in Arabia, as it is burning the resources it is meant to leave for future generations for the mere purpose of clinging to a misinformed hegemony in the way of creative chaos. The decision to increase the oil output now instead of much later on reflects a shrunk expectation horizon of a human future, and even in the best case, where it would be assumed that it is more of a conscious choice than of a motoric reflex to dispatch the oil which is left to a shorter timespan than appropriate from the perspective of intergenerational justice, it expresses the untold admission that the Saudi racket does not see a future for itself it would deem worth of any conservation. What shows itself in the current price dump is the metabolic rush of the prisoner who gets to smoke a last cigarette before execution, and as the inhalation is in full scale it is not visible how much of it has already burned down before the Mammal Squad turns on its cameras. Apparently the increased strength of the Islamic State is rock-firm enough to shake the petroleum market into sell-out panic.
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17-11-2014 15:58
| Analysis
| Climate Chaos
| Energy Crisis
| World
This is a serious concern, despite the fact that there are much worse traps waiting for the same targets. The Chinese-American climate treaty, whose occurrence indicates that both currencies are chained to the same throne, which was sufficiently shaken by the impact of attention directed against it, proves with certainty that Jinping can fool Obama (and thereby keep his even more reactionary competitors at bay). The essence of the treaty is that each side puts a blind eye towards the other side´s accounting trick, which is in the American case the backward projection of the calculation baseline to a date before peak oil, and in the Chinese case the forward shifting of it to a date after peak coal. Of course any meaningful climate treaty would use the date of signature as the common accounting baseline for emission reduction measurements, not only to create an incentive for everyone to sign in at the same time but also to sign in as soon as possible before unavoidable reductions fall behind the entry of competition. This is not the case with the “Beijing Protocol,” and although in this one at least backward projection is not mutual, deprecating the entire treaty, the trade-off of the two different scams leaves a “fossil gap” between the two peaks of the length of one generation that mirrors the uneven consumption of the two substances due to the grotesque energy thirst of a century of militarism. It is not only that the negotiated result makes Unitedstates look stupid because they have to reach their declared targets before the other side even begins to wind down, which leaves the Chinese regime with zero risk. It also leaves the international public with the situation that there is a diplomatic framework but with no effect, because it neither involves targeted competition nor reality-based planning. Only the please-boss-do-something-crowd can spell “cool for our time” as if they had their right of political engagement delivered to them by governments and corporations.
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24-10-2014 15:10
| Analysis
| Anti-Nuclear
| Energy Crisis
| World
The incident was an independent response to the censorship case discussed here and resonated with the description of the self-referential nature of body politics for a group of people whose constellation resembles the human organism: If the Islamic state censors beyond the lines drawn by its internationalist base, it is stealing from the people and the “executive body part” involved in it is to be looked at. The execution of someone wrapped in an IS flag that recently was disrupted by Australia´s military-industrial complex and triggered the largest police state quake in the history of the colony apparently was meant to write with the blood of an easily available victim the comment to Mosul that such behaviour was inappropriate. Yet while the message from the Southern continent got out, it was not implemented since as a result of spying the people involved were taken prisoners by the capitalist state in an unprecedented instance of “victimless crime.” Since then, the Canberra regime has been weighed by the temptation to persecute someone who has not done anything more than a cop who places a bullet into the wrong direction at the wrong time as an alleged terrorist, and as a result thereof such symptoms of internal discomfort could be observed as the threat to imprison people who identify spies by their names or frictions between troops and spies over subordination issues. Already since the sudden cabinet resignation at the peak of the NSA runaway affair, and the ensuing degradation in a conservative cesspool trampled by a surge of Unitedstates occupation troops, Australia has politically appeared like the broken clock that is right twice a day but no one can tell when. Yet since Julian Assange of Wikileaks called health emergency this summer to get out of the London siege, this appears to have changed and the Southern continent presents itself more like a lost watch where total desertification by runaway climate change is likely to be expected earlier than anywhere else.
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21-05-2014 18:06
| Energy Crisis
| Fracking
| Globalisation
| London
| World
The historic May 21, 2014, agreement marks the first time a huge gas or oil deal in a currency other than dollars is agreed upon. "Normally," the US launches a military attack against any country that tries to abandon the dollar (Iraq, Libya, etc.). The trade in dollars is that big a deal.
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| 1 comment
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14-04-2014 14:10
| Occupy Everywhere
| Energy Crisis
| Globalisation
| Terror War
| London
| World
Superpowers&factions must stop risking billions of lives vying for power in the Ukraine&Syria,
The situ in Ukraine is especially silly, help this country®ion thrive peacefully via a fair direct democracy, which can happen if we stop messing around.Ukraine can help bridge eurasia& the world, not split it.
Does Putin&his clan want to be as reviled as Hitler& Stalin?, dying early& or twisted in a bunker. Billions of nice people&good programmers want peace, not world war3,
no one ultimately profits from war!
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08-01-2014 19:15
| Energy Crisis
| World
Shale gas and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) have been hitting the headlines for months, surrounded by debate on controversial extraction methods. But if the future of fracking is uncertain, what are the alternatives for a secure energy future?
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| 11 comments
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