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Monday, December 6, 2021
Saturday, November 27, 2021
oil gas Iraq Baghdad (بغداد) 9 11 Arabic
George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007
p.302
Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle were among 18 people who had signed a public letter from a group they named “The Project for the New American Century” calling for Saddam's ouster.
p.303
America's promise to topple Saddam remained the law of this land from halfway through Bill Clinton's second term right up until U.S. troops invaded in March 2003.
p.304
Rather, our analysis concluded that Saddam was too deeply entrenched and had too many layers of security around him for there to be an easy way to remove him. Whenever we talked to Iraqis, either expatriates or those still living under Saddam's rule, the reaction was always: “CIA, you say you want to get rid of Saddam. You and whose army? If you are serious about this, we want to see American boots on the ground.”
p.306
To his amazement, Feith said the words to the effect that the campaign should immediately lead to Baghdad.
p.308
One of our senior analysts subsequently told me that the impression given was that the issue of “should we go to war” had already been decided in meetings at which we were not present. We were just called in to discuss the “how” and occasionally the “how will we explain it to the public”.
George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007
____________________________________
Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 2004
p.258
The plans for regime change in Iraq, spoken of during the first week of the administration, were now, seventeen (17) months on, starting to become public.
(Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty : George H. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, 2004)
____________________________________
Angler: the Cheney vice presidency, Barton Gellman, 2008
pp.265-266 a piece of truth
War with Iraq would cost 1 to 2 percent of the gross domestic product.
[ the administration lowball the war cost to help for an easier sell ]
Lawrence Lindsay
4 to 8 percent of GDP
As Bush and Cheney prepared to leave office, the war's financial toll quadrupled [Lawrence] Lidsay's worst-case estimate.
p.138 Jack Goldsmith
he [Cheney] has never hidden the ball.
The amazing thing is that he does what he says.
It was impressive, even if it was bizarro.
It was a will to power.”
(Angler: the Cheney vice presidency, Barton Gellman, 2008, )
____________________________________
George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007
p.44
On May 11, 1998, the Indian government conducted underground tests of three nuclear devices. It followed up a couple days later with tests of two more. Within two weeks, Pakistan responded with its own tests.
p.45
The Indian program was not derived from the U.S., Chinese, Russian, or French programs, but was indigenously developed and thus harder to detect. Three years earlier, in 1995, we had learned about similar test preparations and strongly urged the Indians to stop. They had, but in confronting them we had given them a road map for how to deceive us in the future. This time, only a limited number of senior Indian officials were aware of the planned tests.
p.45
We do not sufficiently accept that Indian politicians might do what they had openly promised ── conduct a nuclear test, as the incoming ruling party had said it would.
The lesson learned is that sometimes intentions do not reside in secret ── they are out there for all to see and hear.
George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the center of the storm : my years at the CIA, 2007
____________________________________
Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 2004
p.78, p.79
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant that nearly every principle underlying America's global posture was due for reevaluation. A first glimpse of what top U.S. officials were thinking in that regard emerged in 1992, when a classified Pentagon draft report, entitled Defense Policy Guidance, was leaked to The New York Times. The plan, written by Paul Wolfowitz, then the undersecretary for policy under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, stressed how new centers of power, some of them hostile to the United States, were growing. The draft report recommended the United States be forceful in deterring the growth of “competitors”, which included China and Russia along with allies like Germany and Japan.
p.79
development of precision long-range weapons, which make aircraft carriers, air bases, and other conspicuous platforms vulnerable to remote attacks; and advances in information technology ── from satellite-based cameras to robot problems and global positioning systems
p.80
a small, neoconservative community.
p.81
Cheney would offer oversight and protection. Rumsfeld would be the point man. Wolfowitz would back Rumsfeld up from the inside. And from the outside, Richard Perle, heading a special civilian group called the Defense Policy Advistory Group, would counsel the Pentagon, the White House, and the CIA.
(Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty : George H. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, 2004)
[ 10 years after the break up of the Soviet Union ]
[ Nine Eleven happened; U.S. is in Afghanistan and Iraq ]
[ what has the U.S. been doing in foreign lands that would cause Nine Eleven ]
[ what activities are the U.S. doing that would cause Nine Eleven ]
[ other military and NGO in Afghanistan and Iraq? ]
<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
[ in search for enemies ]
[ in search for credible threats ]
[ if no [credible] threat in sight, make one up ]
[ [credible] threats justify the military spending ]
[ in fact, military spending is a jobs program ]
John Gans., white house warriors : how the national security council transformed the American way of war, 2019
p.117
Greek poet Constantine Cavafy
“Why this sudden bewilderment? ... Because night has fallen, and the Barbarians have not come! ... What's going to happent to us without the Barbarians?”8
(White house warriors : how the national security council transformed the American way of war / John Gans., subjects: LCSH: national security council (u.s.)──history. | national security──united states──decision making. | united states──military policy──decision making. | strategic culture──united states. | civil-military relations──united states. | united states──foreign relations──1945─, classification: LCC UA23.G356 2019 | DDC 355/.033573─dc23, https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054255, 2019, )
[Nine Eleven is the Barbarians]
____________________________________
• “to subject the activities of great concentration of ... power to the spotlight of publicity”
• “to subject the activities of great concentration of ... [disempowerment] to the spotlight of publicity”
The control of oil Paperback – 1978
by John Malcolm Blair (Author)
pp.71-72
“to subject the activities of great concentration of economic power to the spotlight of publicity”
(see "The control of oil" by John Malcolm Blair, 1978, for a more in depth account of this event)
____________________________________
• what's context which we are operating
• to continually invest, enhancing the intelligence of your enterprise
• how people understand the world around them
Peter Senge's presentation from
2012 Better by Design CEO Summit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE5lviCN7gA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE5lviCN7gA
____________________________________
Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 2004
p.249
water and electricity
prerequisites of civilization
(Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty : George H. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, 2004)
____________________________________
John Malcolm Blair, The control of oil (hardcover), 1976
p.vii
In October 1973─January 1974 a fourfold rise in the price of oil was unilaterally imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
p.vii
Within a few months, however, all signs of shortage had disappeared, but the price remained at its new, stratospheric level. Equally puzzling was the dramatic increase in the oil companies' profits.
p.viii
In 1969 Professor Edith Penrose noted: “OPEC has twice attempted a ‘prorationing’ system under which an overall target was set for production and quotas were assigned to the participating countries. Both attempts failed.”2
p.viii
Obviously something new had been added both in the form of market control and in the manner in which it was being exercised. What was past may have continued as the foundation, bu it was no longer the explanation for current developments.
p.viii
Statistical time series are few and far between, and even those that appear to relate to the same subject often differ in their definitions, with the result that they can neither be combined nor compared.
p.ix
On the demand side the essential difficulty is that the industry has grown to such a size that slight differences in predicted growth rates yield strikingly different forecasts of demand, conveying, in relation to anticipated supply, quite different implications for public policy.
p.ix
For example, raising the projected U.S. population for the year 2000 from 252 million to 285 million persons increases the expected gross energy consumption by 13 percent.
p.262
Promptly taking advantage of the opportunity, OPEC on October 16 announced an immediate increase of approximately 70 percent ── from $3.00 to $5.11.
Hardly had oil users adjusted to the October raise before they were hit with a second, even greater increase. At a meeting Tehran, OPEC announced a further raise, effective January 1, 1974, to $11.65. As can be seen from Chart 11-1, the price of the “marker grade”, Saudi Arabia light, had thus risen from its long-established level of $1.80 in late 1970 to $2.59 in early 1972, to $3.01 a year later, to $5.11 in October 1973, and then to $11.65 ── a sixfold increase in four years.
p.262
In general, the lighter the grade, the lower the sulphur content, and the less the freight required to equalize with other crudes at North European ports, the higher the price.3
p.262, p.264
As the chart also shows, the marker grade remained at $11.66 for nearly a year, dropping slightly to $11.25 in November 1974. But in October 1975, the OPEC members took their third unilateral action, raising prices by 10 percent, as a result of which the market grade rose to $12.38.
p.264
The leading proponent of the 1974 increase was, unexpectedly, the Shah of Iran, who had earlier been restored to power with the active aid of the C.I.A., had engineered the highest growth rate of any Mideast country,
─
“”
p.316
It has been repeatedly pointed out that profits cannot be legitimately criticized by ignoring the investment required to generate them; Edward Symonds of the First National City Bank made a statement to this effect in 1969:
People outside the petroleum industry are apt to suffer from an optical delusion ── that oil is “the most profitable American industry.” By a kind of optical foreshortening, they see clearly that industry earnings add up to a huge total. According to our tabulations, the U.S. industry declared net earnings after taxes totalling more than $6 billion, and they have been rising ... by some 8 percent annually.
But many observers perceive dimly, if at all, that, to generate these earnings, the companies had to sell goods and services which last year were valued at more than $60 billions. To maintain their pace of activity, these petroleum companies ── most of which have been in business 50 years or more ── have had to build up net assets totalling some $47 billion and yet received a rate of return of 13 percent .... 35
pp.316-317
The oil industry was certainly not the most profitable of these nineteen (19) important fields of production, that honor ── as had been true for many years ── being reserved for the drug industry. The profit performance of the top eight (8) oil companies was also surpassed in 1971 by the eight leading firms in cigarettes, malt liquors, and motor vehicles. AT the same time, the average rate of return for the eight leaders in oil was more than twice that of the leading firms in machine tools, steel, broadwoven fabrics and yarn, aircraft, radio and television, nonferrous metals, and pulp and paper.
─
“”
p.341
solar hot water heaters used on rooftops by homeowners in Arizona, California, and Florida in the early 1900's are still in use today, as is Solar House Number 1 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which began operation in 1920.
(The Control of Oil., John Malcolm Blair 1914─, 1. petroleum industry and trade., 2. petroleum industry and trade──United States., 3. energy policy──United States., HD9560.6.B55, 338.2'7'282, 1976, )
____________________________________
William R. Clark, Petrodollar warfare, 2005 [ ]
p.20 (pdf - page 41/289)
David Spiro's book, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony
pp.20-21 (pdf - page 41/289)
In typical understatement Spiro noted that, “clearly something more than the laws of supply and demand ... resulted in 70 percent of all Saudi assets in the United States being held in a New York Fed account.”42
40. David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar recycling and International Markets, Cornell university press, 1999, pp. 121-123.
41. Ibid, p. x.
42. Ibid, p. 125.
p.21 (pdf - page 42/289)
In May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the dollar still vivid, a
group of 84 of the world's top financial and political insiders met
at Saltsjobaden, Sweden, the seclude island resort of the Swedish
Wallenberg banking family. This gathering of [the] Bilderberg
group heard an American participant, Walter Levy, outline a ‘scenario’
for an imminent 400 percent increase in OPEC petroleum
revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjobaden meeting WAS NOT
TO PREVENT THE EXPECTED OIL PRICE SHOCK, BUT RATHER TO PLAN HOW TO MANAGE
THE ABOUT-TO-BE-CREATED FLOOD OF OIL DOLLARS, a process US Secretary
of State Kissinger later called ‘recycling the petrodollar flows.’
[emphasis added]
-- F. William Engdahl, A Century of War43
p.21 (pdf - page 42/289)
Engdahl's remarkable book, A Century of War, chronicled how certain geopolitical events mirrored a “scenario” discussed during a May 1973 Bilderberg meeting. Apparently powerful banking interests sought to “manage” the monetary dollars flows that were premised upon what the group envisioned as “huge increases” in the price of oil from the Middle East. The minutes of this Bilderberg meeting included projections of OPEC oil prices increasing by 400 percent.44
In 1974 US Assistant Treasury Secretary Bennett and David Mulford of the London-based Eurobond firm of White Weld & Co. set about the mechanism to handle the surplus OPEC petrodollars.45 Kissinger, Bennett, and Mulford helped orchestrate the secret financial arrangement with SAMA that creatively transformed the high oil prices of 1973-1974 to the direct benefit of the US Federal Reserve Banks and the Bank of England.
p.22 (pdf - page 43/289)
Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC producers deposited their surplus dollars in US and UK banks, which then took these OPEC petrodollars and re-lent them as Eurodollar bonds or loans, to governments of developing countries desperate to borrow dollars to finance their oil imports. While beneficials to the US- and UK-based financial centers, the buildup of these petrodollar debts by the late 1970s facilitated the basis for the developing world's debt crisis of the early 1980s. Hundreds of billions of dollars were recycled between OPEC, the London and New York banks, and back to developing countries.
p.22 (pdf - page 43/289)
In The Dollar Crisis, Richard Duncan attributed the 1974 petrodollar recycling mechanism to the “first boom-and-bust crisis of the post-Bretton Woods [Monetary Conference] era.”46
[these excess flow of USD would later result in unsustainable debt in banks, and international lending schemes ]
(Petrodollar warfare : oil, Iraq and the future of the dollar, William R. Clark, 2005, )
____________________________________
Daniel Yergin, The prize : the epic quest for oil, money, and power, 1991
p.512
Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo
A truck had to be sent for it. Eventually, it was delivered to his villa in the suburbs. But the corrosion had eaten through the car. Pérez Alfonzo viewed it all like a sign from heaven; he had the car installed near a ping-pong table in his garden, as a corroded, overgrown shrine and symbol of what he saw as the dangers of oil wealth for a nation--laziness, the spirit of not caring, the commitment to buying and consuming and wasting.
Pérez Alfonzo had vowed never to allow himself to be seduced by the trapping of power, and once back in office, he kept to a simple, disciplined, and parsimonious life. He carried his own sardine sandwiches to the office for lunch. He also brought to his new office a sophisticated understanding of the structure of the oil industry as well as his own clearly defined objectives. He wanted not only to increase the government's share of the rents, but also to effect a transfer to the government, and away from the oil companies, of power and authority over production and marketing. To sell oil too cheaply, he argued, was bad for consumers, as the result would be the premature exhaustion of a nonrenewable resource and the discouragement of a new development. For the producing countries, oil was a national heritage, the benefits of which belonged to future generations as well as the the present. Neither the resource nor the wealth that flowed from it should be wasted. Instead, the earnings should be used to develop the country more widely. Sovereign governments, rather than foreign corporations, should make the basic decisions about the production and disposition of their petroleum. Human nature should not be allowed to squander the potential of this precious resource.14
pp.758-759
Searching his mind for some starting point, Parra recollected a book he had read many years earlier, The United States Oil Policy, published in 1926 by John Ise, a professor of economics at the University of Kansas. Parra finally found a battered copy in Caracas and brought it with him to the London where he read it carefully.
“The unfortunate features of the oil history of Pennsylvania have been repeated in the later history of almost every other producing region,” Ise had written then. “There has been the same instability in the industry, the same recurrent or chronic over-production, the same wide fluctuations in prices, with consequent curtailment agreements, the same waste of oil, capital, and of energy.” Ise described one episode in the 1920s as a “spectacle of a vast overproduction of this limited natural resource, growing stocks, overflowing tanks, and declining prices, frantic efforts to stimulate more low and unimportant uses, or to sell for next to nothing . . . . It was the cast of 'being choked, and strangled, and gagged, by the very thing people most wanted--oil.'” Ise added, “Oil producers were committing 'hara-kiri' by producing so much oil. All saw the remedy, but would not adopt it. The remedy was, of course, a reduction in the production.” Although Ise had written the book 60 years ago, the language and the diagnosis sounded all to familiar to Parra. He made notes.
p.768
Afterwards, he was asked how long such lessons would be remembered.
The questions took him a bit by surprise, and he thought for a moment. “About 3 years, without reminding,” he said.
Within a year of that exchange, he himself was no longer minister. And a month later, his country was invaded.8
p.777
Control of, or at least access to, large sources of oil has long constituted a strategic prize. Of that there can be no doubt. It enables nations to accumulate wealth, to fuel their economies, to produce and sell goods and services, to build, to buy, to move, to acquire and manufacture weapons, to win wars.
p.779
Among the most important effects of the environmental consensus will be a switch toward natural gas as the least polluting energy source, particularly in electricity generation. And there will be a new emphasis on energy conservation, not only for reasons of security and price, as was the case in the 1970s and early 1980s, but as a way to contain the combustion of hydrocarbons--and to buy time.
p.779
Much of the industrial world will find itself caught up in the competition of two great themes--energy and security, and energy and the environment. A far-reaching clash between anxieties about energy security and economic well-being on the one side, and fears about the environment on the other, seems all but inevitable.
p.780
Over almost a century and a half, oil [greed & avarice] has brought out the best and worst of our civilization. It has been both boon and burden. Energy is the basis of industrial society. And of all energy sources, oil has loomed the largest and the most problematic because of its central role, its strategic character, its geographic distribution, the recurrent pattern of crisis in its supply--and the inevitable and irresistible temptation to grasp for its rewards.
(Yergin, Daniel, The prize : the epic quest for oil, money, and power / Daniel Yergin, 1. petroleum industry and trade--political aspects--history--20th century, 2. petroleum industry and trade--military aspects--history--20th century, 3. world war, 1914-1918--causes, 4. world war, 1939-1945--causes, 5. world politics--20th century, 1991, )
(The prize : the epic quest for oil, money, and power / Daniel Yergin, 1991, )
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
William R. Clark, Petrodollar warfare, 2005 [ ]
p.28 (pdf - page 49/89)
The answer is simple: the dollar's unique role as a petrodollar has been the foundation of its supremacy since the mid 1970s. The process of petrodollar recycling underpins the US' economic domination that funds its military supremacy. Dollar/petrodollar supremacy allows the US a unique ability to sustain yearly current account deficits, pass huge tax cuts, build a massive military empire of bases worldwide, and still have others accept its currency as medium of exchange for their imported good and services. The origins of this history are not found in textbooks on international economics, but rather in the minutes of meetings held by various banking and petroleum elites who have quietly sought unhindered power.
([ look for articles, papers, and books about the secret back room deal between bankers and oil executives ])
([ transition the dollar as World Reserve Currency to a basket of currencies ])
([ list of other stable currencies ])
p.30 (pdf - page 51/89)
By January 1974 the price of OPEC's benchmark oil stood at $11.65 per barrel (up from $3.01 in early 1973). Furthermore, it is also a matter of historical record that, during this time, the US had engaged in secret negotiations with the Saudi Arabia Monetary Authority to establish a petrodollar recycling system via New York and London banks.
p.39 (pdf - page 60/89)
Eurasia
Anglo-American alliance
Oil and gas are not the ultimate aims of the US [in Iraq]. It's about control. If the US controls the sources of energy of its rivals ── Europe, Japan, China, and other nations aspiring to be more independent ── they win.
── Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, January 2002
p.40 (pdf - page 61/89)
In essence, the Iraq war was about dollars, euros, oil, and geostrategic power in the 21st century.
(Petrodollar warfare : oil, Iraq and the future of the dollar, William R. Clark, 2005, )
____________________________________
Jeremy Grantham, Quarterly Letter - Third Quarter 2014 [ ]
The beginning of the end of the fossil fuel revolution
(From golden goose to cooked goose)
General Thesis
The quality of modern life owes almost everything to the existence of fossil fuels, a massive store of dense energy that for 200 years had become steadily cheaper as a fraction of income. Under that stimulus, the global economy grew ever larger, more complex, and more inter-related and, I believe, more fragile. Then around the year 2000 the costs of finding oil start to rise over 10% a year, and with the global economy growing at only 4% oil starts to fall behind in affordability. Oil has a leading role in the cost structure of agriculture and extractive industries, including coal, and dominates transportation. Because of that its affordability seems to determine economic progress far more than coal or natural gas. As its cost of extraction rises, other parts of the complex economic system have to be sacrificed to retain the ability to acquire sufficient oil. In those conditions, economic growth rates have to fall, and if oil costs continue to rise the trade-offs become more and more painful. Our complex system has been trained by experience to deal with steady growth. Now it must deal with slowing growth and one day it may face contraction. In this changed world we can only guess how robust the stressed system will be. We may hope it will be tough but quite possibly it will be brittle. At the extreme it might even threaten the viability of our current economic system.
... [...] ...
Unfortunately, this target is hindered by the fossil fuel industries, which actively oppose incentives for alternatives.
... [...] ...
(Those who assume the key factor in our growth was the steam engine miss the point: without coal, the steam engine would have just hurtled us toward the depletion of wood far faster than was already happening. The Industrial Revolution was based on coal as the source of energy and the steam engine as the original way to exploit that energy as the efficiency level rose from 1% to 35% over the steam engine's first 100 years.)
Thus we owe almost everything we have had in the way of scientific and economic progress and the growth of the world's food supplies and population to fossil fuels. And not simply to the availability of these fuels, BUT MORE PRECISELY TO THE AVAILABILITY OF THOSE FOSSIL RESOURCES THAT COULD BE CAPTURED EXTREMELY CHEAPLY.
... [...] ...
The efficiency of energy usage increases at about 1.5% a year, but if the price of finding and delivering oil continues to rise at a faster rate than that, then the squeeze on global rates will continue to tighten.
... [...] ...
What is needed is a continuing steady drop in the cost of alternatives for another 20 or more years before the surplus they offer has any chance of equaling our old, 1950-2000 fossil fuel surplus. Fortunately, a continued steady decline in the cost of wind power is likely, and a rapid decline in solar and energy storage costs is almost a certainty.
The challenge for our economy is to speed up this energy transition and to try and minimize, in the interim, the damage to our global economy and, possibly more importantly, to the actual viability of several poor countries, which suffer under the combined impact of rising fuel costs and their associated rising food costs. In some critical cases like Syria and Sudan, these cost increases are exacerbated by rapidly worsening climate extremes.
Even if we can make the transition to renewable electric power smoothly, other challenges to reducing carbon emissions remain, especially in transportation, which is where the great majority of the rest of oil goes.
... [...] ...
First, let us quickly admit that U.S. fracking is a very large herring.
... [...] ...
Nor is the leakage of methane (natural gas) from the drill and pipeline operations seriously monitored despite the fact that methane is over 86 times as potent a greenhouse gas, last a 20-year horizon, as CO2 is.
... [...] ...
The aggregate financial results allow for the possibility that fracking costs have been underestimated by corporations and understated in the press.
... [...] ...
This data surely raises a strong likelihood that falling affordability of oil dominates our energy equation and poses a serious threat to income and wealth generation. At the very least the data is compatible with the thesis.
... [...] ...
But we will, I'm sure, eventually remove oil demand for surface transportation. As we do so, it will give our environment some breathing room - some more time for us to deal with the remaining important uses for oil and gas such as chemical feedstock, air and sea transportation, and road surfacing, which uses will take many decades to completely replace.
... [...] ...
Not only did the mainstream absolutely not see the financial crisis approaching, but it marginalized the work of Hyman Minsky, who did. More to the point, the economic mainstream has totally missed the significance of the limits on growth posed by finite resources and again marginalized the work of Kenneth Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the writers of the original The Limits to Growth, 3 who did.
... [...] ...
Meanwhile, they try to define all of our problems in monetary, debt, and interest rate language, ignoring the real world of people and things.
... [...] ...
I had suggested originally that temporary drops in commodity prices could be caused by China growing less than expected or by weather for farming improving after several monstrously bad years. Both of these events occurred this year. However it has always been oil that matters most, for oil is half the value of traded commodities and almost half of the cost structure of the rest.
... [...] ...
iron ore, bauxite, potash, phosphorus, crude oil
... [...] ...
The End of Normal, by James Galbraith
page 104
‘There is no reason to believe that the democratic decision made by the living in the face of their present needs and desires will be the decision that would maximize the chance of long-term system survival. The unpleasant conclusion is that it is possible for a society to choose economic collapse.’
... [...] ...
five commodities: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten.
... [...] ...
GMO_QtlyLetter_3Q14_full.pdf
< http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/Jeremy_Grantham.pdf >
< http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/GMO_QtlyLetter_1Q14_FullVersion.pdf >
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, Mankind at the turning point, 1974 [ ]
1973
p.178
(see Table III C-1).*
Table III C-1
Cost in U.S. Dollar
Technical
Energy source capital cost unit cost
Persian Gulf 100-300 0.10-0.20
Nigeria 600-800 0.40-0.60
Venezuela 700-1000 0.40-0.60
North Sea 2500-4000 0.90-2.00
Large deep-sea reservoirs over 3000? 2.00-?
New U.S. reservoirs (not too remote) 3000-4000 2.00-2.50
Easy part of Alberta tar sands 3000-5000 2.00-3.00
High-grade oil shales 3000-7000 3.00-4.50
Gas synthesized from coal 5000-8000 3.00-6.00
Liquid synthesized from coal 6000-8000 3.00-6.00
Liquid natural gas (landed) 6000-9000 3.00-6.00
* A. B. Looius, "Energy Resources," paper at the UN symposium on population, resources, and environment, Stockholm, 1973.
(Mankind at the turning point, Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, The Second Report to The Club of Rome, 1974, p.178)
____________________________________
Iraq is part of the Persian Gulf area
____________________________________
Peter Senge's presentation from
2012 Better by Design CEO Summit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE5lviCN7gA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE5lviCN7gA
(transcript, not verbatim, not by algorithm)
I don't know if this is new or very old,
in some sense, my guess is that it is kind of a timeless idea
but since a lot of you are in the senior role in your organization
I would like to suggest one easily neglected aspect of your work is how to help people make sense of things
who are we
where are we
but also what's context which we are operating
so one way to say would be that one aspect of your job is to continually invest, enhancing the intelligence of your enterprise
how people understand the world around them
now that could be
(1.2), (1.25), (1.3), (1.7)
and you'll see in a minute when I explain a little bit
of why there is a natural range of uncertainty
but part of the defining feature of the world we lived today is this number
this number refers to how many earths we presently use
if you look at the total footprint of human activity on the planet
we are way pass the 1
probably, I say a kind of concensus perspective of environmental scientists
probably in the later part of the last century we pass the 1 point
now, this is inherently ambiguious idea
that does not make it unimportant
we want to be a good designer in this world today
you obviously have to embrace ambiguity
everything in life at some level is ambiguious
so you picked a few that are particularly important
I would say there are probably none that are more important than this one
If China were to rise to the level of material affluence and waste of the West, this number would be two
We would need 2 Earths
If India does like wise, it will be 3
I would say that is a defining feature of our reality, today
Because it means what it means
To each person, to each organization, to each society
take the time to try to make sense of it
needless to say we don't have 2 earths, we don't have 3, we don't even have one and a half
so we are way pass already to the point to which human being think in any logical rational basis that we just keep going the way we are going and everything will be fine
but I would say just that as long as we accept this inherently certain notion, every species, every biological context or niche, operate in the context biologist has been calling for years, carrying capacity
you know, how many of whatever species can be supported in this biological setting, or geographical setting, food supply, ability to process waste, etc. . .
very basic stuff
second number
this one, ah, a lot less ambiguious in concept
the idea of a carrying capacity of any species is always a conceptual idea, no one differs with the principle behind it
there is always an optimum size of the physical footprint of any species,
but what that is and how you calculate it is inherently very
scientific question
this one actually much less complicated
that's the number of people in the world who will not have access to clean drinking water by 2020
today it's already well over a billion (1,000,000,000)
general estimate, World Health Organization, about a billion, 200 million people in the world do not have reliable access to clean drinking water, not far off, 2020, standard World Health Organization estimate,
this will be two billions (2,000,000,000)
this is not a new statement right now, but I think it tells us alot
actually, water is the new oil
this third is one that probably
at least for me when I first was expose to it was the one that really surprise me and I want to share it, it's a little bit tough to deal with, at least I think it is, you'll draw your own conclusion, because to me it kind of complete the picture in a very interest way,
that number is the number of people in the world who died each year from their own hands, suicides, compared to the total number killed in homocides and wars, year in and year out, for the last two to three decades, particularly for the last decade,
3 times as many people have killed themselves than have been killed by another
so I am just sharing these little bits of data, to give us something to reflect on, one of the real role of data we often miss that is to get us to stop and pay attention to some aspect of our reality, and asked what does this mean,
so obviously the first and second one have to do ...
for I want to leave with you to think about this on your own
this third number, I don't know about you, but when I first heard it was kind a really jaw dropping
and I've heard it now several time ... in a ball park accurate
It suggests something that to me very important to consider in concert with let just say sociological crisis, which deep down we may have a crisis of humanness
I mentioned the global food sustainable laboratory
we have lived in an age
we need a little definition here
if you are in Europe the we go on, maybe the last 200, 250 years
if you are American the last 150, 200 years
New Zealand, somewhat similar
in China, 20 years
we live in an Era, the era is industrial age, it is not over, wasn't subplanted by the information age, a complete mis understanding of what the term mean
it's an age where, another way to say this, it would be materialism become kind of dominant mindset,
many would argue that the Western scientific revolution plant the seed for this
quite a bit more fundamental
technology is about enabling thing
what do we want to enable
what is the context in which we live
what is the reality of today and the future
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
2075
*************************
* Blueprint or Scramble *
*************************
transcript excerpt from a talk given by LAWRENCE WILKERSON
Royal Dutch Shell has done a look.
They have some of the best strategists that I've run into
(and I was a strategist in the military) in a long time,
and their look says the future is a blueprint,
or the future is a scramble.
And they talk about how to 2075, how dwindling water resources,
dwindling petroleum resources, gas and oil,
and so forth are going to cause world leaders to have
to either cooperate and coordinate — "blueprint" — or fight each other
mercilessly for half a century or longer.
Royal Dutch Shell believes it's probably going to be the latter.
They call that "scramble".
We arrive at essentially the same point in 2075,
with a basket of energy sources,
some of which we probably don't even know now due to technological
innovation, with different countries in the world,
with different power relationships in the world;
we arrive pretty much at the same place,
whether it's the blueprint scenario or the scramble scenario.
There's just under the scramble scenario a lot of blood,
a lot of treasure, and a lot of dead bodies.
Frankly, Royal Dutch Shell strategists,
they won't tell you this, but I believe it's fair to say that
they think the political will and the leadership won't be here,
and so we're going to do the scramble and not the blueprint.
If you're an optimist, you can go for the blueprint.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. STATE DEPT. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL:
Let me express my appreciation for all of you coming out tonight.
It's late, and we're on a college campus,
and this is really rare to get this many people out.
([ It shall be a combination of a blueprint and a scramble, ... ])
____________________________________
p.306
ambivalence: simultaneous and contradictory feeling toward the same object that can lead to psychological “splitting,” in which a subject separates irreconcilable parts of his/her personality. A concept used by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939).
(Battle Angel Alita: Last Order Omnibus volume 1, copyright © 2011 Yukito Kishiro, English translation copyright © 2013 Yukito Kishito, p.306)
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Theodore Modis., Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future, 1992.
invariants, 14-15, 23-32, 181, 207
car safety and, 24-26, 25
computer innovation and, 26-27
defined, 12
futuronics and, 185-87
humans vs. machines and, 27-30
numbers of heartbeats as, 30-31
turning into variables, 31-32
p.12
Casare Marchetti, physicist at the International Institute of Advanced Systems
Analysis (IIASA) near Vienna, Austria,
p.12
was given the task by the energy-project leader to forecast energy demands.
p.12
Another kind of war
the fierce competition for oil
The need for increased understanding of the future energy picture was becoming imperative.
p.12
scientific method: observation, prediction, verification.
In this approach, predictions must be related to observation through a theory resting on hypotheses. When the predictions are verified, the hypotheses becomes laws. The simpler a law, the more fundamental it is and the wider its range of applications.
p.12
In his [Marchetti] work he first started searching for what physicists call invariants.
p.12
These [invariants] are constants universally valid manifested through indicators that do not change over time.
p.12
He [Marchetti] believed that such indicators represent some kind of equilibrium, even if one is not dealing with physics but with human activities instead.
p.12
Marchetti noted that growth curves for animal populations follow patterns similar to those for product sales.
p.12
the mathematics developed by Volterra for the growth of a rabbit population
p.12
Marchetti want on to make a dazzling array of predictions, including forecasts of future energy demands, using Volterra's equations.
p.14
People can spend their money only once, on one computer or on another one. Bringing a new computer model to market depresses the sales of an older model.
“”
p.14
he [Marchetti] kept tossing out universal constant ─ what he called invariants ─
p.14
Did I know that human beings around the world are happiest when they are on the move for an average of about 70 minutes per day.
pp.14-15
Prolonged deviation from this norm is met with discomfort, unpleasantness, and rejection.
p.15
To obscure the fact that one is moving for longer periods, trains feature games, reading lounges, bar parlors, and other pastime activities. Airlines show movies during long flights.
p.15
Confinement makes prisoners pace their cell in order to meet their daily quota of travel time.
p.15
Did I know, Marchetti, asked, that during these 70 minutes [1 hr. 10 minutes ] of travel time, people like to spend no more and no less than 15 percent of their income on the means of travel?
p.15
To translate this into biological terms, one must think of income as the social equivalent of energy.
p.15
Poor people walk, those better off drive, while the rich fly.
p.15
they are all trying to get as far as possible within the 70 minutes and the 15 percent budget allocation.
p.15
Affluence and success result in a bigger radius of action. Jet did not shorten travel time, they simply increased the distanced traveled.
(Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future / Theodore Modis., 1. forecasting., 2. creation (literary, artistic, etc.)
3. science and civilization., CB 158.M63, 303.49--dc20, 1992
, )
____________________________________
Steve Coll, Private empire : exxonmobil an american power, ????
pp.278-279 Evans, Don
Later, John Snow, Bush's second Treasury secretary, found himself in a meeting with Putin where the subject of the job offer to Evans came up. Putin marveled at the Evan's refusal.
“You know,” he told Snow, “if he had taken that, you could have cut your C.I.A. budget in half.”42
Putin misunderstood the American system as much as American analysts misunderstood him. Russian oil companies cut their deals from a position that was clearly subordinate to the state. In Putin's worldview, the recruitment of a Bush friend like Evans to Rosnelf made perfect sense. The converse proposition--the idea that ExxonMobile would recruit a Putin consigliere to its senior-most executive ranks in Irving, in order to solidify U.S.-Russian relation--was highly unlikely. ExxonMobile had never been an arm of the Bush administration's Russia reset after 2001, events had demonstrated; it was a private global empire that would choose to align with Bush, or not, as its enduring interests required.
p.643
42. Vladimir Putin's job offer to Don Evans, the Russian president's conversation with John Snow, and all quotations from interviews with former Bush administration officials.
p.304 2030 and beyond
Oil and gas were here to stay, Exxon-Mobil's economists and planners had concluded; fossil fuels would be central to global economics and security until 2030 and beyond.
p.306 Exxon's forecasters
It turned out that in 1980, Exxon's forecasters had been half right and half wrong about the future. They had correctly predicted, within 1 percent, the total amount of energy the world would consume in 2000--a remarkable feat.
p.306 steady-as-you-go & available supply
The answer, he said, was to manage on a “steady-as-you-go basis and try to make sure the fundamentals are right.” Rather than forecasting price, Raymond decided to concentrate instead on predicting volumes--the amount of oil and other energy sources global consumers would demand over time, and also the amount of available supply.5
p.307 3 percent per year until 2030
Historically, ExxonMobile's analysts believed, the pace of a country's economic growth typically explained about two thirds of its changes in energy consumption; population changes explained only about one third. Economic activity, in other words, not the number of people, would be the most important factor in future energy demand. When they added up all of their individual country predictions, ExxonMobil's analysts concluded that the world's economy would grow on average by about 3 percent per year until 2030.6
p.308 transportation sector
The transportation sector--cars, pickup trucks, heavy trucks, airplanes, ships, and trains--was the most important factor in the global market for liquid oil. Three quarters of the roughly 20 million barrels of oil the United States consumed each day was as transportation fuel; the rest went to industrial uses, such as the manufacture of plastics. Virtually no oil went to generate electricity--coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy provided the main sources of electric power generation.
...; unless all-electric cars and vehicles spread very rapidly in the United States, windmill construction, whatever its pace, would have little impact on the amount of foreign oil the United States consumed.
• Three quarters of oil US consumed each day was for transportation fuel
• the rest went to industrial uses, such as the manufacture of plastics.
p.309
Titanic changes in the patterns of energy use over decades would be required to create even modest changes in fuel consumption patterns.
pp.310-311
...; they predicted, therefore, that CO2 emissions would rise by an additional 30 percent worldwide between 2005 and 2030.
p.359 organized the visit a long time ago
Even this show-and-tell had limited impact: Afterward, one of the Chadian delegates, Abdelkarim Abakar, remarked to an American diplomat that the “visit solidified the question of why Doba crude was priced so low when the price of oil in the international markets was priced at such a high level,” and he argued that if ExxonMobil “was truly willing to communicate openly” about issue, “it would have organized this visit a long time ago.”
(Private empire : exxonmobil an american power / by steve coll., 1. exxon corporation, 2. exxon mobil corporation, 3. petroleum industry and trade--political aspects--united states, 4. corporate power--united states, 5. big business--united states, )
____________________________________
Steve Coll, Private empire : exxonmobil an american power, ????
pp.278-279 Evans, Don
Later, John Snow, Bush's second Treasury secretary, found himself in a meeting with Putin where the subject of the job offer to Evans came up. Putin marveled at the Evan's refusal.
“You know,” he told Snow, “if he had taken that, you could have cut your C.I.A. budget in half.”42
Putin misunderstood the American system as much as American analysts misunderstood him. Russian oil companies cut their deals from a position that was clearly subordinate to the state. In Putin's worldview, the recruitment of a Bush friend like Evans to Rosnelf made perfect sense. The converse proposition--the idea that ExxonMobile would recruit a Putin consigliere to its senior-most executive ranks in Irving, in order to solidify U.S.-Russian relation--was highly unlikely. ExxonMobile had never been an arm of the Bush administration's Russia reset after 2001, events had demonstrated; it was a private global empire that would choose to align with Bush, or not, as its enduring interests required.
p.643
42. Vladimir Putin's job offer to Don Evans, the Russian president's conversation with John Snow, and all quotations from interviews with former Bush administration officials.
(Private empire : exxonmobil an american power / by steve coll., 1. exxon corporation, 2. exxon mobil corporation, 3. petroleum industry and trade--political aspects--united states, 4. corporate power--united states, 5. big business--united states, )
____________________________________
Denmark intel helped US NSA to spy on European politicians
Cyber Security
May 31, 2021
3 min read
• Danish telecommunications hub.
• allowed the US National Security Agency (NSA) to tap into a primary internet and telecommunications hub in Denmark
• “The NSA is said to have accessed text messages and the phone conversations of a number of prominent individuals by tapping into Danish internet cables in co-operation with the FE.”
• allowed the NSA to obtain data using the telephone numbers of politicians as search parameters, according to DR.
• The NSA and the Danish intelligence signed a secret pact that allowed the cyberspies to eavesdrop on sensitive communications between 2012 and 2014
• to spy on communications passing through the Sandagergårdan hub in Dragor, near Copenhagen.
•••• ••• ••••
Danish Defense Intelligence Service (Danish: Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, FE) allowed the US National Security Agency (NSA) to tap into a primary internet and telecommunications hub in Denmark, the operation allowed the US intelligence agency to spy on the communications of European politicians. According to BBC, the NSA allegedly gathered intelligence on officials from Germany, France, Sweden, and Norway.
•••• ••• ••••
How was the Danish government involved?
The Danish government knew of the involvement of their country's secret service in the NSA scandal by 2015 at the latest.
Danish intelligence service [Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE)] helped NSA (US surveillance SIGINT spying agency) secretly intercepted private communication, on leading politicians in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and France, as well as Germany.
Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE) => Forsvarets Efterretnings-tjeneste
They began to collect information on the FE's cooperation with the NSA between 2012 and 2014 in the secret Dunhammer report following the disclosures by the former NSA employee and whistleblower Edward Snowden, NDR reported.
The information they gathered made it clear that the FE had helped the NSA to spy on leading politicians in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and France, as well as Germany.
Danish intelligence also helped the US agency to spy on the Danish foreign and finance ministries as well as a Danish weapons manufacturer. The FE also cooperated with the NSA on spying operations against the US government itself.
Upon discovering exactly how far the cooperation between the two countries' intelligence services went, the Danish government forced the entire leadership of the FE to step down in 2020.
What drove Danish spies to help the NSA?
A Danish expert in secret service operations Thomas Wegener Friis believes that the FE was faced with a choice about which global partners to work more closely with.
"They made a clear decision to work with the Americans and against their European partners," he told NDR.
Patrick Sensburg, who led the German parliamentary committee to investigate the NSA spying scandal, was not surprised by the news. For the lawmaker from Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), it is important to understand what drives secret services.
"It's not about friendships. It's not about moral-ethical aspirations. It's about pursuing interests," he told NDR.
The NSA, FE and Danish defense ministry did not respond to requests for comment on the research, however, a general statement from the defense ministry said that "a systematic bugging of close allies is unacceptable."
Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE) => Forsvarets Efterretnings-tjeneste
source:
Pierluigi Paganini
source:
https://cybersecurityworldconference.com/2021/05/31/denmark-intel-helped-us-nsa-to-spy-on-european-politicians/
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://www.dw.com/en/danish-secret-service-helped-us-spy-on-germanys-angela-merkel-report/a-57721901
https://www.dw.com/en/danish-secret-service-helped-us-spy-on-germanys-angela-merkel-report/a-57721901
____________________________________
Nathan Rosenberg, Inside the black box: technology and economics, 1982
pp.142-143
p.142
This paper, then, is a kind of preliminary reconnaissance, the beginning of an attempt to develop a conceptual framework that will improve our understanding of the connections between science and economic performance.
p.142
In view of the obvious and compelling importance of this subject, I offer only a token apology for the fact that this paper is, at best, only the first small step on a long intellectual journey. I will argue that technology influences scientific activity in numerous and pervasive ways. I will attempt to identify some of the most important categories of influence and to sharpen our understanding of the causal mechanisms at work.
p.142
Of course, the influence of certain technological concerns on the growth of scientific knowledge has long been recognized. Torricelli's demonstration of the weight of air in the atmosphere, a scientific breakthrough of fundamental importance, was an outgrowth of this attempt to design an improved pump.2 Sadi Carnot's remarkable accomplishment in creating the science of thermodynamics was an outgrowth of the attempt, a half century or so after Watt's great innovation, to understand what determined the efficiency of steam engines.3 Joule's discovery of the law of the conservation of energy grew out of an interest in alternative sources of power generation at his father's brewery.4
pp.142-143
Pasteur's development of the science of bacteriology emerged from his attempt to deal with problems of fermentation and putrefaction in the French wine industry. In all these cases, scientific knowledge of a wide generality grew out of a particular problem in a narrow context.
p.143
elemental point: Technology is itself a body of knowledge about certain classes of events and activities.
It is a knowledge of techniques, methods, and designs that work, and that work in a certain ways and with certain consequences, even when one cannot explain exactly why.
p.143
gives only a very limited sense of the nature and extent of the interplay between science and technology. Indeed, that sense is totally suppressed in the prevailing formulation of our time,
p.143
it is common to look at causality as running exclusively from science to technology, and in which it is common to think of technology as if it were reducible to the application of prior scientific knowledge.
p.143
Thus, it seems to be quite worthwhile to examine the science ─ technology interaction with greater care.
p.144
As a result, technology has served as an enormous repository of empirical knowledge to be scrutinized and evaluated by the scientist.
(Inside the black box./ Nathan Rosenberg, 1. technological innovations., 2. technology─social aspects., HC79.T4R673 1982, 338'.06, first published 1982, )
____________________________________
Jonathan Lyons., The house of wisdom: how Arab learning transformed Western civilization, 2009
SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
622 prophet Muhammand leads a migration of his followers from Mecca
to Medina, the hijra. It marks the start of the Muslim epoch.
632 the death of Muhammand.
732 An Arab raiding party is defeated near Tours, in southern
France, effectively ending Muslim penetration of Western
Europe from Spain.
750 The victory of the Abbasid revolution against the Umayyad caliphs.
756 Abd al-Rahman proclaims himself master of Muslim Spain,
known as al-Andalus.
762 Caliph al-Mansur founds Baghdad as the new Abbasid capital.
771 Hindu sages bring Sanskrit scientific texts to Baghdad.
p.60
Proximity to Indian Ocean trade routes, a vibrant multiethnic culture, and safe distance from the traditional military dangers posed by the Byzantine Greeks helped establish Baghdad for centuries as the world's most prosperous nexus of trade, commerce, and intellectual and scientific exhange.16 Skilled craftmen, merchants, and other wordly folk rushed in to meet the demands of the city elite.
p.60
Syrian glassware, Indian dyes and spices, silks and other luxury goods from China and Persia, gold from Africa, and slaves from Central Asia all passed through its markets and enriched its traders.
p.60
Nothing survives today of early Abbasid Baghdad,
p.60
In a tradition that remains throughout much of the Middle East today, the buildings were generally nondescript on the outside, the pedestrian exteriors providing no real indiction of the riches couched within.
pp.60-61
Al-Yaqubi, writing about one hundred years after al-Mansur, offers a breathless description of life in the City of Peace the caliph left behind: “I mention Baghdad first of all because it is the heart of Iraq, and , with no equal on earth either in the Orient or the Occident, it is the most extensive city in area, in importance, in prosperity, in abundance of water, and in healthful climate ...”18
pp.61-62
According to the Abbasid ideologues, Alexander's defeat of Darius III and his conquest of Persia in the fourth [4th] century B.C. had seen the wholesale transfer of Iranian learning westward where it provided the kernel of later Greek advances.22 Whatever its merits, this Abbasid tradition proved remarkably long-lived. Six hundred [600] years later, the great Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun issued a similar verdict: “Among the Persians, intellectual sciences played a large and important role, since the Persian dynasties were powerful and ruled without interruption. The intellectual sciences are said to have come to the Greeks from the Persians, when Alexander killed Darius and gained control of the Achaemenid Empire. At that time, he appropriated the books and sciences of the Persians.”23
23. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. and ed. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 3: 113-14.
pp.62-63
Abu Jafar alMansur
May Allah have mercy on him
Another chronicler notes that the caliph directed numerous foreign translations into Arabic, including classic of Hindu, Persian, and Greek scholars, and set the direction for future research. “Once in possession of these books, the public read and studied them avidly.”25
p.63
To accommodate the vast scale of work needed to translate, copy, study, and store the swelling volume of Persian, Sanskrit, and Greek texts, al-Mansur established a royal library modeled after those of the great Persian kings. Working space, administrative support, and financial assistance were also required for the small army of scholars who would take up these tasks and then build on them in creative and original ways. This was the origin of what became known in Arabic as the Bayt al-Hikma, or the House of Wisdom ── the collective institutional and imperial expression of early Abbasid intellectual ambition and official state policy.
p.63
Its overriding function, however, was the safeguarding of invaluable knowledge, a fact reflected in other terms applied at times by Arab historians to describe the project, such as the Treasury of the Books of Wisdom and simply the Treasury of Wisdom.26
p.63
The influential ninth-century [9th] scholar and translator Hunayn ibn Ishaq provides a taste of the length to which the Arab sages would go to obtain necessary material, in this case a missing medical manuscript: “I myself searched with great zeal in quest of this book over Mesopotamia, all of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, until I came to Alexandria. I found nothing, except about half of it, in Damascus.”27
p.64
Over the course of 150 years, the Arabs translated all available Greek books of science and philosophy. Arabic replaced Greek as the universal language of scientific inquiry. Higher education became increasingly organized in the early ninth [9th] century, and most major Muslim cities featured some type of university.
p.64
One such institution, the al-Azhar mosque complex in Cairo, has been the seat of uninterrupted instruction for more than one thousand years.
p.64
Travel, and the accompanying exposure to new experiences and new ways of thinking, was an important element of a scholar's education in a society that retained great reverence for the spoken word; other than face-to-face, how else could a learned man meet his colleagues and collect and debate their ideas?
p.65
Just such an encounter ended the life of one of the Arab world's leading commentators on Aristotle, Abu Nasr al-Farabi, who was murdered by a criminal gang on the road outside Damascus around 950.
p.65
The rise of this new scientific and philosophical tradition generated demand for more, and better, translations from the Greek and other sources; it was not, as Western tradition often has it, the translations that gave rise to Arab science and philosophy.32 A breakthrough in mathematics or optic, for example, would send Arab scholars back to the Greek literature, which was then translated, reworked, and frequently corrected or otherwise improved. Along the way, new scientific terminology also has to be invented, as task for which Arabic proved to be highly adept. Many of these words ── alcohol, alembic, and alchemy, to take just a few examples from the beginning of the alphabet ── are today a firm part of the Western lexicon.
p.65
A tenth-century [10th] Arabic manuscript on arithmetic by the Persian mathematician al-Nawasi pays tribute to the precision of the language; the author says in his introduction that he first wrote the book in Persian but had to redo it in Arabic in order to convey his exact meaning.
p.65
Syriac, the language of early Arab Christian scholars, likewise proved no match for the flexibility and nuance of Arabic. To the dismay of many leading churchmen, their parishioners generally used Arabic in their daily lives as well.33
first U.S. edition 2009
(The house of wisdom: how Arab learning transformed Western civilization / by Jonathan Lyons., 1. civilization. western ── arab influences., 2. learning and scholarship ── arab countries ── history ── medieval, 500-1500., 3. east and wast., CB251.L96 2009, 909'.09821──dc22, 2008026238, first U.S. edition 2009, )
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NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., section 107, some material is provided without permission from the copyright owner, only for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of federal copyright laws. These materials may not be distributed further, except for "fair use," without permission of the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
____________________________________
→ Because I don't know what lies behind something, I cann't keep up, and at something of a disadvantage. And that's no way to live. To be uninformed and entirely at someone else's mercy. (Netflix streaming show, The Crown, first season, episode 7, “Scientia Potentia Est”)
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Speech from 1957 Predicting Peak Oil
Posted on July 2, 2007 by Gail Tverberg
Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover gave an amazing speech in 1957 that predicted many of the energy-related issues we are now dealing with. Among other things, the speech talks about
• The relationship between fossil fuels and economic growth.
• The relationship between fossil fuels and military power.
• The fact that oil, natural gas, and coal are expected to peak, and the approximate timeframe.
• The responsibility of Rickover’s generation to tell later generations about the fact that fossil fuels will deplete, so that they can start very early making plans for the difficult transition away from fossil fuels.
Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover is known as the father of the nuclear submarine. He was also instrumental in getting the United States started using nuclear power to generate electricity. He was an advisor to Jimmy Carter, who is known for his interest in renewable energy. The world would no doubt be much different if we had listened to Mr. Rickover’s ideas from more than 50 years ago and acted on them.
This speech was posted in December 2006 on the Energy Bulletin. This speech was made available by the work of two people: Theodore Rockwell, author of The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference, who had this article in his files, and Rick Lakin, who sought out the article and converted it to digital form.
This is the text of Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover’s May 14, 1957 speech to the Minnesota State Medical Association:
Energy Resources and Our Future
I am honored to be here tonight, though it is no easy thing, I assure you, for a layman to face up to an audience of physicians. A single one of you, sitting behind his desk, can be quite formidable.
My speech has no medical connotations. This may be a relief to you after the solid professional fare you have been absorbing. I should like to discuss a matter which will, I hope, be of interest to you as responsible citizens: the significance of energy resources in the shaping of our future.
We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil Fuel Age. Today coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93% of the world’s energy; water power accounts for only 1%; and the labor of men and domestic animals the remaining 6%. This is a startling reversal of corresponding figures for 1850 – only a century ago. Then fossil fuels supplied 5% of the world’s energy, and men and animals 94%. Five sixths of all the coal, oil, and gas consumed since the beginning of the Fossil Fuel Age has been burned up in the last 55 years.
These fuels have been known to man for more than 3,000 years. In parts of China, coal was used for domestic heating and cooking, and natural gas for lighting as early as 1000 B.C. The Babylonians burned asphalt a thousand years earlier. But these early uses were sporadic and of no economic significance. Fossil fuels did not become a major source of energy until machines running on coal, gas, or oil were invented. Wood, for example, was the most important fuel until 1880 when it was replaced by coal; coal, in turn, has only recently been surpassed by oil in this country.
Once in full swing, fossil fuel consumption has accelerated at phenomenal rates. All the fossil fuels used before 1900 would not last five years at today’s rates of consumption.
Nowhere are these rates higher and growing faster than in the United States. Our country, with only 6% of the world’s population, uses one third of the world’s total energy input; this proportion would be even greater except that we use energy more efficiently than other countries. Each American has at his disposal, each year, energy equivalent to that obtainable from eight tons of coal. This is six times the world’s per capita energy consumption. Though not quite so spectacular, corresponding figures for other highly industrialized countries also show above average consumption figures. The United Kingdom, for example, uses more than three times as much energy as the world average.
With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus the enormous fossil energy which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves. Man’s muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously, or one-twentieth horsepower. Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 2,000 men push his automobile along the road, and his family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles, and lives better than most ancient kings. In retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions, and disasters, the hundred years just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.
Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our growing population. Before I go into this question, let me review briefly the role of energy resources in the rise and fall of civilizations.
Possession of surplus energy is, of course, a requisite for any kind of civilization, for if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles, he must expend all his strength – mental and physical – to obtain the bare necessities of life.
Surplus energy provides the material foundation for civilized living – a comfortable and tasteful home instead of a bare shelter; attractive clothing instead of mere covering to keep warm; appetizing food instead of anything that suffices to appease hunger. It provides the freedom from toil without which there can be no art, music, literature, or learning. There is no need to belabor the point. What lifted man – one of the weaker mammals – above the animal world was that he could devise, with his brain, ways to increase the energy at his disposal, and use the leisure so gained to cultivate his mind and spirit. Where man must rely solely on the energy of his own body, he can sustain only the most meager existence.
Man’s first step on the ladder of civilization dates from his discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. With these energy resources he was able to build a pastoral culture. To move upward to an agricultural civilization he needed more energy. In the past this was found in the labor of dependent members of large patriarchal families, augmented by slaves obtained through purchase or as war booty. There are some backward communities which to this day depend on this type of energy.
Slave labor was necessary for the city-states and the empires of antiquity; they frequently had slave populations larger than their free citizenry. As long as slaves were abundant and no moral censure attached to their ownership, incentives to search for alternative sources of energy were lacking; this may well have been the single most important reason why engineering advanced very little in ancient times.
A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life. For example, exhaustion of wood fuel is believed to have been the primary reason for the fall of the Mayan Civilization on this continent and of the decline of once flourishing civilizations in Asia. India and China once had large forests, as did much of the Middle East. Deforestation not only lessened the energy base but had a further disastrous effect: lacking plant cover, soil washed away, and with soil erosion the nutritional base was reduced as well.
Another cause of declining civilization comes with pressure of population on available land. A point is reached where the land can no longer support both the people and their domestic animals. Horses and mules disappear first. Finally even the versatile water buffalo is displaced by man who is two and one half times as efficient an energy converter as are draft animals. It must always be remembered that while domestic animals and agricultural machines increase productivity per man, maximum productivity per acre is achieved only by intensive manual cultivation.
It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of Asia, who today seldom go to sleep with their hunger completely satisfied, were once far more civilized and lived much better than the people of the West. And not so very long ago, either. It was the stories brought back by Marco Polo of the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe’s eyes to the riches of the East, and induced adventurous sailors to brave the high seas in their small vessels searching for a direct route to the fabulous Orient. The “wealth of the Indies” is a phrase still used, but whatever wealth may be there it certainly is not evident in the life of the people today.
Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of her growing populations and sank into such poverty that in many places man has become again the primary source of energy, since other energy converters have become too expensive. This must be obvious to the most casual observer. What this means is quite simply a reversion to a more primitive stage of civilization with all that it implies for human dignity and happiness.
Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow, creaking along a cobblestone road, or who has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market in Java – the slender women bent under mountainous loads heaped on their heads – anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone, realizes the degradation of man’s stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human beings are so degraded.
Where slavery represented a major source of energy, its abolition had the immediate effect of reducing energy consumption. Thus when this time-honored institution came under moral censure by Christianity, civilization declined until other sources of energy could be found. Slavery is incompatible with Christian belief in the worth of the humblest individual as a child of God. As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire and masters freed their slaves – in obedience to the teaching of the Church – the energy base of Roman civilization crumbled. This, some historians believe, may have been a major factor in the decline of Rome and the temporary reversion to a more primitive way of life during the Dark Ages. Slavery gradually disappeared throughout the Western world, except in its milder form of serfdom. That it was revived a thousand years later merely shows man’s ability to stifle his conscience – at least for a while – when his economic needs are great. Eventually, even the needs of overseas plantation economies did not suffice to keep alive a practice so deeply repugnant to Western man’s deepest convictions.
It may well be that it was unwillingness to depend on slave labor for their energy needs which turned the minds of medieval Europeans to search for alternate sources of energy, thus sparking the Power Revolution of the Middle Ages which, in turn, paved the way for the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century. When slavery disappeared in the West engineering advanced. Men began to harness the power of nature by utilizing water and wind as energy sources. The sailing ship, in particular, which replaced the slave-driven galley of antiquity, was vastly improved by medieval shipbuilders and became the first machine enabling man to control large amounts of inanimate energy.
The next important high-energy converter used by Europeans was gunpowder – an energy source far superior to the muscular strength of the strongest bowman or lancer. With ships that could navigate the high seas and arms that could outfire any hand weapon, Europe was now powerful enough to preempt for herself the vast empty areas of the Western Hemisphere into which she poured her surplus populations to build new nations of European stock. With these ships and arms she also gained political control over populous areas in Africa and Asia from which she drew the raw materials needed to speed her industrialization, thus complementing her naval and military dominance with economic and commercial supremacy.
When a low-energy society comes in contact with a high-energy society, the advantage always lies with the latter. The Europeans not only achieved standards of living vastly higher than those of the rest of the world, but they did this while their population was growing at rates far surpassing those of other peoples. In fact, they doubled their share of total world population in the short span of three centuries. From one sixth in 1650, the people of European stock increased to almost one third of total world population by 1950.
Meanwhile much of the rest of the world did not even keep energy sources in balance with population growth. Per capita energy consumption actually diminished in large areas. It is this difference in energy consumption which has resulted in an ever-widening gap between the one-third minority who live in high-energy countries and the two-thirds majority who live in low-energy areas.
These so-called underdeveloped countries are now finding it far more difficult to catch up with the fortunate minority than it was for Europe to initiate transition from low-energy to high-energy consumption. For one thing, their ratio of land to people is much less favorable; for another, they have no outlet for surplus populations to ease the transition since all the empty spaces have already been taken over by people of European stock.
Almost all of today’s low-energy countries have a population density so great that it perpetuates dependence on intensive manual agriculture which alone can yield barely enough food for their people. They do not have enough acreage, per capita, to justify using domestic animals or farm machinery, although better seeds, better soil management, and better hand tools could bring some improvement. A very large part of their working population must nevertheless remain on the land, and this limits the amount of surplus energy that can be produced. Most of these countries must choose between using this small energy surplus to raise their very low standard of living or postpone present rewards for the sake of future gain by investing the surplus in new industries. The choice is difficult because there is no guarantee that today’s denial may not prove to have been in vain. This is so because of the rapidity with which public health measures have reduced mortality rates, resulting in population growth as high or even higher than that of the high-energy nations. Theirs is a bitter choice; it accounts for much of their anti-Western feeling and may well portend a prolonged period of world instability.
How closely energy consumption is related to standards of living may be illustrated by the example of India. Despite intelligent and sustained efforts made since independence, India’s per capita income is still only 20 cents daily; her infant mortality is four times ours; and the life expectance of her people is less than one half that of the industrialized countries of the West. These are ultimate consequences of India’s very low energy consumption: one-fourteenth of world average; one-eightieth of ours.
Ominous, too, is the fact that while world food production increased 9% in the six years from 1945-51, world population increased by 12%. Not only is world population increasing faster than world food production, but unfortunately, increases in food production tend to occur in the already well-fed, high-energy countries rather than in the undernourished, low-energy countries where food is most lacking.
I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels: The answer is – in the long run – none.
The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.
In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have, to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.
Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.
Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy statistics; far-seeing industrialists who know that energy is the principal factor which must enter into all planning for the future; responsible governments who realize that the well-being of their citizens and the political power of their countries depend on adequate energy supplies – all these have begun to be concerned about energy resources. In this country, especially, many studies have been made in the last few years, seeking to discover accurate information on fossil-fuel reserves and foreseeable fuel needs.
Statistics involving the human factor are, of course, never exact. The size of usable reserves depends on the ability of engineers to improve the efficiency of fuel extraction and use. It also depends on discovery of new methods to obtain energy from inferior resources at costs which can be borne without unduly depressing the standard of living. Estimates of future needs, in turn, rely heavily on population figures which must always allow for a large element of uncertainty, particularly as man reaches a point where he is more and more able to control his own way of life.
Current estimates of fossil fuel reserves vary to an astonishing degree. In part this is because the results differ greatly if cost of extraction is disregarded or if in calculating how long reserves will last, population growth is not taken into consideration; or, equally important, not enough weight is given to increased fuel consumption required to process inferior or substitute metals. We are rapidly approaching the time when exhaustion of better grade metals will force us to turn to poorer grades requiring in most cases greater expenditure of energy per unit of metal.
But the most significant distinction between optimistic and pessimistic fuel reserve statistics is that the optimists generally speak of the immediate future – the next twenty-five years or so – while the pessimists think in terms of a century from now. A century or even two is a short span in the history of a great people. It seems sensible to me to take a long view, even if this involves facing unpleasant facts.
For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today’s unit cost, are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account. Oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There will be coal left in the earth, of course. But it will be so difficult to mine that energy costs would rise to economically intolerable heights, so that it would then become necessary either to discover new energy sources or to lower standards of living drastically.
For more than one hundred years we have stoked ever growing numbers of machines with coal; for fifty years we have pumped gas and oil into our factories, cars, trucks, tractors, ships, planes, and homes without giving a thought to the future. Occasionally the voice of a Cassandra has been raised only to be quickly silenced when a lucky discovery revised estimates of our oil reserves upward, or a new coalfield was found in some remote spot. Fewer such lucky discoveries can be expected in the future, especially in industrialized countries where extensive mapping of resources has been done. Yet the popularizers of scientific news would have us believe that there is no cause for anxiety, that reserves will last thousands of years, and that before they run out science will have produced miracles. Our past history and security have given us the sentimental belief that the things we fear will never really happen – that everything turns out right in the end. But, prudent men will reject these tranquilizers and prefer to face the facts so that they can plan intelligently for the needs of their posterity.
Looking into the future, from the mid-20th Century, we cannot feel overly confident that present high standards of living will of a certainty continue through the next century and beyond. Fossil fuel costs will soon definitely begin to rise as the best and most accessible reserves are exhausted, and more effort will be required to obtain the same energy from remaining reserves. It is likely also that liquid fuel synthesized from coal will be more expensive. Can we feel certain that when economically recoverable fossil fuels are gone science will have learned how to maintain a high standard of living on renewable energy sources?
I believe it would be wise to assume that the principal renewable fuel sources which we can expect to tap before fossil reserves run out will supply only 7 to 15% of future energy needs. The five most important of these renewable sources are wood fuel, farm wastes, wind, water power, and solar heat.
Wood fuel and farm wastes are dubious as substitutes because of growing food requirements to be anticipated. Land is more likely to be used for food production than for tree crops; farm wastes may be more urgently needed to fertilize the soil than to fuel machines.
Wind and water power can furnish only a very small percentage of our energy needs. Moreover, as with solar energy, expensive structures would be required, making use of land and metals which will also be in short supply. Nor would anything we know today justify putting too much reliance on solar energy though it will probably prove feasible for home heating in favorable localities and for cooking in hot countries which lack wood, such as India.
More promising is the outlook for nuclear fuels. These are not, properly speaking, renewable energy sources, at least not in the present state of technology, but their capacity to “breed” and the very high energy output from small quantities of fissionable material, as well as the fact that such materials are relatively abundant, do seem to put nuclear fuels into a separate category from exhaustible fossil fuels. The disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants is, however, a problem which must be solved before there can be any widespread use of nuclear power.
Another limit in the use of nuclear power is that we do not know today how to employ it otherwise than in large units to produce electricity or to supply heating. Because of its inherent characteristics, nuclear fuel cannot be used directly in small machines, such as cars, trucks, or tractors. It is doubtful that it could in the foreseeable future furnish economical fuel for civilian airplanes or ships, except very large ones. Rather than nuclear locomotives, it might prove advantageous to move trains by electricity produced in nuclear central stations. We are only at the beginning of nuclear technology, so it is difficult to predict what we may expect.
Transportation – the lifeblood of all technically advanced civilizations – seems to be assured, once we have borne the initial high cost of electrifying railroads and replacing buses with streetcars or interurban electric trains. But, unless science can perform the miracle of synthesizing automobile fuel from some energy source as yet unknown or unless trolley wires power electric automobiles on all streets and highways, it will be wise to face up to the possibility of the ultimate disappearance of automobiles, trucks, buses, and tractors. Before all the oil is gone and hydrogenation of coal for synthetic liquid fuels has come to an end, the cost of automotive fuel may have risen to a point where private cars will be too expensive to run and public transportation again becomes a profitable business.
Today the automobile is the most uneconomical user of energy. Its efficiency is 5% compared with 23% for the Diesel-electric railway. It is the most ravenous devourer of fossil fuels, accounting for over half of the total oil consumption in this country. And the oil we use in the United States in one year took nature about 14 million years to create. Curiously, the automobile, which is the greatest single cause of the rapid exhaustion of oil reserves, may eventually be the first fuel consumer to suffer. Reduction in automotive use would necessitate an extraordinarily costly reorganization of the pattern of living in industrialized nations, particularly in the United States. It would seem prudent to bear this in mind in future planning of cities and industrial locations.
Our present known reserves of fissionable materials are many times as large as our net economically recoverable reserves of coal. A point will be reached before this century is over when fossil fuel costs will have risen high enough to make nuclear fuels economically competitive. Before that time comes we shall have to make great efforts to raise our entire body of engineering and scientific knowledge to a higher plateau. We must also induce many more young Americans to become metallurgical and nuclear engineers. Else we shall not have the knowledge or the people to build and run the nuclear power plants which ultimately may have to furnish the major part of our energy needs. If we start to plan now, we may be able to achieve the requisite level of scientific and engineering knowledge before our fossil fuel reserves give out, but the margin of safety is not large. This is also based on the assumption that atomic war can be avoided and that population growth will not exceed that now calculated by demographic experts.
War, of course, cancels all man’s expectations. Even growing world tension just short of war could have far-reaching effects. In this country it might, on the one hand, lead to greater conservation of domestic fuels, to increased oil imports, and to an acceleration in scientific research which might turn up unexpected new energy sources. On the other hand, the resulting armaments race would deplete metal reserves more rapidly, hastening the day when inferior metals must be utilized with consequent greater expenditure of energy. Underdeveloped nations with fossil fuel deposits might be coerced into withholding them from the free world or may themselves decide to retain them for their own future use. The effect on Europe, which depends on coal and oil imports, would be disastrous and we would have to share our own supplies or lose our allies.
Barring atomic war or unexpected changes in the population curve, we can count on an increase in world population from two and one half billion today to four billion in the year 2000; six to eight billion by 2050. The United States is expected to quadruple its population during the 20th Century – from 75 million in 1900 to 300 million in 2000 – and to reach at least 375 million in 2050. This would almost exactly equal India’s present population which she supports on just a little under half of our land area.
It is an awesome thing to contemplate a graph of world population growth from prehistoric times – tens of thousands of years ago – to the day after tomorrow – let us say the year 2000 A.D. If we visualize the population curve as a road which starts at sea level and rises in proportion as world population increases, we should see it stretching endlessly, almost level, for 99% of the time that man has inhabited the earth. In 6000 B.C., when recorded history begins, the road is running at a height of about 70 feet above sea level, which corresponds to a population of 10 million. Seven thousand years later – in 1000 A.D. – the road has reached an elevation of 1,600 feet; the gradation now becomes steeper, and 600 years later the road is 2,900 feet high. During the short span of the next 400 years – from 1600 to 2000 – it suddenly turns sharply upward at an almost perpendicular inclination and goes straight up to an elevation of 29,000 feet – the height of Mt. Everest, the world’s tallest mountain.
In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D. world population will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion, with 90% of that growth taking place during the last 5% of that period, in 400 years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years. Calculations give us the astonishing estimate that one out of every 20 human beings born into this world is alive today.
The rapidity of population growth has not given us enough time to readjust our thinking. Not much more than a century ago our country – the very spot on which I now stand was a wilderness in which a pioneer could find complete freedom from men and from government. If things became too crowded – if he saw his neighbor’s chimney smoke – he could, and often did, pack up and move west. We began life in 1776 as a nation of less than four million people – spread over a vast continent – with seemingly inexhaustible riches of nature all about. We conserved what was scarce – human labor – and squandered what seemed abundant – natural resources – and we are still doing the same today.
Much of the wilderness which nurtured what is most dynamic in the American character has now been buried under cities, factories and suburban developments where each picture window looks out on nothing more inspiring than the neighbor’s back yard with the smoke of his fire in the wire basket clearly visible.
Life in crowded communities cannot be the same as life on the frontier. We are no longer free, as was the pioneer – to work for our own immediate needs regardless of the future. We are no longer as independent of men and of government as were Americans two or three generations ago. An ever larger share of what we earn must go to solve problems caused by crowded living – bigger governments; bigger city, state, and federal budgets to pay for more public services. Merely to supply us with enough water and to carry away our waste products becomes more difficult and expansive daily. More laws and law enforcement agencies are needed to regulate human relations in urban industrial communities and on crowded highways than in the America of Thomas Jefferson.
Certainly no one likes taxes, but we must become reconciled to larger taxes in the larger America of tomorrow.
I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants – those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age. Our greatest responsibility, as parents and as citizens, is to give America’s youngsters the best possible education. We need the best teachers and enough of them to prepare our young people for a future immeasurably more complex than the present, and calling for ever larger numbers of competent and highly trained men and women. This means that we must not delay building more schools, colleges, and playgrounds. It means that we must reconcile ourselves to continuing higher taxes to build up and maintain at decent salaries a greatly enlarged corps of much better trained teachers, even at the cost of denying ourselves such momentary pleasures as buying a bigger new car, or a TV set, or household gadget. We should find – I believe – that these small self-denials would be far more than offset by the benefits they would buy for tomorrow’s America. We might even – if we wanted – give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption a little here and there so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.
One final thought I should like to leave with you. High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which control – the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own country.
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