{"id":6082,"date":"2015-02-27T20:13:17","date_gmt":"2015-02-28T01:13:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6082"},"modified":"2015-02-27T20:13:17","modified_gmt":"2015-02-28T01:13:17","slug":"tomgram-michael-schwartz-israel-gaza-and-energy-wars-in-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6082","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Israel, Gaza, and Energy Wars in the Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Israel, Gaza, and Energy Wars in the Middle East<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n

Talk of an oil glut and a potential\u00a0further price drop<\/a>\u00a0seems to be growing. The cost of a barrel of crude now sits at just under $60, only a little more than half what it was at its most recent peak in\u00a0June 2014<\/a>. Meanwhile, under a barrel of woes, economies like\u00a0China’s<\/a>\u00a0have slowed and in the process demand for oil has sagged globally. And yet, despite the\u00a0cancellation<\/a>\u00a0of some future plans for exploration and drilling for extreme (and so extremely expensive) forms of fossil fuels, startling numbers of barrels of crude are still pouring onto troubled waters.\u00a0 For this, a thanks should go to the prodigious efforts of “Saudi America<\/a>” (all that energetic hydraulic fracking, among other things), while the actual Saudis, the original ones, are stillpumping away<\/a>.\u00a0 We could, in other words, have arrived not at “peak oil” but at “peak oil demand” for at least a significant period of time to come.\u00a0 At\u00a0Bloomberg View<\/em>, columnist A. Gary Shilling has even\u00a0suggested<\/a>\u00a0that the price of crude could ultimately simply collapse under the weight of all that production and a global economic slowdown, settling in at $10-$20 a barrel (a level last seen in the 1990s).<\/p>\n

And here’s the saddest part of this story: no matter what happens, the great game over energy and the resource conflicts and wars that go with it show little sign of slowing down.\u00a0 One thing is guaranteed: no matter how low the price falls, the scramble for sources of oil and the demand for yet more of them won’t stop.\u00a0 Even in this country, as the price of oil has dropped, the\u00a0push<\/a>for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to bring expensive-to-extract and especially carbon-dirty Canadian “tar sands” to market on the U.S. Gulf Coast has only grown more fervent, while the Obama administration has\u00a0just opened<\/a>\u00a0the country’s southern Atlantic coastal waters to future exploration and drilling.\u00a0 In the oil heartlands of the planet, Iraq and Kurdistan typically\u00a0continue<\/a>\u00a0to fight over who will get the (reduced) revenues from the oil fields around the city of Kirkuk to stanch various financial crises.\u00a0 In the meantime, other oil disputes\u00a0only heat up<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Israel, Gaza, and Energy Wars in the Middle East Talk of an oil glut and a potential\u00a0further price drop\u00a0seems to be growing. The cost of a barrel of crude now sits at just under $60, only a little more than half what it was at its most recent peak in\u00a0June 2014. Meanwhile, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[263,3827,328,468,522,781,862],"class_list":["post-6082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-geopolitics","tag-energy","tag-energy-wars","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-keystone-xl","tag-middle-east","tag-tar-sands","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6083,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6082\/revisions\/6083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}