The Shell Game to Pique Oil Reserves the Rite to Silence.

Kristine Lofgren is voicing surprise at the plan Shell Oil has unveiled to wean the world from its addiction to oil. Or at least, "move us away from its own product."

That phrase alone should tell us about how much we simply swallow the Corporations' representation of reality. Foodstuffs, gasoline, manufactured goods are all produced. Oil, diamonds, gold, and all natural resources are drilled for or mined and delivered to refineries, De Beers or Central Banks. The production process is done by forces of which mankind is incapable of recreating, yet we still call the Oil Companies "Producers", but they produce nothing that isn't already there, they deliver it.

The difference you may argue is merely academic, but it's precisely because of that mistaken perception that Enron, who produced nothing, was able to hoodwink the entire globe as to its value, although having the help of the Governor of the largest oil producing state in the country to help you pull off your scam was certainly a big help ... that Governor being George W. Bush, by the way, cutting his teeth on how to use private industry to rape the public for his cronies' behalf before moving to the White House to hoodwink the entire world by overseeing the transformation of the US banking system into a fraud machine, bringing the entire credibility of finance into question (his father having slid him the template under the table ... The one used to destroy the entire Savings And Loan industry in the United States, and stick the taxpayer with multi-billion dollar cost of the "clean-up").

Why theses facts are cogent with Ms. Lofgren's article, is that Shell Oil, although she doesn't deem it fit to mention the fact, was the first of the Major Producers (I know ... but sometimes, like MultiNational Corporations, (of which there are none but which we're forced to refer to them as) as opposed to TransNational Corporations (which is what they are in actuality, and it is no accident that the former acronym is not only preferred, but used exclusively, to propagate a lie) I'll defer to the accepted usage) to admit that they purposely overvalued what their reserve estimates were, by more than 20%,  from the amounts they actually expected to unearth, in order to goose the value of their stock. 

So there's that. It's like taking the word of Wells Fargo, or VolksWagon, two other known Corporate criminals and Liars that ruin lives and deceive their own customer base as part of their Corporate strategies. And like doing business with either of those firms, believing press releases from Shell Oil is like signing a contract with one of those other two: Caveat Emptor. Because, as GW said, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... (he couldn't remember the rest).

The second objection Kristine may have been good enough to raise, is that the time frame of this empty Shell of a plan (most of which is so tiny as to be illegible) stretches out to 2070.

Now, before the end of the last millennia, it was accepted that there were approximate 3 trillion bbl's of oil reserves, half of which had already gone up in smoke, (but the estimate of which has since more than doubled to 7 trillion) such that the term peak oil was used, not by the environmentalists who picked it up and ran with it, but by none other than Dick Cheney, warning the world of the necessity of drilling more, drilling everywhere, drilling faster, or else:

"By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?… While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” [LONDON INSTITUTE OF PETROLEUM, 1999]

That what he prizes is the ultimate lie no one should now doubt. The US, by far the largest oil consumer in the world, consumed 22 million bbls/day, so in a mere decade, the then-CEO of Halliburton, in order to get investment into the fracking technology and horizontal drilling which he, while Secretary of Defense under the First Bush presidency, had the US go to War in order to let Halliburton get away with drilling across the Iraqi border to deliver to Kuwait Iraq's oil reserves, for which he was awarded the CEO of a company he had no experience whatsoever of running, claiming that somehow the world which had for decades been increasing its oil consumption by a steady 1.5%/annum would in the space of a decade, add 2.5 times the oil demand of the entire United States, which, with a mere 5% of world population slurped up in excess of 20% of worldwide oil production. As if out of nowhere an entire two continents' worth of demand were going to be added to the world Map, each of which would exceed the oil demand of the world's largest consumer, which demand had taken an entire century of development to reach, yet which they would somehow, in a mere matter of 10 years, attain.

Instead, partly because of the world-wide calamity brought about by the same administration of which he was a part, oil demand in 2010 had risen by less than 10 million bbl/day. He was "mistaken" by panicky overestimating by a factor of FIVE! The CEO of an Oil Service Company! Talk about Fake News.This isn't just propaganda, this is deliberate lying, the reasons for which we all now know, but none cared to look too closely at then, until the term Peak Oil was invented by those who, believing his distortion of future demand, saw the end of life as we know it in the near future, many guesstimating that future to be as soon as 2005.

The "co-incidence" that fracking, funded by the same Fed Chairman that abetted the largest criminal syndicate in the guise of a federal agency in modern history, making John Law look like an honest broker, Bernanke, QE'd to the tune of trillions and trillions of dollars, enriching Goldman Sach's who was a prime broker, and funneling it to the fracking industry, which was poured into the profits of none other than Halliburton, even as the oil we supposedly went to Iraq to procure, is still, more than 150 billion bbl's of it, reserves 2'nd only to Saudi Arabia, in the ground. All thanks to the machinations of the same government he was the chief cheerleader for in its invasion of Iraq. And which no one has bothered to even ask what, if not WMD, and every other reason they concocted, was the REAL reason? Now we know ... have in fact known all along, but, while the spectacle of GW, "tearing up the dance floor", receives accolades from a celebrity-besotted press, the guardian story of how Tony Blair conspired to spread the lie of WMD to justify the Iraq War receives scant attention.

Now before I get back to the Shell game, let's look at another Bush-era energy confabulation: Ethanol from corn. Here we have the dick Cheney claiming that the world is going to need 50 million bbl's /day of oil he just has no idea whence it may come, so what do they do? They come up with this scam of ethanol from corn to make the US "Energy Independent" (LIAR!). How? By literally pouring oil into the ground, because that's what modern agriculture pretty much does. It is  the largest single user of oil resources, after transportation and the military, so the energy equation has to be rigged by leaving out certain factors (Such as the necessity for different pipelines from the existing ones, as ethanol has different characteristics than gasoline) to come up with a mere 1.2:1 ratio of energy in:energy out. So in a very real sense, they were digging oil out of the ground in one place to pour it back into the ground in another. Collecting profits at every step in the process. All while deliberately panicking the world into believing that oil was running out in order to get us to go along with their agenda. If we had only thought to call it a transagenda, perhaps people would have paid more attention.

So, in case you've wondered why I seem to be on such a tear about Greenwashing and the New York and exTerminator's lawsuits against big oil, that is the reason. Their busy doing it to us all over again, and we're just as gullibly falling for it all over again. Why not sue the Fed, the Bushes, Cheney,  all the Car manufacturers, Halliburton, Archer Daniels Midland, the coal companies, all of whom benefited from various schemes to goose their profits by burning enormous amounts of oil unnecessarily, schemes so vast and so all-encompassing, it makes the term Deep State a running joke, VW's crime completely understandable (they know the enormity of  the profits the Iraq War is the centerpiece for, even if we don't). It demonstrates the really childlike view of the world the US citizenry assumes in order to justify their perceived right to two cars in every driveway (because the garage is too jam-packed with "Stuff" - mostly plastic, an oil byproduct - to accommodate them). Any scheme can be put forward and it will be swallowed hook, line and sinker so long as it promises that "The American Way of Life (AWOL) is Not Negotiable", even as the policies it adopts to supposedly maintain that way of life, undermines it instead.

How? Well the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere is now well over 400, and is accelerating at a rate far faster than what it was before the Kyoto protocols were signed (the first year, 1992,  in which GW, in a conference in Rio, used the above phrase, and our reason has been AWOL ever since). How can this be when the USA is still by far, the largest consumer of fossil fuels, of all kinds, and yet the US has barely increased its oil consumption since Cheney's lie that the world would need 50 million bbl's more per day than it did in 1999?

Because every single program instituted to alleviate the need for burning more fossil fuel has done the exact opposite, we burn more now than ever, and leave a path of smoking guns all along the Green highway: fields (ie CO2 sinks) plowed under (and thereby turning them into CO2 pumps) to "grow" fuel, rain forests utterly destroyed to produce oil (another carbon sink turned into a carbon pump as centuries of carbon sequestration is released into the atmosphere) on vast scales. And to disguise the increase in energy needed, building a string of coal-fired power plants to the tune of one a week all during the Bush era to pump even more CO2 into the air, all while doubling the weight of the vehicle the average American drags around with them (not a single drop of ethanol would have been needed had we simply not doubled the weight of passenger vehicles ... do we sue the oil companies for that too?) and producing so much fracked oil it has rapidly, in less than a decade, almost doubled the ppb's of methane, a greenhouse gas far more powerful than CO2, being released. These are all immediate negative feedbacks from the Progressive idea of "doing something" whereas had we done nothing, the amount of CO2 being exhausted into the atmosphere, would still have those natural carbon sinks to take it up again, wouldn't need the CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration) technology the Shell Plan is proposing ... technology that burns more fuel and increases, once again, the profits of the oil Companies while burning through the world's store of fossil fuel even faster: CCS has been done by Nature since at least the beginning of oxygen-using lifeforms, it still brings down the CO2 ppm every year, as it will again this summer, the particles reaching a maximum around May 10, (as a result of the reduced photosynthesis during the northern hemisphere's winters).

It's really quite simple. CCS translates, as ethanol from corn or sugar and bio-diesel from palm oil, into Profits.

 As should be no surprise to anyone, Corporate  profits and energy usage are directly correlated. ANy plan, but even more so, one being proposed by a Shell company already known for cooking its books in oil, all require huge upfront investments that, following the same template used for military build-up, are done, not with investment capital that would then require a business plan that demonstrates a path to profitability, are laid out like the Shell Game: there is no profitability without enormous piracy of public funds, Halliburton's business plan for the technologies they developed would have been disastrous but for the trillions Bernanke created to further them, and the Wars Their CEO embroiled us in to create the shortage and manipulate the increase in oil prices to close to $150.bbl. But to get us to go along with the plan without complaining, they do what the Reagan administration showed them how: borrow the funds needed and paint a rosy scenario, which the beholden Corporate MSM (Corporate profits, Corporate collusion ... the same people who have no problem believing their own government planned the Twin Tower debacle never even conceive that the Corporations that actually profited from it ever conspire with one another ... how lame is that?) will dutifully fawn over, to give us that happy happy feeling, and they will gleefully follow you down the road to their own ruin, praising you all the way, and shouting down anyone who has the effrontery to suggest that maybe these major Corporations aren't really interested in your future, they're only interested in what is their fiduciary responsibility to be interested in: their stockholders and their share price. Why then, would/do we believe these dangerous, self-serving schemes from Corporations that offer nothing but dangerous self-serving scenarios? And not only accept them, but like Kristine, praise them, as though anything Shell would ever come up with would have anything but there own survival in mind? Why are we like this? There seems to be no way forward, so the Corporations, and the politicians they own come up with one for us. What are we to do? Oh, that's right. We'll sue. Great. That'll help. That'll teach 'em.