Bad American

If you read nothing else today, read these two stories:

New York Sun:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing. Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”

snip

An employee at the Costco store in Queens said there were no restrictions on rice buying, but limits were being imposed on purchases of oil and flour. Internet postings attributed some of the shortage at the retail level to bakery owners who flocked to warehouse stores when the price of flour from commercial suppliers doubled.

The curbs and shortages are being tracked with concern by survivalists who view the phenomenon as a harbinger of more serious trouble to come.

“It’s sporadic. It’s not every store, but it’s becoming more commonplace,” the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. “The number of reports I’ve been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I’d say in the last three to five weeks.”

snip

Spiking food prices have led to riots in recent weeks in Haiti, Indonesia, and several African nations. India recently banned export of all but the highest quality rice, and Vietnam blocked the signing of a new contract for foreign rice sales.

“I’m surprised the Bush administration hasn’t slapped export controls on wheat,” Mr. Rawles said. “The Asian countries are here buying every kind of wheat.” Mr. Rawles said it is hard to know how much of the shortages are due to lagging supply and how much is caused by consumers hedging against future price hikes or a total lack of product.

“There have been so many stories about worldwide shortages that it encourages people to stock up. What most people don’t realize is that supply chains have changed, so inventories are very short,” Mr. Rawles, a former Army intelligence officer, said. “Even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out.”

Saudis Finally Fess Up (sort of)

Financial Times

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, has put on hold plans to increase long-term production capacity from its vast oil fields beyond existing proposals, its most powerful policymakers have said.

In a series of statements, including one by the king himself, the kingdom has warned consumers it does not reckon there is a need for further expansion beyond 12.5m barrels a day, an assumption disputed by the world’s biggest developed countries.

The realisation Saudi Arabia will not increase production to 15m barrels a day as quickly as important consumers and the markets had assumed could put further pressure on oil prices, which touched fresh records last week.

snip

Abdullah Jum’ah, chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s oil company, said in a closed door meeting with oil ministers and executives in Rome on Sunday that market signals were ’imperfect’ and that there were uncertainties created by the move away from oil, the world’s worsening economic outlook and the recent turbulance in the financial markets, according to one person who took notes at the discussions. This has impacted Saudi Arabia’s view on the profitability of investing billions of additional dollars into its industry at this point, Gulf sources said.

In a recent interview with Argus, an industry newsletter, Ali Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister, made clear Saudi Arabia had “no plans” to embark on its next phase of expansion. “We are idling at around 9m bpd and we will reach capacity of 12.5m bpd by 2009.”

He added: “That is substantial spare capacity. As far as I know, all the latest projections, at least up to 2020, do not require anything higher than that.”

Forecasts by the International Energy Agency, the watchdog of the main consuming countries and an important participant in the forum, reach a different conclusion.

Most recently the group calculated that, even if all the policies to increase renewable fuels and to use oil more efficiently were to be enacted on Tuesday, the world would still need Opec’s daily production to increase by 11.5m barrels by 2030, the bulk of which would have to come from its biggest members, such as Saudi Arabia.

That is a tall order. It is more than 50 per cent more than Opec has managed to increase output during 1980 to 2006.

Recent announcements will harden the view of those sceptics who argue the kingdom is unable to boost production because of the high decline rates at its fields – a view that is still in the minority among those in the industry and one Riyadh emphatically rejects.

Sorry, it’s the truth and I’ve been saying and writing it for several years now. If you’ve been watching what the Saudis SAY they’re going to do in terms of boosting production and what they have ACTUALLY DONE you see the disconnect.

And now this - a virtual admission, cloaked in bullshit-speak, that the Saudis won’t increase their capacity.

BECAUSE THEY CAN’T.

And if THEY can’t neither can anyone else.

Peak Oil is real, it is here and it is starting to eat our collective lunch.

And the Bush administration AND the current crop of candidates AND the government in general WILL NOT admit it to the American people.

But people seem to be starting to understand the age of oil is coming to a close.

The war in Iraq was all about access to what was left of the world’s largest reserves of crude. It didn’t work out the way Washington had hoped for and neither will bellicosity with Iran.

I have written about all of this until my fingers figuratively bled and I’m tired of reciting this. This story should end all doubts.

Coming next for the American consumer - spot shortages of gasoline, probably by the end of the year if not sooner. And over $4 a gallon gas - easily.

The Bush administration and the American establishment have always been playing for time on this issue, but time is now running out. Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy summit in 2001 was all about this issue and that’s what led eventually to the invasion of Iraq. You can’t keep lying about things and talking about ‘energy independence,’ ‘biofuels’ and other pie in the sky lies for too much longer.

Of course, Bush would have had the full throated support of the American people had he told them we were invading Iraq to preserve our way of life vis a vis oil. But Wall Street would have tanked. He tried to have it both ways by lying and now the chickens are about to come home to roost.

Surprise - Food Rationing!

In a spectacular one-two punch the New York Sun now talks about the rationing of rice (and soon other staples like corn) in the USA. It’s sporadic and here and there now, but just wait. I wrote about the rice riots on this blog earlier and now, thanks to the global economy, Americans are now discovering that what happens in Indonesia can affect us as well. Foreign countries are now cutting back on food exports to feed their own people and we will feel the effects of that.

And now we’re cashiering our food crop of corn to put it in our gas tanks causing the price of that staple to start soaring not just here but all over the world.

Are you beginning to get the picture America?

Have you notice the skyrocketing price of food to go with those gas prices?

Worried a little? You should be.

It’s that other little time bomb that the right doesn’t want you to believe in called global climate change AND ecological catastrophe.

By the way, the bees are still dying.

You may say they’ll pry my non-negotiable American lifestyle from my cold dead hands but rest assured - that’s exactly what mother Earth is doing right now. You could have sacrificed before the deluge and changed your ways but now change will be thrust upon you and it will not care whether you are a conservative or liberal, Christian or no.

And as long as Obama, Clinton and the media keep their eyes on who wears the fucking flag lapel pin or puts their hand over their heart for the anthem, we will get exactly what we deserve - and good and hard.

But there’s more to this. . .

James Howard Kunstler, in his latest missive, cries to high heaven for the restoration of America’s passenger rail system:

Now get this: we are sleepwalking into a transportation crisis. As I already said, the airline industry is dying. The price of petroleum-based aviation fuel is killing it. And forget the fantasies about running it on bio-diesel or used french-fry oil. Driving cars will not be an adequate substitute, either. It’s imperative that this country gets serious about restoring the passenger rail system. We can’t not talk about it for another year. We must demand that the candidates for president speak to this issue. If you who are reading this are active reporters or editors in the news media, you’ve got to raise your voices behind this issue.

I like Kunstler: he’s one of my heroes. But he’s missing something here. There is a very good reason why no one in government or politics is discussing revitalizing the American passenger rail system.

To understand that, let me ask a dark little question:

If you are going to have to control a population where oil and gas as well as food and even water are going to have to be rationed, how are you going to do it?

Will you facilitate the transport of the hungry masses of say, New York City, to the sylvan haunts, of, oh, I don’t know, Saratoga Springs, New York?

Or would it be best to be able to keep that population right where it is by any means necessary?

Think about it.

If the shit is truly going to hit the fan in the coming years, the LAST thing the government in charge is going to want is a mobile population. It’s why cutting off transportation of ordinary people is part of the plot line of every futuristic, apocalyptic and sci-fi movie dealing with the issue.

You know you can call me insane or a fear monger. But the writing is now clearly on the wall for all who have eyes to see. In fact, both the food and the oil stories were linked to The Drudge Report.

If I’m wrong, I’ll admit it. But I’ll also, in the future, will be the one to say I told you so. And as far as I’m concerned, if I’m going to blog about important things, I have to say what I have to say. Someone has to.

So if you think there’s any truth behind what I’ve said to the above links and stories you might, just might, want to start preparing you and your loved ones for the future NOW.