Conspiracy Theories

I read with interest John Kunstler's weekly column today in his Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles. He addresses the numerous conspiracy theories that have emerged about the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks in the US. He does not mention any of them in particular, but he does mention the idea of the government letting it happen. He sees the conspiracy theories as a delusion that is distracting us from tackling the problems of Peak Oil directly.

Some of these say that the Bush government knew what was coming but let it happen to get an excuse to put troops all over the place near where the oil is. Others go further and say that the 2001 September 11 attacks were somehow choreographed by the US government. Is there anything to these? Kunstler says not.

I am not sure. Some of what these theories say can be disproven easily. For example, bombs did not bring down the World Trade Center. Every floor (below the plane hit lines) of the towers was in perfectly good shape until the floor above it collapsed on it. This is in line with the theory that high temperatures in the weight-bearing columns caused them to give way. It is not in line with the theory that bombs brought the Towers down. If that had happen, we would have seen explosions all over the place in the Towers. Further, some say a small plane with a bomb aboard hit the towers. A comparison of the outline of a Boeing 767 and the holes left by the terrorist planes seems to show that the two match each other.

However, questions remain. Why did World Trade Center 7 collapse? It was farther away from Towers 1 and 2 than other buildings that stood were. And why did every single building with the name World Trade Center was destroyed, but all other buildings stood? And how about the infamous eight "My Pet Goat" minutes between the time Bush knew about the attacks and the time he announced it to the elementary school class and the world?

I suspect these have answers somehow that don't involve what the conspiracy advocates are saying. But I can't rule out some kind of complicity. It was in the interest of the Administration to take control of large parts of the Middle East, since that is where much of the remaining oil is. So to me I could see where he would see the attacks as an opportunity to take this control. It probably did not happen that way, but it can't be ruled out.

In any case, weapons of mass destruction were not the reason why the US invaded Iraq. Neither is getting rid of a ruthless dictator. That was the good thing about the invasion. Saddam can no longer shred people. But helping the Iraqi people and setting up a democracy, although it may be a generous act by the US to that country, was not the reason why the US invaded. It invaded because of oil. That is not the way to deal with the upcoming crisis; cooperation with nations and companies is the way.

Kunstler also says that there is an elephant coming up the python and that sooner or later it will be here. I wonder if he is aware of the other elephant in the python - the retiring Baby Boomers. This huge group of people is all of a sudden going to consume instead of save. Could this cause the economy to crash?

Oil Shale and Energy

This morning I read an article about the deposits of shale in the western states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, centering around the triple-point at which the three states meet. The article said that there is a tremendous deposit of oil here. It said that there are a billion barrels of oil per square mile. I looked at the map and I could easily see two or three areas at least 30 miles wide. So this is a total of well over 2-3 trillion barrels of oil.

Then I read further to find out what this mining would be like. The idea is to take a rod and plunge it deep into the earth, and heat it to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. This melts the rock and after a while of doing this, the melted stuff, consisting in large measure of an oil-like substance, comes to the surface and it can then be refined into distillate products such as gasoline.

The problem with this is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to heat the rock to 700 degrees. The article said this would have to be done for four years before any oil comes from it. Further, the column would have to be surrounded by a cold layer, I suppose, at least 100 degrees below zero. That would require more energy. And further, the operation requires a lot of water, which is not in great supply in Wyoming, Colorado, or Utah.

The question is whether it takes more than a barrel of oil's worth of energy to get a barrel of shale oil out of the ground. If it does, this will not be an energy source for us - in fact, it takes up energy instead and would make the problem worse. Already, a few hundred thousand barrels of oil were extracted from these fields in the 1980s, according to the article, and it did not earn any profit.

Oil shale is a possibility, but mainly if a new technology not requiring so much energy could be used to get the oil out.