by Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
At a time when the world faces tipping points in the escalation of multiple crises, the publication of this volume is of momentous significance.
As I write, a sampling of the latest “mainstream” corporate news illustrates the unprecedented nature of our current predicament as a civilization. The bizarre and extreme weather of the early United States summer prompted one leading climate scientist to state boldly that we are “certainly seeing climate change in action,”1 as a window on a worsening future. Record-shattering heat waves, wildfires, and freak storms are a taste of things to come—“This is just the beginning,” said one meteorologist.2
Simultaneously, the International Monetary Fund cut its growth forecast for the US economy, warning that the ongoing eurozone crisis, along with the weak housing market, risks triggering a recession by 2013 while the jobless rate morphs into “higher structural unemployment.”3
As the defunct neoliberal model of casino capitalism wreaks havoc at home, it is doing the same abroad. Global food prices doubled between 2006 and 2008, and despite some fluctuation, remain largely at record levels. One of the key causes has been speculation in derivatives—thirteen trillion dollars was invested in food commodities in 2006, then pulled out in 2008, and then reinvested again by 2011. The rocketing food prices for the global poor have generated an unprecedented global food crisis across the developing world.4
But another driver of the food crisis is climate change, which has already led to crop failures in key food basket regions. This is only going to get worse on a business-as-usual model, which could lead to a minimum 4 degrees Celsius rise by mid-century. Even a 2-degree rise would lead to dramatic crop failures and soaring meat prices; at 4 degrees Celsius, rice crops could be reduced by about 30 percent, leading to global food shortages and hunger.5
Amid this escalating frenzy of perfect storms, however, over the last year the corporate media has focused on one apparent light at the end of the tunnel: unconventional oil and gas. “Has Oil Peaked?” read one headline in the Wall Street Journal.6 Across the pond, BBC News asked, “Shortages: Is ‘Peak Oil’ Idea Dead?”7 Environmentalists have also jumped on the bandwagon. Andrew C. Revkin in the New York Times took “A Fresh Look at Oil’s Long Goodbye,”8 while George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian that “We Were Wrong On Peak Oil. There’s Enough to Fry Us All.”9
The essence of this uniform message is that new drilling methods—like hydraulic fracturing, i.e. “fracking,” among others—have allowed the fossil fuel industry to exploit previously untapped reserves of tar sands, oil shale, and shale gas, bringing them to market at much cheaper prices than hitherto imaginable, and effectively turning the US from net oil importer into a leading exporter.
But it should come as no great surprise to Project Censored readers that, once again, the corporate news media has obfuscated the facts. The latest figures from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) confirm that the supposedly massive boost in unconventional oil production that is pitched to launch the world into a glorious future of petroleum abundance—capable of sustaining the wonders of capitalist economic growth ad infinitum—has had negligible impact on world oil production. On the contrary, despite the US producing a “total oil supply” of ten million barrels per day—up by 2.1 million since January 200510 —world crude oil production remains on the largely flat, undulating plateau it has been on since it stopped rising around that very year. As reported by oil markets journalist Gregor Macdonald, who has previously reported for the Financial Times and Harvard Business Review, among other publications:
Since 2005, despite a phase transition in prices, global oil production has been trapped below a ceiling of 74 mbpd (million barrels per day). New production from new fields and new discoveries comes on line, but, it has not been at a rate fast enough to overcome declines from existing fields. Overall, global decline has been estimated at a minimum of 4% per year and as high as 6+% a year. Given that new oil resources are developed and flow at much slower rates, the existing declines present a formidable challenge to the task of increasing supply. I see no set of factors, in combination, that would take global production of crude oil higher in2012, or next year, or thereafter.11
Yet this stark fact has not been reported in any mass media news outlet whatsoever, anywhere in the world. Indeed, Macdonald points out that data from British Petroleum’s Statistical Review of World En-ergy shows that oil’s heyday is well and truly in decline. In 1973, oil as a percentage of global energy use had peaked at around 48.5 percent. Forty years later, “oil is barely hanging on as the world’s primary energy source, with a much reduced role as a supplier of only 33.5% of all world energy consumption.”12
The disparity in reporting is instructive. In June 2012, the corporate media focus on the unconventional oil boom revolved around one study in particular by oil company executive Leonardo Maugeri— former executive vice president of Italian oil major Eni. The report was not peer-reviewed but was published at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs by the Geopolitics of Energy Project, “which is supported in part by a general grant from the [same] oil major [i.e. Eni],” conceded the WSJ.13 Hardly an impartial perspective, then.
Meanwhile, a series of peer-reviewed reports by independent scientists published in highly reputable science journals from January through to June 2012—Science, Nature, and Energy—have been blacked out in corporate news reporting.14 In Energy, Gail E. Tverberg documented that since 2005, “world oil supply has not increased,” that this was “a primary cause of the 2008–2009 recession,” and that the “expected impact of reduced oil supply” will mean the “financial crisis may eventually worsen.” An even more damning analysis was published in Nature by James Murray and Sir David King, the latter being the British government’s former chief scientific adviser. Murray and King’s analysis found that despite reported increases in oil reserves, tar sands production, and hydrofracturing-generated natural gas, depletion of the world’s existing fields is still running at 4.5 percent to 6.7 percent per year, and production at shale gas wells could drop by as much as 60 to 90 percent in the first year of operation.
Curiously forgotten in the spate of reporting on the opportunities opened up by fracking is a New York Times investigation from 2011, which found that “the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of industry e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells.” The e-mails revealed industry executives, lawyers, state geologists, and market analysts voicing “skepticism about lofty forecasts” and questioning “whether companies are intentionally, and even illegally, overstating the productivity of their wells and the size of their reserves.”15 A year later, it seems, such revelations were merely destined for the memory hole.
In fact, we now find that the corporate media has trumpeted the declarations of none other than ExxonMobil chief executive officer Rex Tillerson, who in a Council on Foreign Relations speech in late June lauded the future of North American oil production, underpinned by unconventional oil and shale gas production. Tillerson also dismissed climate models predicting devastating impacts for much of the world’s population due to rising sea levels and the collapse of agriculture. “We have spent our entire existence adapting. . . . We’ll adapt,” he prophesized. “It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.” He then blamed an “illiterate public” for the popularity of environmental advocacy groups criticizing the dangers of fracking, before moving on to emphasize that US self-reliance in energy production would not change our foreign policy in the Middle East one iota:
Now it becomes a question of what’s our national security interest in the region, because you have an enormous—as all of you know, enormous national defense footprint in the Middle East because of our interest in the area. . . . It’s more a question of the importance of that region to global economic stability. And we’re going to still be interested in that. So if you have a supply—if we’re no longer getting any oil from the Middle East because we’re secure here, a disruption of oil supplies from that region will have devastating impacts on global economies. Now is that important to us? Probably so.16
Tillerson’s speech provides a window into the latest strain of elite ideology on how to approach the convergence of crises we are currently facing. It seems fairly simple:
And just what mechanisms has the US been using to ensure its dominance over the Middle East? Terrorism. In Libya, and now in Syria, credible reports confirm that the US, working with its Persian Gulf client regimes like Saudi Arabia, has consciously supported dubious rebel movements with links to al-Qaeda.17 Such covert operations have neutralized the effect of very real, peaceful, grassroots civil society movements in these countries, with a view to prevent them from metamorphosing into viable national democratic structures that might ultimately undermine US influence.
At first glance, the escalation of these machinations appears overwhelming. But while things are no doubt getting worse, people’s movements for progressive social change are getting louder. Popular grassroots movements both east and west—the Arab Spring, Occupy movement—have taken both governments and corporations by complete surprise. And these movements have emerged because Tiller-son’s “illiterate public” is increasingly unwilling to tolerate lies and propaganda.
The majority of people now hold views about Western governments and the nature of power that would have made them social pariahs ten or twenty years ago. The majority are now skeptical of the Iraq War;18 the majority want an end to US military involvement in Afghanistan;19 the majority resent the banks and financial sector, and blame them for the financial crisis;20 most people are now aware of environmental issues, more than ever before, and despite denialist confusion promulgated by fossil fuel industries, the majority in the US21 and Britain are deeply concerned about global warming;22 most people are wary of conventional party politics23 and disillusioned with the mainstream parliamentary system,24 due to the continuation of scandal after scandal.
In other words, on a whole range of issues, there has been a massive popular shift in public opinion toward a progressive critique of the current political economic system. It is, of course, largely subliminal, not carefully worked out, and lacks a coherent vision for what needs to be done—but there can be little doubt that this shift has happened, and is deepening. People are increasingly disenchanted, and they are hungry for alternatives.
And it is within this space that the pivotal role of Project Censored comes into play, for the backbone of this transnational industrial juggernaut is the state of “false consciousness” sustained by corporate mass media propaganda.
Project Censored works to uncover and showcase news stories, in the public interest, that have been ignored, misreported, or simply censored by the so-called “mainstream,” but more accurately, the cor-porate media. Each year, its landmark Censored publication reviews the Top 25 Censored Stories of the year, and each year the pattern is the same. Stories that challenge, expose, or undermine transnational corporate power are routinely and often systematically suppressed in “mainstream” reporting. By collating and publicizing these stories, Project Censored has been at the front line of resistance against the system for the last few decades.
This volume is no exception. It goes an extra mile by not simply highlighting these suppressed news stories of recent years, but by subjecting them to rigorous political, sociological, historical, and economic analysis in a range of incisive essays that will empower the reader with a deep insight into how the system works, and what can be done. The essays reveal little-known facts about the absurdly unequal structures of resource ownership in the global economy; the continuation of a massive humanitarian crisis in “free” Iraq; lies and propaganda to justify ongoing illegal military actions; the escalation of domestic social control powers to monitor US citizens and curtail dissidence; and especially, ways forward for the Occupy movement.
Censored 2013 is, thus, a rare read of paramount importance, providing a snapshot of the critical transition period in which we find ourselves. It is an essential handbook for activists, students, and scholars, a rallying cry with which we may step further into the New American Century. But most of all, Censored 2013 is a powerful tool, with which to shatter the illusions that comprise the hegemony of the 1 percent. So read this book, and use it to educate your friends, family, and communities, because change, one way or another, is coming.
London
July 4, 2012
Notes
1. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Scientists Say Ongoing Weather Extremes Offer Proof of Climate Change,” Guardian, July 3, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/03/usextreme-summer-future-climate-change?newsfeed=true.
2. Ibid.
3. Ian Talley, “IMF Cuts U.S. Growth Outlook, Warns of Potential Recession,” Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120703-712016.html.
4. James Goodman, “As Long as the Rich can Speculate on Food, the World’s Poor Go Hungry,” Age, July 1, 2012, http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/as-long-as-the-rich-can-speculate-on-food-the-worlds-poor-go-hungry-20120630-219ja.html.
5. “What’s Cooking? The UK’s Potential Food Crisis,” Phys.Org, July 3, 2012, http://phys.org/ news/2012-07-cooking-uk-potential-food-crisis.html.
6. Liam Denning, “Has Peak Oil Peaked?,” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2012, http://online.wsj. com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577490823345598042.html.
7. Roger Harrabin, “Shortages: Is ‘Peak Oil’ Idea Dead?,” BBC News, June 19, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18353962.
8. Andrew C. Revkin, “A Fresh Look at Oil’s Long Goodbye,” Dot Earth, New York Times, June 25, 2012, http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/a-fresh-look-at-oils-new-boom-time.
9. George Monbiot, “We Were Wrong on Peak Oil. There’s Enough to Fry Us All,” Guardian, July 2, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/peak-oil-we-we-wrong.
10. James Hamilton, “Natural Gas Liquids,” Econbrowser (blog), July 1, 2012, http://www.econ-browser.com/archives/2012/07/natural_gas_liq.html.
11. Gregor Macdonald, “Global Oil Production Update: EIA Revises Two Decades of Oil Data,” Gregor.Us (blog), April 1, 2012, http://gregor.us/oil/global-oil-production-update-eia-revisestwo-decades-of-oil-data. Emphasis in quote.
12. Macdonald, “Oil’s Bright, Momentary Flash,” Gregor.Us (blog), April 30, 2012, http://gregor.us/ coal/oils-bright-momentary-flash.
13. Denning, “Has Peak Oil Peaked?”
14. Gail E. Tverberg, “Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis,” Energy 37, no. 1 (January 2012): 27–34, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544211003744 ; James Murray and David King, “Climate Policy: Oil’s Tipping Point Has Passed,” Nature 481 (January 26, 2012): 433–35, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7382/ full/481433a.html ; and Richard A. Kerr, “Technology Is Turning U.S. Oil Around But Not the World’s,” Science 335, no. 6068 (February 3, 2012): 522–23, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/522.summary.
15. Ian Urbina, “Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush,” New York Times, June 25, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/26gas.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all.
16. Rex W. Tillerson, “The New North American Energy Paradigm: Reshaping the Future,” Council on Foreign Relations, June 27, 2012, http://www.cfr.org/united-states/new-north-americanenergy-paradigm-reshaping-future/p28630.
17. Peter Dale Scott, “Who Are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?,” Asia-Pacific Journal 9, no. 13/3 (March 28, 2011), http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3504 ; Karen DeYoung and Liz Sly, “Syrian Rebels Get Influx of Arms with Gulf Neighbors’ Money, U.S. Coordination,” Washington Post, May 16, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ national-security/syrian-rebels-get-influx-of-arms-with-gulf-neighbors-money-us-coordination/2012/05/15/gIQAds2TSU_story.html ; and Ruth Sherlock, “Leading Libyan Islamist Met Free Syrian Army Opposition Group,” Telegraph, November 27, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8919057/Leading-Libyan-Islamist-metFree-Syrian-Army-opposition-group.html.
18. Dalia Sussman, “Poll Shows View of Iraq War Is Most Negative Since Start,” New York Times, May 25, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/washington/25view.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.
19. CNN Political Unit, “CNN Poll: Support for Afghanistan War at All Time Low,” Political Ticker (blog), October 28, 2011, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/28/cnn-poll-support-forafghanistan-war-at-all-time-low.
20. Dennis Jacobe, “American’s Confidence in Banks Remains at Historic Low,” Gallup, April 6, 2010, http://www.gallup.com/poll/127226/americans-confidence-banks-remains-historiclow. aspx.
21. “Climate Change Poll Finds More Americans Now Believe the Global Is Warming,” Huffington Post, September 16, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/16/climate-change-pollamerican-global-warming_n_966214.html.
22. Damian Carrington, “Public Belief in Climate Change Weathers Storm, Poll Shows,” Guardian, January 31, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/31/public-belief-climatechange.
23. Michael McDonald, “Multi-Partyism in American Politics?,” Pollster.com, May 13, 2010, http://www.pollster.com/blogs/multipartyism_in_american_poli.php?nr=1.
24. Jane Merrick and Brian Brady, “Two in Five Shun Three Main Political Parties,” Independent on Sunday, May 17, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/two-in-five-shunthree-main-political-parties-1686268.html.
DR. NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ AHMED is a best-selling writer and international security analyst. He is Executive Director at the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD) in London. Ahmed has written features, commentary, and analysis for various publications including the Independent on Sunday, the Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, Le Monde diplomatique, Foreign Policy, the New Statesman, Prospect, the Gulf Times, Daily News Egypt, Daily Star (Beirut), Pakistan Observer, Tehran Times, Bangkok Post, Prague Post, the Georgian Times, Open Democracy, Raw Story, and New Internationalist, as well as several policy periodicals. Ahmed is coproducer and writer of the critically acclaimed documentary feature film, The Crisis of Civilization (2011), adapted by director and producer Dean Puckett from Ahmed’s 2010 book, A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It. Among other books he has authored, the 2002 book The War on Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 is archived in the “9/11 Commission” Collection at the US National Archives in Washington, DC; it was among ninety-nine books made available to each 9/11 commissioner of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States to use during their investigations. Ahmed has taught at the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies and Brunel University’s Politics and History Department. He is also a regular media commentator and has appeared frequently, in the US, on C-SPAN, CNN, Fox News, Bloomberg, PBS, National Public Radio, and Progressive Radio Network, and internationally on BBC News, Al Jazeera English, Press TV (Iran), Islam Channel, and more.