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Garrison Keillor | Something I Would've Said in June, Had I Been Asked
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "Life is unfair. This is what the Class of 2020 should've been told at commencement, if there had been one."
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People gather at the 'Get Off Our Necks' Commitment March on Washington on August, 28, 2020. (photo: Jack Gruber/USA TODAY)
'We Cannot Stop. We Cannot Quit': Thousands Rally for Racial Justice at March on Washington
Nicquel Terry Ellis, N'dea Yancey-Bragg, Rachel Aretakis, Joshua Bote and Claire Thornton, USA TODAY
Excerpt: "Thousands converged on the nation's capital Friday demanding long-lasting change to end systemic racism as the country reels from police killings of Black people this year that have fueled nationwide protests."
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Bernie Sanders speaks at the Our Revolution Massachusetts Rally at the Orpheum Theatre on March 31, 2017, in Boston, Massachusetts. (photo: Scott Eisen/Getty)
Bernie Sanders's Five-Year War: How He Lost and Where We Go From Here
Matt Karp, Jacobin
Karp writes: "A left grounded in class politics, and aimed fundamentally at majority-building demands for material redistribution - health care, education, jobs, and family support for all, paid for by the rich? The future is still unwritten."
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Kyle Rittenhouse, left, with backwards cap, walks along Sheridan Road in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, with another armed civilian. (photo: Adam Rogan/AP)
ALSO SEE: Praise for Alleged Kenosha Shooter Proliferates
on Facebook Despite Supposed Ban
Vigilante, Volunteer, Terrorist: How the US Media Covers Kyle Rittenhouse
Poppy Noor, Guardian UK
Noor writes: "There is perhaps no greater example of the polarization of American media than the coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who allegedly shot and killed two protesters and injured another at Kenosha this week." ‘A terrorist’ Domestic terrorism is defined by the FBI as “the unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States (or its territories) without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”. Publications have tended not to call Rittenhouse a terrorist (Esquire did call his alleged attack “an act of what could only be called terrorist tourism”) but on Wednesday Representative Ayanna Presley did. She described Rittenhouse as a “domestic terrorist [who] drove across state lines, armed with an AR-15.” READ MORE
Pulitzer Prize winning reporter David Fahrenthold. (photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
The White House Is Openly Threatening a Journalist With a 'Dossier'
Paul Blest, VICE
Blest writes: "A White House spokesperson publicly threatened a Washington Post reporter and said the administration was compiling a 'dossier' on him in response to his reporting on the Trump Organization." While reporting a story on how the Secret Service has been a “captive customer” in spending the public’s money on Trump Organization properties while protecting the president, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold and his colleagues submitted questions to the White House. In response, White House spokesman Judd Deere told reporters that the administration was targeting him. “The Washington Post is blatantly interfering with the business relationships of the Trump Organization, and it must stop,” Deere wrote in a statement to the Washington Post. “Please be advised that we are building up a very large ‘dossier’ on the many false David Fahrenthold and others stories as they are a disgrace to journalism and the American people.” The story noted that more than $900,000 of the public’s money has been spent at Trump’s businesses, including at least $570,000 as a result of the president’s travel. For example, the story revealed that the Trump Organization charged Secret Service agents daily “resort fees” — which were the maximum rate to Secret Service agents under federal per-diem rules — while protecting Vice President Mike Pence at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. That trip alone cost the Secret Service more than $20,000. The Washington Post declined comment on the matter to multiple outlets. On Twitter, Fahrenthold accused Deere, a White House employee, of explicitly defending the Trump Organization’s business interests.
It’s unclear what’s in the alleged “dossier,” but Fahrenthold has long been a thorn in Trump’s side. The veteran Post reporter previously won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 “for persistent reporting that created a model for transparent journalism in political campaign coverage while casting doubt on Donald Trump’s assertions of generosity toward charities.” He also broke the story of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape in October 2016, in which Trump brags about grabbing women “by the pussy.” In a tweet, Fahrenthold put out a call asking someone to leak him the dossier, which is likely exempted from the Freedom of Information Act along with other White House records. If the dossier exists, Fahrenthold is far from the first reporter on whom the administration has collected information. In July, the Post obtained copies of “intelligence reports” the Department of Homeland Security had compiled about a reporter for the New York Times and the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, which were handed over to law enforcement agencies. And earlier this year, the Trump campaign filed libel lawsuits against CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times over alleged “false reporting” in op-eds related to the campaign’s ties to the Russian government. |
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Colombian president Ivan Duque. (photo: Tomas Ayuso/Getty)
Colombia: President Duque Authorizes the Return of US Troops
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Colombia's Defense Ministry Thursday informed that President Ivan Duque allowed the resumption of the U.S. Army's cooperation work in the country after it was suspended by a court order."
Over 20 lawmakers claimed that Duque had violated political controls because he did not ask the Senate’s authorization to allow the transit of foreign troops in the national territory.
Defense Minister Carlos Trujillo reported that his ministry received an approval letter from 69 Senate’s congressmen to resume the U.S. Army's activities in the national territory.
He also assured that the government complied with the Cundinamarca Court's requirements as it presented a full report on the work that SFAB would carry out in Colombia and most of the senators agreed with the authorization.
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A new report suggests that over the next 30 years, at least 80 percent of the oil industry will be wiped out. (photo: iStock)
The End of the Oil Age Is Upon Us
Nafeez Ahmed, VICE
Ahmed writes: "A new report suggests that over the next 30 years, at least 80 percent of the oil industry will be wiped out."
he oil industry is on the cusp of a process of almost total decimation that will begin over the next 30 years, and continue through to the next century. That’s the stark implication of a new forecast by a team of energy analysts led by a former US government energy advisor, seen exclusively by Motherboard.
2020, the forecast suggests, will go down in history as the final point-of-no-return for the global oil industry—a date to which we will look back and remember how the production of oil, as well as other fossil fuels like gas and coal, underwent a slow, but inexorable and largely irreversible decline.
Along the way, some 80 percent of the industry as we know it is going to be wiped out.
Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to be recognized as a principal trigger for this decline. The new era of oscillating social distancing rules and remote working has crushed once rocketing demand, at least temporarily.
But in reality, the broad contours of this decline were already set in motion even before the pandemic hit. And the implications are stark: we are in the midst of a fundamental energy transition which will see the bulk of the fossil fuel industry gradually eclipsed in coming decades.
The end of the line
These conclusions are laid out in a soon-to-be-published analysis written by a former top strategy advisor to the US Department of Energy, Rodrigo Villamizar Alvargonzález—previously Columbian Minister of Energy, World Bank senior economic consultant, an advisor to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and energy expert for the Texas State Senate Economic Development Committee and Texas Public Utility Commission.
I obtained the draft manuscript, titled Energy and Power Futures, from the authors earlier this year when it was first finalized in January—just before the COVID-19 pandemic came on the scene. Villamizar’s forecast placed “the start date of oil’s decline at around 2020”—described as a “tipping point” for world oil production which, from then on “will go down. Nowhere in sight is the possibility of going over the all-time production high of 35.7 billion barrels per year (or 100 million barrels per day) beyond 2020.”
Villamizar is currently Head of Strategy for the Americas at Kaiserwetter Energy Asset Management, an energy investment firm based in Hamburg, Madrid, and New York. His analysis is co-authored with Randy Willoughby, a professor of political science at San Diego University, and Vicente Lopez-Ibor Mayor, previously founding Chairman of Europe’s largest solar energy company Lightsource BP (owned by oil and gas giant BP) and a former Commissioner at Spain’s National Energy Commission. Their study is due to be published later this year by Durham University’s School of Government and International Affairs.
After the COVID-19 crisis, they revised their forecasts—finding that the pandemic has reinforced the trends they had previously identified. In their updated text, they argue that the remaining years of the 21st century and beyond will be marked by a “slow but permanent decline in demand for plenty of oil resources.”
The new forecast is in broad agreement with the predictions of several other agencies, including the Norwegian energy consultancy DNV GL, the US financial consultancy McKinsey, and even oil and gas giant BP, which similarly portend a relentless decline in oil demand out to 2050.
But unlike those predictions, the forecast shows this decline could be faster, with huge ramifications for global oil production.
Too much oil?
In the view of Villamizar, Willoughby and Mayor, this is not an oil scarcity crisis, but a demand crisis. They write: “Perhaps we were the first to notice that, even before COVID-19, the year 2019 would be the last ever to register daily production of oil closer to 100 million barrels. Indeed, before the coronavirus landed in Italy, the size of the oil market had already started its permanent slippery downward slide towards an uncertain future.”
In this analysis, oil demand was seen to peak at the end of 2019 and early 2020. “I thought we had a glitch in our forecasting model,” explained Villamizar. “But all the revisions pointed to a similar result.”
Among the factors behind the portended decline are a combination of “climate change action initiatives” demanding a brake on fossil fuel production; a shift toward more electric cars and other forms of transport; the persistence of lower oil prices undermining oil industry profitability; and a decrease in investment in new oil infrastructure and technology:
“Our results showed petroleum consumption reduced 31 percent by 2050 and 60 percent by 2100. That means that 2019 was the highest ever production level reached (100 million barrels per day, mbd).”
Villamizar and his colleagues point out that oil will still be needed for many key industries, including petrochemicals and plastics.
And there are vast reserves of oil still in the ground. So the industry will not simply disappear. But most of the world’s oil assets will, in their view, become ‘stranded’—left alone because global demand for it gradually evaporates.
The overall prognosis—that we are now moving into the second and final half of the oil age—is sobering: “Oil will not die anytime soon but it is already on a downward slippery slope.”
Natural selection
While the oil industry as such will not simply collapse, these experts believe it is now entering a protracted period of terminal decline over the next three decades. What emerges as a consequence will be a very different type of industry.
“We forecast a long-term Darwinian transformation in the future oil sector,” write Villamizar, Willoughby, and Mayor. “The new market structure rising from the old oil reality will be dominated by an oil troika made up of US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.”
Only 20 percent of industry players will survive by 2050, they forecast. And the oil market will be “one-third smaller than today.”
This drop in demand means, of course, that global oil production will also decline because it is no longer needed. According to the authors, production will decline from 100 million barrels per day (mbd) to 68-69 mbd by mid-century, and 40 mbd by 2100.
The world will simultaneously see a dramatic reduction of exports from 46 mbd to about 25 mbd by 2050, and a reduction in the number of exporting countries from today’s 58 to about 15.
These projected declines in global oil production by a third, and in global oil exports by nearly half—within the next 30 years—comprises a colossal collapse by any standard.
The analysts compare this sweeping oil sector transformation to the decimation of the tobacco industry. This time, the result will be “fewer players, shrinking markets and lots of enemies everywhere accusing the companies of selling an environmentally poisonous product… With less water in a shrinking pond, the bigger fish will push the smaller out and regroup in isolated sections of what’s left.”
Climate danger
But it is too early to rejoice that the coming decimation of the oil industry will happen sufficiently fast to save us from dangerous climate change.
Villamizar, Willoughby, and Mayor point out that “this future lower level of oil supply is still much higher than what the Paris Agreement on climate mitigation expects to be produced to maintain the world’s average temperature above no higher than 2 degree Celsius from the level registered during the Industrial Revolution.”
So it would be a huge mistake to sit back and wait casually for the oil industry to slowly die out. That approach would put us on a path to breach the scientifically recognized 2C safe limit. Beyond that level, scientists warn that we will experience an increasingly deadly and unpredictable climate.
And some scientists warn that even now, due to the uncertainties in predicting how tightly interconnected complex ecosystems might unfold, we may already be on the brink of triggering a runaway warming process that could culminate in an uninhabitable planet.
This predicament puts the task of rapidly decarbonizing our economy at the forefront of global priorities. That will, according to Villamizar and his co-authors, require huge investments in “areas like electrification, affordable long-term energy storage, and regenerative agriculture.”
It also means a change in investor mindsets, and thus a shift to a slower but perhaps more stable economy—instead of expecting quick bucks for the next quarter, investors should recognize the need to wait 10-15 years for returns, they argue.
Supply or demand?
While the demand slump is right now the big factor in the global oil crisis, several other studies have pointed out that the oil industry was overdue a reckoning due to the increasing costs of oil production and how this might impact supply relative to profits.
Earlier in February, I reported on a major study by the Geological Survey of Finland which assessed the implications of the fact that conventional oil production began to plateau around 2005. After this point, the world has become increasingly dependent on unconventional oil and gas supplies. Since 2008, the rise in demand has been met almost entirely by more expensive and difficult to extract sources such as shale oil, tar sands and offshore drilling.
While market prices have remained too low for oil companies to make a meaningful profit relative to rocketing extraction and production costs, they have ramped up billions of dollars in debt to keep the show on the road: all enabled by massive post-2008 quantitative easing. Thus, the study warned:
“The era of cheap and abundant energy is long gone. Money supply and debt have grown faster than the real economy. Debt saturation and paralysis is now a very real risk, requiring a global scale reset.”
In June, a peer-reviewed study led by Dr Roger Bentley of the Petroleum Analysis Centre in Ireland found that global conventional oil production had indeed reached a “resource-limited plateau” from 2005 onwards. Although this was relieved by the rise in US shale oil, even before the pandemic there were signs that the shale boom “may be fairly short-lived.”
The new forecast from Villamizar and his co-authors, when taken into context with such studies, suggests that the oil industry now faces a perfect storm of crises affecting both supply and demand.
Production was increasingly uneconomical due to the transition to more expensive and difficult to extract unconventional oil and gas. The unsustainable debt-drenched economics of unconventional resources mean that, however vast those reserves are, it was increasingly unviable to continue extraction without even more unsustainable levels of debt. Meanwhile, global demand was already set to begin a slow but precipitous decline from 2020 onwards. But the pandemic accelerated that collapse in demand, and we have reached the point-of-no-return.
If this analysis is right, then the end of the oil age is in full swing. The real question is, how fast can we transition to what comes next?
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uring a week of police violence and vigilante murder in Wisconsin, in a year of preventable deaths and growing poverty, the Republican convention emphasized loyalty to Donald Trump, casting aside matters of policy and campaign law in favor of grievance. Was the convention just another concession to his outsize ego, part of the strategy to energize the party’s base in the run-up to November, or an attempt to win over undecided voters?
