Random House will soon make available worldwide my many-year study on nondual esotericism. The early tarot triumphs, coming from 15th century Eastern Christian and Sufi worlds into Italy via Venice and Ferrara, reflect a vast expanse of traditional esoteric knowledge and alchemical practice. Please drop by the Origins of the Tarot website.

I will leave this series of blog posts with some final words from the NY Times, for they carry the weight of common sense and inevitability, regarding socioeconomic imperatives at play today.

For those who might have an interest in my metaphysical thoughts, perhaps not made evident on this more mundane blog, my book Origins of the Tarot: Perennial Wisdom, Cosmic Evolution & the Principles of Immortality will soon be available. Drop me a line if you like.

Peace and Creative Love to All...

Watershed, NY Times 8/19/07

There are good reasons to hope — and believe — that the Federal Reserve will ably manage the turmoil in the financial markets. Its surprise lending rate cut on Friday and earlier infusions of cash into the banking system show that it is committed to crisis management.

But the Fed’s moves also show that it believes the markets’ problems have become a threat to the broader economy. For that reason, calming the markets should be seen as only a necessary first step toward addressing much bigger issues — issues that President Bush and his aides continue to deny.

The real work — that of leaders, not managers — is to understand how the economy became so vulnerable to current global market instability, and to articulate an agenda for reducing those underlying weaknesses. There is no return to “normal” that would not be the same as sticking one’s head back in the sand.

The bare facts are that the nation — heavily indebted — needs to attract some $800 billion a year from abroad, either by borrowing the money or by selling American assets. No serious analyst believes that an imbalance of that magnitude is sustainable.

In fact, the erosive effects are already evident. Debt must be repaid by sending money abroad, leaving less to invest domestically. Selling off American assets means reduced investment returns to Americans. And that’s if things go smoothly. Ever present is the risk that the vital foreign inflows will wane, with severe repercussions on interest rates and the dollar.

So far, however, the Bush administration has shown no awareness that the current market turmoil is layered on top of deeper vulnerabilities that demand attention. It cannot even see that the current market upheaval calls for new policies. In an interview this week in The Wall Street Journal, the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, said that the credit crunch tied to risky mortgage-related investments was “inevitable.” But the credit squeeze is not the work of an invisible hand. It stems from a markets-above-all ideology espoused at the highest levels of government, and resulting regulatory failures in the face of excessive risk taking.

Despite the current turmoil’s clear roots in unbridled risk, Mr. Paulson told The Journal, “there is nothing, in my judgment, that we should be doing to ...restrain risk taking.” He should tell that to the hundreds of thousands of people who will endure foreclosure because of reckless lending, which spawned the risky investments now roiling the markets.

In Mr. Paulson’s world, and President Bush’s, excess and its ruinous consequences are the natural result of market activity, which is itself sacrosanct. So it will fall to Congress and the presidential candidates to put the truly pressing issues on the agenda. The nation badly needs progressive, pro-market leaders who will advance a legal and regulatory framework to reduce excesses in lending and derivatives and to monitor opaque market actors, like hedge funds and private equity firms. The goal must be to avert or at least mitigate crises that otherwise do damage far beyond the immediate investors.

And to succeed in the future, the country must first stop digging the hole it is in. That will require federal budget discipline, especially health care reform and higher taxes.

It will also require higher private savings. And all of that will require leaders who will level with Americans about the depth of the country’s economic problems, including its vulnerability to global turbulence, and the sacrifices it will take to address them.

Two simple sentences, the unpacking of which speaks of a difficult near-term future for global financial flows and consequently the 99% of people who didn't get filthy reach during the Greenspan years of endemic corruption:

“Investors are now starting to question economic projections, stock market projections and public officials,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research. “They are questioning American consumers’ continuing ability to spend beyond their means.”

And they certainly would be right to question S&P's own valuations, integrity, and service.

I have recently spent a few years observing, engaging and teaching in southern China. Aware that relatively high-profile foreigners such as myself (even when keeping a low profile) are carefully ‘accounted for’ by Chinese police (in a non-threatening manner, and often ‘for their own good’) I became accustomed to the concept of ‘soft-tracking,’ communist style.

Now, however, American tech-and-profit is leading the way to enable Chinese authorities to realize the next generation of tracking-and-location social control enforcement. This is not too surprising given the very high rate of crime in southern China and other coastal provinces where dead poor ‘immigrants’ flood in to work on slave wages (often _no_ wages until end of year, when half will actually get paid their annual salary agreement, with the other half being out of luck, with little recourse beyond rioting). For foreign companies (with US corps holding a major presence) making much of their global profit from their Chinese factory operations, social control through 21^st century surveillance has become an important component of their strategic models.

So what’s happening? In China, a High-Tech Plan to Track People, a NY Times heads-up is on the money. With Cisco and other big guns backing this program, we can expect to see the next iteration of it in the US and most certainly England, where surveillance is the government’s answer to much of its societal ills.

In Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong, 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being added to 180,000 business and government agency television cameras to be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on Windows.

Western security experts have suspected for several years that Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this.

From above mentioned Florida-based company China Public Security: Mr. Lin [CEO] said he had refrained from some transactions with the Chinese government because he is the chief executive of a company incorporated in the United States. “Of course our projects could be used by the military [in China, all societal control is directed by the same Party, and all policing is effectively military], but because it’s politically sensitive, I don’t want to do it,” he said.

Microsoft, Google and Cisco apparently have no such compunctions; it is difficult to believe that China Public Security is even remotely attempting to honor a 'do no evil' policy. What better test bed for the IBM, MS, Oracle and Cisco's of this world to roll-out a global human tracking, location and identification system.

Given that coal is cheap but massively warms the planet in greenhouse ways that are not what the planet or humans need, and that oil production has peaked and will keep raising in price, here’s a magic bullet solution:

Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS)

Time to return to the basics:

1. Drill into earth until you find some elemental process that can be tapped for the next few hundred years.

2. Pump down an elemental catalyst to get a chemical reaction that can be channelled.

3. Pump up that reactive energy and connect it to an electrical turbine and heat exchange system 

FIRE in the form of 400 degree Fahrenheit stone heat 3 miles underground

WATER in the form of treated surface flows pumped into the earth

HEAT in the form of geothermal hot water and steam is turned into electricity

Of course, the process has recently been causing earthquakes, but that doesn’t look too hard to get around. 

Down Under in Oz, the Aussies are using their mining skills to blaze deep into hot earthen territory, making use of radioactive uranium et al in a far safer way than that of nuclear reactors.

Emeritus Professor John Veevers from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Macquarie University explains the beauty of doing alchemy with Gaia:

The Earth is hot: all but the outermost shell is hotter than 1000 degrees, and the core is 5000 degrees. Some of this is fossil heat from the beginning four and a half billion years ago when the earth accreted from rock, dust and gas into a molten ball. Most comes from the slow radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium that became concentrated in continental crust. If it wasn't for this radioactivity the earth would have cooled to a dead planet several billion years ago and life would be very different. Land masses may not have existed above the watery surface, and what then of humanity? But that's another story.

Granites with as much as 4% potassium, 50 parts per million thorium, and 20 parts per million uranium generate about 10 microWatts of heat per cubic metre continuously for hundreds of millions of years. If hindered from escaping by an insulator, the heat accumulates to a degree that can be exploited for generating electricity.

Heat from the radioactive isotopes uranium 238 and 235, thorium 232, and potassium 40, has brought the granite at a depth of 4 kilometres to a temperature of 250 degrees. As in oil and gas exploration, we need to store the resource in a reservoir and to contain it by a cap or seal. At Innamincka, the reservoir is made by opening the natural horizontal cracks or fractures by pumping high-pressure water into the granite. The natural horizontal shearing stress in the crust then shifts the roof of every crack sideways so that it slips a few millimetres When the water pressure is released, the cracks close but do not mate. The minute sideways slippage brings a ridge above against a ridge below and the permeability along the fracture systems increases a thousandfold. That means that water can now circulate through an engineered plumbing system to make an effective heat exchanger. The network of water-filled cracks becomes the heat reservoir. And the heat is kept in by the 4-kilometre thick sedimentary rocks above.

NY Times says it all in this brief editorial that both conniving creditors and ignorant debtors need to own up to:

Credit Card Buyer Beware

The federal agencies that are supposed to regulate the banking and credit card industries have failed utterly to keep pace with deceptive and unfair practices that have become shamefully standard in the business. As a consequence many hard-working Americans who pay their bills are mired in debt — and in danger of losing whatever savings they have, and perhaps their homes. Congress, which sat on its hands while the problem got worse and worse, needs to rein in this sometimes predatory industry.

The scope of the problem was laid out in Congressional hearings this spring held by Senator Carl Levin, the Democrat from Michigan. According to testimony, one witness exceeded his charge card’s $3,000 limit by $200 — triggering what eventually amounted to $7,500 in penalties and interest. After paying an average of $1,000 a year for six years, the man still owed $4,400.

That experience has become all too common as the credit card industry has stealthily adopted methods designed to maximize burdensome penalties and fees, while ratcheting up interest rates as high as 30 percent. Companies bombard unwary consumers with teaser packages that promise very low interest rates to start, while reserving for themselves the right to raise rates whenever they choose. The details are buried in deliberately arcane contracts that run 30 pages long and that even lawyers have trouble understanding.

Congressional investigations and studies by consumer advocates have exposed other unsavory practices. Some card companies apply penalty rates retroactively — to purchases that were made before the penalty was incurred or in some cases to debts that were even paid off. As one Congressional witness pointed out, the credit card industry is the only one allowed to increase the price of a product after it has been sold.

Under a provision known as “universal default,” a cardholder who pays a credit card company faithfully can still be hit with a high penalty interest rate for missing payments with another creditor. In another despicable tactic known as “double cycle billing,” a cardholder who pays $450 of a $500 balance is charged interest on the entire amount as opposed to the unpaid balance.

State usury laws would once have precluded many of these practices, but those have been preempted by federal regulations that are increasingly designed to make banks and credit card companies happy — rather than protect consumers.

A bill introduced by Senator Levin would limit “penalty” interest rates to an additional 7 percent above the previous rate. It would also prohibit retroactive penalties and double cycle billing, and it would limit the amount of fees companies could charge customers who exceed their credit limit.

Passing the Levin bill would be a good start. But Congress needs a comprehensive approach to this problem. Lawmakers need to ban deceptive card offers outright, strengthen federal oversight and toughen truth-in-lending laws.

Meanwhile, American consumers should think long and hard before they accept credit card offers that are too good to be true.

As broadly viewed in previous posts, the housing bubbles of the US and similar debt-ridden territories (Australia being a prime example) are proving unsustainable.  

The money needed to propagate that international bubble has been sourced in Asia, primarily China and Japan. Japan keeps printing money as fast as the Fed, but lends it to investment banks for practically nothing. Back in the US, borrowers are scammed by lending operators to pay senseless interest rates on money that those operators got from banks who got it so cheap that even with massive loan defaults they are guaranteed to make a killing.

This utterly dishonourable financial practice was literally instituted by Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was the key man manipulating markets so that the Rich could get Filthy Rich. This is proudly called the New Gilded Age, wherein laws are enacted and brutally enforced that recreate an American and Global Fiefdom of serfs for the 1/100^th of a percent who control 5% of America’s wealth and their managers who compose 1% of the population but own 50% of all assets and make 15-20% of the income (actually a higher percentage, as offshore income vehicles where all the massive hedge funds et al. reside are not counted).

Ravi Batra’s Greenspan's Fraud clearly delineates the pernicious effects of policies that have fundamentally dictated our current course of inequity. In any case, scammed consumers are about to burn in hell with the devil regularly checking their chains:

Under the new bankruptcy law enacted last year [2005] by a Congress eager to reward their campaign contributors in the credit industry, the vast majority of common folk saddled by unmanageable debt--usually because of severe misfortune, such as medical emergencies, job loss, or divorce - will be deemed to be in possession of "excess income" and will no longer be permitted to wipe the slate clean. Instead, they'll be put on an accelerated payment schedule for a 3-5 year period at a much higher rate of interest and forced to pay for "fiscal management" classes in addition to lawyers' fees.

For dishonest American lenders – from small time crooks right up to big time investment banks repackaging what they know is crap but will sell to ignorant Asian central bankers anyhow – the above scenario is All Good, Right On, and Manifest Destiny. For now, it is the hapless stooges running Chinese and SE Asian central banks that are being walloped with this year's flurry of bad money.

Chan Akya’s recent atimes.com post The Robbery of the Century spells this out.

There are, however, a number of investors - for example, central banks and pension funds - that rely only on the rating agencies for their information. Thus they fail to act when the markets start moving, and are forced to act when the rating agencies admit that the quality of the bond is actually lower than was previously thought. These investors are called "hogs" in the market - they are fattened up and then slaughtered.

Ha Ha on those clueless Asian suckers who actually believe in Standard and Poor's and Moody's rating system (as the Christian Science Monitor points out, S&P and Moody's charged huge fees to help the banks create the very same debt instruments that they are now downgrading) while believing they are 'in control' of their central banks. (It is notable that these guys only get paid $50k per annum, 1/100^th of Goldmen Sach’s CEO Henry Paulson’s $6 mil for 2005 before he became Secretary of the US Treasury, and 1/1000^th of the $53 mil that Goldman’s current CEO Lloyd Blankfein received last year for ‘teaching’ the corrupt and brutal party members in China how to turn their country into Mordor while receiving a tidy little hunk of every slave laborer’s ROI).

Ravi Batra was panned for not being correct regarding a Great Depression in the ‘90’s, and his current book holds much promise to the future if real changes in governmental policy are enacted (The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos). But the fact is that Voodoo Economics will not hold out as an illusion of that which is True, Good, or Beautiful. Here is an old, but still valid, wrap up of Batra’s forecast for the course we remain moving down:

Uncle Sam, no longer rich but in desperate need of incoming largesse, has become the largest debtor in the world, but since the debt is not in foreign currency, its ill effects would take time to erupt. The United States is still standing tall despite its mountain of debt, but since its liabilities are not in terms of a foreign currency, it will be the last domino to fall.

This is the inside story of America’s sizzling prosperity in the late 1990s, even as the rest of the world crumbles. As the federal deficit ballooned in 1990 and thereafter, the slump of that year could have turned into a full-fledged depression, but the inflow of Japanese money brought interest rates down and saved the day. In spite of that inflow, there was a good deal of suffering for six long years until 1996. After that, as the foreign inflow accelerated, a tepid recovery turned into a full-blooded boom. Is this a real boom or a mere postponement of the day of reckoning into something worse? With billions of dollars in loans even a pauper can become a tycoon and gloat about his riches. But one day the loans come due with interest, something that has already bedeviled many parts of the world. The US hour of judgment is almost here, and then the great depression, postponed in 1990, could make a ferocious comeback.

As published by the NY Times, here is Al Gore's plea for cognizance by the American public and corporate body to get real about impending environmental disaster. The two main problems which will have to be solved are corrupt greed and willful ignorance.  Combined, they almost assure the massive use of polluting coal to mitigate the global depression about to be brought on by Peak Oil. I know few Chinese, Americans, or even Kiwis who are prepared for what is now direly required. However, while we witness tshtf, we can certainly put our ears and hearts toward the Live Earth movement. Personally, I gladly signed the pledge.

Moving Beyond Kyoto
By AL GORE

Nashville

WE — the human species — have arrived at a moment of decision. It is unprecedented and even laughable for us to imagine that we could actually make a conscious choice as a species, but that is nevertheless the challenge that is before us.

Our home — Earth — is in danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.

Without realizing the consequences of our actions, we have begun to put so much carbon dioxide into the thin shell of air surrounding our world that we have literally changed the heat balance between Earth and the Sun. If we don’t stop doing this pretty quickly, the average temperature will increase to levels humans have never known and put an end to the favorable climate balance on which our civilization depends.

In the last 150 years, in an accelerating frenzy, we have been removing increasing quantities of carbon from the ground — mainly in the form of coal and oil — and burning it in ways that dump 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours into the Earth’s atmosphere.

The concentrations of CO2 — having never risen above 300 parts per million for at least a million years — have been driven from 280 parts per million at the beginning of the coal boom to 383 parts per million this year.

As a direct result, many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several “tipping points” that could — within 10 years — make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization.

Just in the last few months, new studies have shown that the north polar ice cap — which helps the planet cool itself — is melting nearly three times faster than the most pessimistic computer models predicted. Unless we take action, summer ice could be completely gone in as little as 35 years. Similarly, at the other end of the planet, near the South Pole, scientists have found new evidence of snow melting in West Antarctica across an area as large as California.

This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue, one that affects the survival of human civilization. It is not a question of left versus right; it is a question of right versus wrong. Put simply, it is wrong to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours.

On Sept. 21, 1987, President Ronald Reagan said, “In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

We — all of us — now face a universal threat. Though it is not from outside this world, it is nevertheless cosmic in scale.

Consider this tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground — having been deposited there by various forms of life over the last 600 million years — and most of the carbon on Venus is in the atmosphere.

As a result, while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. True, Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, but the fault is not in our star; Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. It’s the carbon dioxide.

This threat also requires us, in Reagan’s phrase, to unite in recognition of our common bond.

Next Saturday, on all seven continents, the Live Earth concert will ask for the attention of humankind to begin a three-year campaign to make everyone on our planet aware of how we can solve the climate crisis in time to avoid catastrophe. Individuals must be a part of the solution. In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?”

Live Earth will offer an answer to this question by asking everyone who attends or listens to the concerts to sign a personal pledge to take specific steps to combat climate change. (More details about the pledge are available at algore.com.)

But individual action will also have to shape and drive government action. Here Americans have a special responsibility. Throughout most of our short history, the United States and the American people have provided moral leadership for the world. Establishing the Bill of Rights, framing democracy in the Constitution, defeating fascism in World War II, toppling Communism and landing on the moon — all were the result of American leadership.

Once again, Americans must come together and direct our government to take on a global challenge. American leadership is a precondition for success.

To this end, we should demand that the United States join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90 percent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy Earth.

This treaty would mark a new effort. I am proud of my role during the Clinton administration in negotiating the Kyoto protocol. But I believe that the protocol has been so demonized in the United States that it probably cannot be ratified here — much in the way the Carter administration was prevented from winning ratification of an expanded strategic arms limitation treaty in 1979. Moreover, the negotiations will soon begin on a tougher climate treaty.

Therefore, just as President Reagan renamed and modified the SALT agreement (calling it Start), after belatedly recognizing the need for it, our next president must immediately focus on quickly concluding a new and even tougher climate change pact. We should aim to complete this global treaty by the end of 2009 — and not wait until 2012 as currently planned.

If by the beginning of 2009, the United States already has in place a domestic regime to reduce global warming pollution, I have no doubt that when we give industry a goal and the tools and flexibility to sharply reduce carbon emissions, we can complete and ratify a new treaty quickly. It is, after all, a planetary emergency.

A new treaty will still have differentiated commitments, of course; countries will be asked to meet different requirements based upon their historical share or contribution to the problem and their relative ability to carry the burden of change. This precedent is well established in international law, and there is no other way to do it.

There are some who will try to pervert this precedent and use xenophobia or nativist arguments to say that every country should be held to the same standard. But should countries with one-fifth our gross domestic product — countries that contributed almost nothing in the past to the creation of this crisis — really carry the same load as the United States? Are we so scared of this challenge that we cannot lead?

Our children have a right to hold us to a higher standard when their future — indeed, the future of all human civilization — is hanging in the balance. They deserve better than a government that censors the best scientific evidence and harasses honest scientists who try to warn us about looming catastrophe. They deserve better than politicians who sit on their hands and do nothing to confront the greatest challenge that humankind has ever faced — even as the danger bears down on us.

We should focus instead on the opportunities that are part of this challenge. Certainly, there will be new jobs and new profits as corporations move aggressively to capture the enormous economic opportunities offered by a clean energy future.

But there’s something even more precious to be gained if we do the right thing. The climate crisis offers us the chance to experience what few generations in history have had the privilege of experiencing: a generational mission; a compelling moral purpose; a shared cause; and the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict of politics and to embrace a genuine moral and spiritual challenge.

Al Gore, vice president from 1993 to 2001, is the chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection. He is the author, most recently, of “The Assault on Reason.”

(Note: I have been traveling and generating a new-media edutainment company called Ambrosia House; my posts will thus remain infrequent for a period.)

Given the crucial and broad ramifications of Peak Oil, I hope that readers are compelled to further educate themselves about likely global shortages regarding oil demand in the near future. By the end of the year, it will become apparent whether the Saudis can actually increase production any further.

Below are some excellent sites to add to your peak oil bookmarks...but please, first have a read here regarding the folly of biofuel production, as it is now directly producing starvation in poorer countries. America and Europe are taking food out of the world's mouths and pouring it into their SUVs...what a terrible, shameful addiction:

In the past 12 months the global corn price has doubled. The constant aim of agriculture is to produce enough food to carry us over to the next harvest. In six of the past seven years, we have used more grain worldwide than we have produced.

The reason for the price surge is the wholesale diversion of grain crops into the production of ethanol. Thirty per cent of next year's grain harvest in the US will go straight to an ethanol distillery. As the US supplies more than two-thirds of the world's grain imports this unprecedented move will affect food prices everywhere. In Europe farmers are switching en masse to fuel crops to meet the EU requirement that bio-fuels account for 20 per cent of the energy mix.

Ethanol is almost universally popular with politicians as it allows them to tell voters to keep on motoring, while bio-fuels will fix the problem of harmful greenhouse gas emissions. But bio-fuels are not a green panacea, as the influential economist Lester Brown from the Earth Policy Institute explained in a briefing to the US Senate last week. He said: "The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's 2 billion poorest people."

As this blog has pointed out, Chinese, American and, indeed, world economies are massively interdependent and reliant on continual, dangerous (deeply so, in all four environmental, social, cultural, and spiritual spheres) growth of industrial Chinese factories. Woven into this in much of the world, including America, Australia, England and China, a genuine real estate bubble has merged with a global equities market valuation that is quite beyond the dotcom fantasies of only six years ago.

The latter is based upon maintainence of ignorance regarding the fact that oil and energy in general will now become scarce and expensive. This will impact most listed companies' 5 year profit forecasts (let alone 10+ years); a fact that is being taken into account by neither corporate CFOs nor investment bank managers. The reality of Peak Oil is simply too much for people to psychologically and rationally tackle; thereby it is likely that prolonged avoidance of this issue will continue.

Take the Oil Quiz and see how much your general beliefs on the subject are accurate. Here is the best overview of peaking oil production -- by the same contributor as the Oil Quiz -- including excellent links and solid analysis. It is basically a FAQ covering the gamut of questions that you and every other thoughtful person are likely to have. Example:

6. Doesn't OPEC report very large oil reserves? It seems like those high reserves would assure us that OPEC can increase its production at will.

No, the high reserves aren't all that helpful. First, there are serious doubts about the accuracy of OPEC's oil reserves. The reserves are not audited numbers. Countries may be motivated to exaggerate them, so as to increase their OPEC production allocations. Analyses such as this one suggest that the reserves are likely overstated.

Second, even if OPEC reserves are accurate, the reserves tell us nothing about the flow rate. If the reserves include much very viscous oil, it may take years and large amounts of other resources to produce a relatively small flow of oil.

One important piece of detective work regarding Saudi oil reserves was done a couple of years ago. Matt Simmons analyzed published scientific papers relating to Saudi oil wells, and determined that Saudi wells were reaching a serious state of depletion. He documented his findings in the book Twighlight in the Desert. This book is now available in paperback, and has been translated into German and Chinese.

Coming out of the UK, PowerSwitch is an exellent resource.

The Energy Bulletin has technical links to knowledgable info regarding energy issues in general and peak oil in particular, such as:

Over 20 MPs and Lords form peak oil group in Parliament
James Howard, PowerSwitch
The All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas (APPGOPO) has been formed, ensuring that the issue of declining global oil supplies will feature much more prominently in Parliament.
first published June 28, 2007.

Top IEA official: without Iraqi oil, we hit the wall in 2015
Jérôme à Paris, European Tribune
In a stunning interview for the French daily Le Monde, Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency effectively says that peak oil is just around the corner, and that without Iraqi oil, we'll be in deep trouble by 2015
first published June 28, 2007.

The Gulf of Despair?
Dave Cohen, ASPO-USA
It's time to revisit the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) with a focus on reality, not hyperbole.
first published June 28, 2007.

Surpassing both An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car  is the simply strait-up and chilling must-see documentary of the year:

Crude Awakening: The Oil Crisis

See it with your kids or grandkids and sit down at the dinner table for a well considered discussion about Peak Oil.

Never heard of it? Here’s a head’s up regarding ‘life after the oil crash’…

“Peak Oil doesn't mean 'running out of oil', but rather 'running out of cheap and plentiful oil'. Inexpensive oil supports our very way of life, as we know it.”

“Oil will not just ‘run out’ because all oil production follows a bell curve. This is true whether we're talking about an individual field, a country, or on the planet as a whole. 

Oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. The peak of the curve coincides with the point at which the endowment of oil has been 50 percent depleted. Once the peak is passed, oil production begins to go down while cost begins to go up.

See the movie if you can (the Net might be your only way, for now; i.e. bittorrent) and have a look at this realplayer streaming interview with Richard Heinberg, a college teacher in Santa Rosa, California. Richard is such an even-headed, understated good guy educator (here's his website), and television interviewer Janaia Donaldson (hosting the Peak Moment series addressing Community Responses For a Changing Energy Future) is such a normal, responsible American woman, that it is tough not to get the message after 28 minutes of simple information. (Btw, if you don't have realplayer installed, download the free and far superior realplayeralternative here.)

Then visit Matt Savinar's life-mission site, www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net. Have a chat with your café friends about what’s been driving big Dick C. the Warmonger over these years…billions of bucks for Haliburton, for sure, but his country’s now desperate need for secure oil even more! Be aware that once this movie, et al. creates sufficient public awareness regarding the implications of the coming Oil Crash -- public education about which has been tightly suppressed expressly for this reason -- global equity markets are going to plummet.

It is good to see some public action being taken regarding the Oil Business As Usual ... this post by a fellow curmudgeon had me rolling in the aisles...heheheh....

Then there are the D.C. politicos finally getting around to supporting alt.energy research, and cutting the sickening subsidies that the PentaCon Party have been handing out to Oil Barons...

Since Earth Day was first promoted back when I was a teen, there has been no shortage of denigrated ‘doomsayers’ proclaiming an end to the world’s energy supplies. When the oil embargo of the ‘70s hit, some folk actually woke up and smelled the petrol. However, the last 15 rah-rah years of endlessly easy money and new fangled financial markets creating capital out of thin air have cast petrochemical dependent leaders and masses back into a deep slumber regarding the actual limitations to the energy capital underlying all industrial activity.

Securing a future of wealth isn’t about exotic derivatives and secure hedge fund mathematics. It is about the real capital of human labor, earth commodities, and energy resources needed to keep modern civilization working. This remains true as much for Americans as Chinese.

David Goodstein, a physicist and vice-provost at the California Institute of Technology, sent out a wake-up call to the world a few years back with his book on peak oil, called Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil. He is called upon in Crude Awakening to extend that message, which in a nutshell goes like this:

 The Age of Oil — 100-plus years of astonishing economic growth made possible by cheap, abundant oil — could be ending without our really being aware of it. Oil is a finite commodity. At some point even the vast reservoirs of Saudi Arabia will run dry. But before that happens there will come a day when oil production ‘peaks,’ when demand overtakes supply (and never looks back), resulting in large and possibly catastrophic price increases that could make today's $60-a-barrel oil look like chump change. Unless, of course, we begin to develop substitutes for oil. Or begin to live more abstemiously. Or both. The concept of peak oil has not been widely written about. But people are talking about it now. It deserves a careful look — largely because it is almost certainly correct.

We peaked with planetary oil discoveries some 40 years ago. We are now peaking with oil production. It is downhill from now on out, and China and India are just coming into the market in a serious way. While China can rely more on coal for some of its heating needs, liquefying coal to create petrol for those millions of new cars coming onto the roads is hugely expensive and polluting. Gas is Europe’s answer for power that can replace oil, but it too will peak out in another 10 years; and Russia has Europe over a barrel now, as previous posts on this blog have informed.

 The issue is not one of ‘running out’ so much as it is not having enough to keep our economy running. In this regard, the ramifications of Peak Oil for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water. The body of a 200 pound man thus holds 140 pounds of water. Because water is so crucial to everything the human body does, the man doesn't need to lose all 140 pounds of water weight before collapsing due to dehydration. A loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him.

 In a similar sense, an oil-based economy such as ours doesn't need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10-15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.

US leaders, as Crude Awakening states so clearly, have a choice of two roads down which the American people must be led:

1. War after war to acquire oil  … forget about Iran, which peaked in its oil production years ago, its time to call up a draft and shift our boys onto Saudi soil, because that country is the one with all the oil, and its people are at the point of revolution.

2. Massive research and development of all alternative energy options immediately … which, as the movie rings out clear and strong, still will not stave off the catastrophe about to hit --  not hydrogen, nuclear, sun, biomass, et al.

This is a must see movie, folks. No one is going around pretending that the facts delivered by experts regarding Peak Oil are somehow fanatical, misconstrued, or alarmist. Add this to your thoughts about global warming and mass extinction, and then take a good hard look at your and your community’s dependent addiction upon plastics and petrochemicals in general, along with gas driven modes of transportation.

After watching this movie, anyone with young children are likely to be contemplating for years to come the fact that it is probable their grandchildren will never step foot in a jet airplane – simply because there will be no oil left to fuel it.