Subject: Australian ABC News: Late Edition -- Tuesday 22JAN2008
From: Edward Cranswick <e_cranswick@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:55:35 +0000
To: roeoz@yahoogroups.com, "nowar_australia@yahoogroups.com" <nowar_australia@yahoogroups.com>, "nowar_australia@yahoogroups.com" <nowar_australia@yahoogroups.com>

ROEOZ-
Unusual for me, not having a TV, I saw the Tuesday 22JAN2008 ABC News:
Late Edition tonight and I note that all the stories were about peak
oil/climate change. The lead-off was about the stock market crash and
was full of comments about the fundamental soundness of the economy,
hence, they obscured the cosmic truth which was conspicuous by its
absence -- the price of everything depends on oil, and if the price of
oil goes up, the price of everything goes up, particularly of doing
business. Next, sitting in climate-ravaged South Australia sucking from
a drying/dying River Murray, we saw the floods of Queensland. Back to a
Palestinian replay of the Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, we
wondered how long the flickering candles and oil lamps would burn for
the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip whose electricity and oil
supply are being embargoed by the Israelis -- the Israelis are
conducting the first controlled Peak Oil experiment on a population --
Oil-less in Gaza. Finally, there was the funeral of Sir Edmund Hillary
which was both a climate change event -- the Peak Ice he reached became
a symbol of Mankind's oily triumph over Nature and the retreat of the
glaciers (and the destruction of Nepal) soon became a rout -- and a Peak
Oil event -- Hillary's triumph on the coronation day of Queen Elizabeth
II is the only triumph of the 1950's British Empire during a period
when the UK lost its oil monopoly in Iran and then lost the Suez and
temporarily lost access to oil Middle East.

I regard myself as one of Old Timer's post-Peak Oil wimps because I have
Peak Oil visions of the horrors committed in Gaza, Daufur, and Baghdad
being visited upon the pleasant bourgeois life I lead in Adelaide and
I'm squeamish -- I don't want to see the inevitable blood, guts, and
agony of its collapse ... I don't want to be here then.

... But even without that melodrama, in the near future life will become
much more intense and most of the things we obsesess about now will
became utterly irrelevant.

-Edward