“SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL – ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED” [by E. F. Schumacher]

Notes inspired by:

“SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL – ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED”

[by E. F. Schumacher]

If we are all born good, how come there’s so much wickedness? And if we’re born wicked, where does all the goodness come from? To follow Nietzsche’s lead into a realm Beyond Good And Evil, let’s try to meditate upon our current systems of production with no condemnation or praise. Even though historian Howard Zinn states that “it’s impossible to be neutral on a moving train”, let’s try for some minutes to practice some neutrality. Let’s take, for instance, capitalism: there’s no shortage of criticism, home-made bombs and armed guerrilas rising against it all throughout History, but there’s no shortage neither of its lovers, its praising servants, its devoted and faithful idolizers.

Who doubts that lots of moral indignation, or revulsion at immorality, has led many Marxists to mobilize their dialectics and their parties and their revolutions against Capitalism, Imperialism, Colonialism etc.? What are the grounds in which “leftists” dare to criticize the capitalist system of production by claiming it’s “morally monstruous” (to quote Miss Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, note #1 )? How do we practise neutrality in the field of history and politics, where the struggles for power and moral considerations are to be found everywhere we look?

I’ll suggest that we try, as a means to attempt to arrive at neutrality, as a raft who might take us there, an exercise in de-humanization: let’s look at things as if we weren’t humans. Maybe then we’ll be able to reach the standpoint of wisdom, which in Lucretius’s poem The Nature Of Things is described with a well-known metaphor: the wise one – which Lucretius, of course, identifies with his Greek master, Epicurus – is the one who stands serene, with full lucidity, at firm ground, watching the folly of ships at sea.

The wise one in the mountain witnesses and meditates upon the human condition at the same time as many humans are on their troubled ships at sea, thrown around by furious waves, involved in bloody fratricidal naval battles, or filled with vendetta ambitions like Ahab’s against Moby Dick. The sea of uncontrolled passions and thriving irrationality is the one Lucretius invites us to leave behind us, in order for us to reach the serenity of wise neutrality and lucid contemplation.

The trouble is, the “Western mind” has been conditioned to believe that Nature is inferior to Man, that nature can and should be exploited and extracted by ease by us, its masters and conquerors. This is how F.A. Schumacher puts it in the first paragraphs of Small is Beautiful: 

“Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side. We are estranged from reality and inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves. Even the great Dr Marx fell into this devastating error when he formulated the so-called ‘labour theory of value’. Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man – and we do not even recognise it as such. This larger part is now being used up at an alarming rate, and that is why it is an absurd and suicidal error to believe, and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved. Let us take a closer look at this ‘natural capital’. First of all, and most obviously, there are the fossil fuels. No-one, I am sure, will deny that we are treating them as income items although they are undeniably capital items. If we treated them as capital items, we should be concerned with conservation: we should do everything in our power to try and minimise their current rate of use…” [SCHUMACHER, note #2]

We have a tendency to think of capital as something created by humans, by labour we impose upon the materiality of nature, but Schumacher invites us to take a look at the wealth of nature without mankind in it. Petroleum is natural capital, then, because it wasn’t created by mankind, it’s the outcome of billions and billions of years in which the organisms dead remnants gathered below the earthly garden. We could even say, to communicate this with the more poetically inclined, that this stuff we today call fossil fuels are materialized death. It also contains a lot of energy, gathered by organisms who lived perhaps millions of years prior to the ascent of a primate such as ourselves. We have been burning the remnants of death like crazy in our car-junkie meat-devouring highly-consumptive and madly-extractive lifestyles.

It’s sufficient to take a peek at our rivers and seas, depleted of fish and poisoned by toxic waste; at our decapitaded forests and smoggy polluted skies; it becomes clear that the “Westernization” of the whole world, known as Globalization, has ecological consequences of mega-magnitude, and it’s increasingly becoming clear and well-known, to millions and millions worldwide, that the “Free Market” path is simply a suicidal one. Speaking about “Westerners” in they continued dependency on fossil fuels, un-reneable energy source, Schumacher states:

“We are not in the least concerned with conservation: we are maximising, instead of minimising the current rates of use; and, far from being interested in studying the possibilities of alternative methods of production and patterns of living – so as to get off the collision course on which we are moving with ever-increasing speed – we happily talk of unlimited progress along the beaten track of ‘education for leisure’ in the rich countries, and of ‘the transfer of technology’ to the poor countries…”  [SCHUMACHER, note #3]

One way to wake up from the Matrix of Western capitalist mentality is suggested by Buckminster Fuller [note #4] when we talks about us as 7 billion passengers of the same ship, Spaceship Earth. We’re all earthlings – that’s something we can easily agree upon. Going beyond parochialisms and egotisms and ethnocentric neuroses, we can arrive at true cosmopolitanism: we are all flying together with our bodies glued by gravity to this revolving planet, this celestial body who dances around a star with almost un-ending energy…

Let’s get back to the ground with economics, this very earthly example: in Toronto, where I lived for a year, there was an array of options in the market area I could reach by foot in the Runnymede neighbourhood: at the corner, I could buy fresh vegetables, juicy fruits, sold by a small-scale Vietnamese shop (“small is beautiful”), side by side with a huge PetroCanada station (a symbol of Canadian big oil biz). I’d rather give my money to small-and-beautiful Vietnamese shop-keepers, refugees from the U.S. led war back in the sixties and seventies, than to fall on my knees to the power of Big Petro Companhies. But I know that, sadly, small is being slaughtered by huge in our world of big multinational corporations and oil-junkie plutocrats…

The gas station, besides, changes the urban landscape in such a way that I could daily witness an endless procession of cars filling up their tanks in order that they could run wild, drunk on petroleum… To which of these two shops should I pledge allegiance? I’d rather be on the side of the Vietnameses’ potatoes and brocolli… What I mean by all this is: betweend food and petroleum, what is the order of priority? Which such come first? Of course, we need to eat first and foremost, and it’s better if it’s GMO-free, and sadly, in our Spaceship, we still got more than 1 billion human earthlings being eaten alive by hunger and thrown into early death by unfulfilled basic needs.

  We are “inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves”, writes Schumacher, and he probably means that our self-adoration, through the praise of our wonderful Technology, is a bit egotistical, cause it treats the man-made as superior to the natural. Most I-Phone users, clicking their ways through bus rides and metro stations, are unaware both of the process of production of that technological gaget and of its ecological consequences. This is not willfull ignorance, self-imposed blindness, but the result of the media system who conditions us to never question the hidden hands and fists of the Market. We are asked to enjoy ourselves in the Marketplace, by which they mean: we should spend a lot of cash and this will heat up the economy, everybody’s gonna win with our high consumption frenzies. We’re supposed to get all horny for hamburguers at the sight of a big yellow M in red background in the urban landscape that’s filled with the mind-mines and fly-traps of advertised bullshit.

What struck me as awesome while I was reading Small is Beautiful for the first time is how Natural Capital is described by the author as something much bigger, vaster, wealthier, than every Human-created Capital. This means, in other words, that Nature is way above the G8 countries, way above the IMF and the World Bank, in its wealth. Nature is rich and mighty, and humans are poor arrogant fools, who’ll pay the price for their húbris in the form of ecological catastrophes. The danger is to believe that Nature, cause she’s awfully rich, wouldn’t mind a bit if we humans plunder it and exploit for centuries and centuries. Perhaps we should wise up and respect that Nature in which we are permanently rooted, cause whatever we do to Nature’s web-of-life, we do it to ourselves as parts of it.

“We did not weave the web of life, we are merely strands in it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves.” ― Chief Seattle.

Cheers, fellow earthlings!

This Awestruck Wanderer now retreats again into silent wonder and worried plans of action.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

1. KLEIN, Naomi.  This Changes Everything.

2. SCHUMACHER, E.F. Small Is Beautiful. Chapter 1.

3. Op. cit.

4. FULLER, Buckminster. The World of Buckminster Fuller (Documentary).

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” W.H. Auden

“ON JULY 28, 2010, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an historic resolution recognizing the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as “essential for the full enjoyment of the right to life.” For those of us in the balcony of the General Assembly that day, the air was tense. A number of powerful countries had lined up to oppose it, so it had to be put to a vote. The Bolivian ambassador to the UN, Pablo Solón, introduced the resolution by reminding the assembly that humans are composed of about two-thirds water and that our blood flows like a network of rivers to transport nutrients and energy through our bodies. “Water is life,” he said.

Then he laid out the story of the number of people around the world who were dying from lack of access to clean water and quoted a new World Health Organization study on diarrhea showing that, every three and a half seconds in the developing world, a child dies of waterborne disease. Ambassador Solón then quietly snapped his fingers three times and held his small finger up for a half-second. The General Assembly of the United Nations fell silent. Moments later, it voted overwhelmingly to recognize the human rights to water and sanitation. The floor erupted in cheers.

The recognition by the General Assembly of these rights represented a breakthrough in the struggle for water justice in the world. It followed years of hard work and was a key platform of our global water justice movement for at least two decades. For me personally, it was the culmination of many years of work, and I was proud and grateful to all who had helped make it happen.

But our work is far from over. Recognizing a right is simply the first step in making it a reality for the millions who are living in the shadow of the greatest crisis of our era. With our insatiable demand for water, we are creating the perfect storm for an unprecedented world water crisis: a rising population and an unrelenting demand for water by industry, agriculture, and the developed world; over-extraction of water from the world’s finite water stock; climate change, spreading drought; and income disparity between and within countries, with the greatest burden of the race for water falling on the poor.

“Suddenly it is so clear: the world is running out of fresh water.” These were the opening words of my 2002 book, Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (co-written with Tony Clarke), which warned of a mighty contest brewing over the world’s dwindling freshwater supplies. As water became the oil of the twenty-first century, we predicted, a water cartel would emerge to lay claim to the planet’s freshwater resources. This has come true. But so has our prediction that a global water justice movement would emerge to challenge the “lords of water.”

In my 2007 book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, I described the growing water cartel and its relentless drive to find ways to take control of the world’s water supplies. I also reported on the amazing work of the environmentalists, human rights activists, indigenous and women’s groups, small farmers, peasants, and thousands of grassroots communities that make up the global water justice movement fighting for the right to water and to keep water under public and democratic control. In the six years since Blue Covenant was published, much has been accomplished. Reports on the crisis are commonplace in mainstream media and the classroom. Books, films, and music move millions to action. The United Nations, other global institutions, and many universities are also sounding the alarm. A movement has coalesced to provide water and sanitation to the urban and rural poor, with mixed, but hopeful, results.

Yet in those same years the water crisis dramatically deepened. It is now accepted that, with the unexpected growth in both population and new consumer classes in almost every country, global demand for water in 2030 will outstrip supply by 40 percent. A report from the U.S. global intelligence agencies warns that one-third of the world’s people will live in basins where the deficit is more than 50 percent. Five hundred scientists from around the world met in Bonn in May 2013 at the invitation of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and sent out a warning that our abuse of water has caused the planet to enter a “new geologic age.” They likened this “planetary transformation” to the retreat of the glaciers more than 11,000 years ago. Within the space of two generations, the majority of people on the planet will face serious water shortages and the world’s water systems will reach a tipping point that could trigger irreversible change, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Already, the world-renowned scientists said, a majority of the world’s people live within 50 kilometres of an impaired water source — one that is running dry or polluted.

The stage is being set for drought on an unprecedented scale, for mass starvation and the migration of millions of water refugees leaving parched lands to look for water. All the justice and awareness in the world cannot stave off this future if the water is not there.

Open any textbook on water and you will see the numbers: how many children die every day; where the water tables have dried up; how aquifers are being depleted. Yet we continue to extract from our precious rivers and lakes and pump our groundwater, using the last of a finite supply of water that will be needed if future generations and other species are to survive.

Amazingly, most of our political leaders ignore the water crisis and create policy. decisions as if there were no end to water supplies. They continue to be captives of an economic framework that promotes unlimited growth, unregulated trade, and bigger and more powerful (and increasingly self-governing) transnational corporations, all of which hasten the destruction of our supplies of fresh water. Somewhere between the hard truths about the world’s water crisis and this perplexing denial on the part of political and corporate leaders, millions — soon to be billions — struggle to deal with disappearing watersheds.

The story does not need to end in tragedy. There are solutions to our water crisis and a path to a just and water-secure world. To get to this place, however, we must establish principles to guide us and help us create policies, laws, and international agreements to protect water and water justice, now and forever. This book puts forward four principles for a water-secure future. Principle one, “Water Is a Human Right,” addresses the current reality of water inequality and lays out a road map to fixing the problem. Principle two, “Water Is a Common Heritage,” argues that water is not like running shoes or cars and must not be allowed to become a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Principle three, “Water Has Rights Too,” makes the case for protection of source water and watershed governance and the need to make our human laws compatible with those of nature if we are to survive. The fourth principle, “Water Can Teach Us How to Live Together,” is a cry from the heart to come together around a common threat — the end of clean water — and find a way to live more lightly on this planet.

The grab for the planet’s dwindling resources is the defining issue of our time. Water is not a resource put here solely for our convenience, pleasure, and profit; it is the source of all life. It is urgent that we clarify the values and principles needed to protect the planet’s fresh water. I offer this book as a guide.”

MAUDE BARLOW, Blue Planet. Introduction.
DOWNLOAD E-BOOK: http://bit.ly/1wPQJc

“Market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change.” NAOMI KLEIN @ THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

Art by Evgeny Parfenov

“Time is tight, to be sure. But we could commit ourselves, tomorrow, to radically cutting our fossil fuel emissions and beginning the shift to zero-carbon sources of energy based on renewable technology, with a full-blown transition underway within the decade. We have the tools to do that. And if we did, the seas would still rise and the storms would still come, but we would stand a much greater chance of preventing truly catastrophic warming. Indeed, entire nations could be saved from the waves.

So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. That problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in our history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. Indeed, governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 1988 – the exact year that marked the dawning of what came to be called “globalisation,” with the signing of the agreement representing the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship between Canada and the US, later to be expanded into the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) with the inclusion of Mexico.

The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatisation of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending. Much has been written about the real-world costs of these policies – the instability of financial markets, the excesses of the super-rich, and the desperation of the increasingly disposable poor, as well as the failing state of public infrastructure and services. Very little, however, has been written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change.”

Naomi Klein
This Changes Everything
@ The Guardian

You might also enjoy:

READ AT GRIST 

 

Watch at The Guardian a 10-min video from the up-coming documentary by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, “This Changes Everything”

CANADA’S DIRTY OIL SANDS – A bunch of documentaries

To the Last Drop: Canada’s Dirty Oil Sands. Filmmakers: Niobe Thompson and Tom Radford. “Gripped in a Faustian pact with the American energy consumer, the Canadian government is doing everything it can to protect the dirtiest oil project ever known…”

“Petropolis” by Peter Mettler. A documentary about the tar sands in Alberta which also happen to be the world’s 2nd largest oil reserve. This movie shows aerial views on what the extraction process has done to the wilderness.

* * * * *

Naomi Klein Arrested Protesting Tar Sands Outside White House

 * * * * *

“People in the west live squeezed together, frenzied as wasps in the nest” – An indigenous Yanomami leader and shaman from Brazil shares his views on wealth, the environment and politics

“Their thoughts are constantly attached to their merchandise. They relentlessly and always desire new goods. I fear their euphoria of merchandise will have no end and they will entangle themselves to the point of chaos. They do not seem concerned that they are making us all perish with the epidemic of fumes that escape from all these things. They do not think that they are spoiling the earth and the sky, and that they will never be able to recreate new ones. (…) The white people’s thought is full of ignorance. They constantly devastate the land they live on and transform the waters they drink into quagmires! There is only one sky and we must take care of it, for if it becomes sick, everything will come to an end.” – Davi Kopenawa Yanomami

Read it all at The Guardian (December 30th, 2014)

You might also like:

“The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman”
by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert
Published by Harvard University Press

“The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon. Representing a people whose very existence is in jeopardy, Davi Kopenawa paints an unforgettable picture of Yanomami culture, past and present, in the heart of the rainforest—a world where ancient indigenous knowledge and shamanic traditions cope with the global geopolitics of an insatiable natural resources extraction industry.

In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation and experience as a shaman, as well as his first encounters with outsiders: government officials, missionaries, road workers, cattle ranchers, and gold prospectors. He vividly describes the ensuing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. To counter these threats, Davi Kopenawa became a global ambassador for his endangered people. The Falling Sky follows him from his native village in the Northern Amazon to Brazilian cities and finally on transatlantic flights bound for European and American capitals. These travels constitute a shamanic critique of Western industrial society, whose endless material greed, mass violence, and ecological blindness contrast sharply with Yanomami cultural values.

Bruce Albert, a close friend since the 1970s, superbly captures Kopenawa’s intense, poetic voice. This collaborative work provides a unique reading experience that is at the same time a coming-of-age story, a historical account, and a shamanic philosophy, but most of all an impassioned plea to respect native rights and preserve the Amazon rainforest.” – Harvard Univeristy Press

 

The Secret of the Seven Sisters – The Shameful Story of Oil [A 4-part series that reveals how a secret pact formed a cartel that controls the world’s oil]

The Secret of the Seven Sisters

 A four-part series that reveals how a secret pact formed a cartel that controls the world’s oil.

BY ALJAZEERA

On August 28, 1928, in the Scottish highlands, began the secret story of oil.

Three men had an appointment at Achnacarry Castle – a Dutchman, an American and an Englishman.

The Dutchman was Henry Deterding, a man nicknamed the Napoleon of Oil, having exploited a find in Sumatra. He joined forces with a rich ship owner and painted Shell salesman and together the two men founded Royal Dutch Shell.

The American was Walter C. Teagle and he represents the Standard Oil Company, founded by John D. Rockefeller at the age of 31 – the future Exxon. Oil wells, transport, refining and distribution of oil – everything is controlled by Standard Oil.

The Englishman, Sir John Cadman, was the director of the Anglo-Persian oil Company, soon to become BP. On the initiative of a young Winston Churchill, the British government had taken a stake in BP and the Royal Navy switched its fuel from coal to oil. With fuel-hungry ships, planes and tanks, oil became “the blood of every battle”.

The new automobile industry was developing fast, and the Ford T was selling by the million. The world was thirsty for oil, and companies were waging a merciless contest but the competition was making the market unstable.

That August night, the three men decided to stop fighting and to start sharing out the world’s oil. Their vision was that production zones, transport costs, sales prices – everything would be agreed and shared. And so began a great cartel, whose purpose was to dominate the world, by controlling its oil.

Four others soon joined them, and they came to be known as the Seven Sisters – the biggest oil companies in the world.

EPISODE 1 – Desert Storms

In the first episode, we travel across the Middle East, through both time and space.

Since that notorious meeting at Achnacarry Castle on August 28, 1928, they have never ceased to plot, to plan and to scheme.Throughout the region’s modern history, since the discovery of oil, the Seven Sisters have sought to control the balance of power.

They have supported monarchies in Iran and Saudi Arabia, opposed the creation of OPEC, profiting from the Iran-Iraq war, leading to the ultimate destruction of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

The Seven Sisters were always present, and almost always came out on top.

“We waged the Iran-Iraq war and I say we waged it, because one country had to be used to destroy the other. As they already benefit from the oil bonanza, and they’re building up financal reserves, from time to time they have to be bled.”

– Xavier Houzel, an oil trader

EPISODE 2 – The Black El Dorado

At the end of the 1960s, the Seven Sisters, the major oil companies, controlled 85 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Today, they control just 10 percent.

New hunting grounds are therefore required, and the Sisters have turned their gaze towards Africa. With peak oil, wars in the Middle East, and the rise in crude prices, Africa is the oil companies’ new battleground.

“Everybody thought there could be oil in Sudan but nobody knew anything. It was revealed through exploration by the American company Chevron, towards the end of the 70s. And that was the beginning of the second civil war, which went on until 2002. It lasted for 19 years and cost a million and a half lives and the oil business was at the heart of it.“

– Gerard Prunier, a historian

In their bid to dominate Africa, the Sisters installed a king in Libya, a dictator in Gabon, fought the nationalisation of oil resources in Algeria, and through corruption, war and assassinations, brought Nigeria to its knees.But the real story, the secret story of oil, begins far from Africa.

Oil may be flowing into the holds of huge tankers, but in Lagos, petrol shortages are chronic.

The country’s four refineries are obsolete and the continent’s main oil exporter is forced to import refined petrol – a paradox that reaps fortunes for a handful of oil companies.

Encouraged by the companies, corruption has become a system of government – some $50bn are estimated to have ‘disappeared’ out of the $350bn received since independence.

But new players have now joined the great oil game.

China, with its growing appetite for energy, has found new friends in Sudan, and the Chinese builders have moved in. Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir is proud of his co-operation with China – a dam on the Nile, roads, and stadiums.

In order to export 500,000 barrels of oil a day from the oil fields in the South – China financed and built the Heglig pipeline connected to Port Sudan – now South Sudan’s precious oil is shipped through North Sudan to Chinese ports.

In a bid to secure oil supplies out of Libya, the US, the UK and the Seven Sisters made peace with the once shunned Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, until he was killed during the Libyan uprising of 2011, but the flow of Libyan oil remains uninterrupted.

In need of funds for rebuilding, Libya is now back to pumping more than a million barrels of oil per day. And the Sisters are happy to oblige.

EPISODE 3 – The Dancing Bear

In the Caucasus, the US and Russia are vying for control of the region. The great oil game is in full swing. Whoever controls the Caucasus and its roads, controls the transport of oil from the Caspian Sea.

Tbilisi, Erevan and Baku – the three capitals of the Caucasus. The oil from Baku in Azerbaijan is a strategic priority
for all the major companies.

From the fortunes of the Nobel family to the Russian revolution, to World War II, oil from the Caucasus and the Caspian has played a central role. Lenin fixated on conquering the Azeri capital Baku for its oil, as did Stalin and Hitler.

On his birthday in 1941, Adolf Hitler received a chocolate and cream birthday cake, representing a map. He chose the slice with Baku on it.

On June 22nd 1941, the armies of the Third Reich invaded Russia. The crucial battle of Stalingrad was the key to the road to the Caucasus and Baku’s oil, and would decide the outcome of the war.

Stalin told his troops: “Fighting for one’s oil is fighting for one’s freedom.”

After World War II, President Nikita Krushchev would build the Soviet empire and its Red Army with revenues from the USSR’s new-found oil reserves.

Decades later, oil would bring that empire to its knees, when Saudi Arabia and the US would conspire to open up the oil taps, flood the markets, and bring the price of oil down to $13 per barrel. Russian oligarchs would take up the oil mantle, only to be put in their place by their president, Vladimir Putin, who knows that oil is power.

The US and Putin‘s Russia would prop up despots, and exploit regional conflicts to maintain a grip on the oil fields of the Caucusus and the Caspian.

But they would not have counted on the rise of a new, strong and hungry China, with an almost limitless appetite for oil and energy. Today, the US, Russia and China contest the control of the former USSR’s fossil fuel reserves, and the supply routes. A three-handed match, with the world as spectators, between three ferocious beasts – The American eagle, the Russian bear, and the Chinese dragon.

EPISODE 4 – A Time for Lies

Peak oil – the point in time at which the highest rate of oil extraction has been reached, and after which world production will start decline. Many geologists and the International Energy Agency say the world’s crude oil output reached its peak in 2006.

But while there may be less oil coming out of the ground, the demand for it is definitely on the rise.

The final episode of this series explores what happens when oil becomes more and more inaccessible, while at the same time, new powers like China and India try to fulfill their growing energy needs.

And countries like Iran, while suffering international sanctions, have welcomed these new oil buyers, who put business ahead of lectures on human rights and nuclear ambitions.

At the same time, oil-producing countries have had enough with the Seven Sisters controlling their oil assets. Nationalisation of oil reserves around the world has ushered in a new generation of oil companies all vying for a slice of the oil pie.

These are the new Seven Sisters.

Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, the largest and most sophisticated oil company in the world; Russia’s Gazprom, a company that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin wrested away from the oligarchs; The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which, along with its subsidiary, Petrochina, is the world’s secnd largest company in terms of market value; The National Iranian Oil Company, which has a monopoly on exploration, extraction, transportation and exportation of crude oil in Iran – OPEC’s second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia; Venezuela’s PDVSA, a company the late president Hugo Chavez dismantled and rebuilt into his country’s economic engine and part of his diplomatic arsenal; Brazil’s Petrobras, a leader in deep water oil production, that pumps out 2 million barrels of crude oil a day; and Malaysia’s Petronas – Asia’s most profitable company in 2012.

Mainly state-owned, the new Seven Sisters control a third of the world’s oil and gas production, and more than a third of the world’s reserves. The old Seven Sisters, by comparison, produce a tenth of the world’s oil, and control only three percent of the reserves.

The balance has shifted.

David Suzuki: “If it ain’t working, change the darn thing!”

David Suzuki in this interview about facing the reality of climate change and other environmental issues from Moyers & Company.

The Keepers Of Our Past & The Guides To Our Future (By Arundhati Roy)

“The day capitalism is forced to tolerate non-capitalist societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination, the day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless, is the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.

The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination — an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future.”

—Arundhati Roy

(The image that illustrates this post was found in Flick; it’s a “Pachamama” Mural in Bariloche (Argentina), near the artisan market. “Pachamama” refers to “Mother Earth” and is central to many indigenous cultures across South America.)

The next time you hear someone say “no one gives a shit about climate change,” show them this photo… #PeoplesClimate

“The next time you hear someone say ‘no one gives a shit about climate change’, show them this photo.” Mother Jones (This post on Facebook has reached in a few hours more than 20.000 shares, 40.000 likes, and counting…); learn more at http://bit.ly/XGiGr3. Photo by Michael Polard, at the People’s Climate March, New York City, September 21st 2014. More than 300.000 people were there!

10 Great Episodes Of Al Jazeera’s “Fault Lines” (With Avi Lewis)

Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis

Cheers, fellow wanderers! I’ve made a selection of some of my favorite videos, from one of my favorite journalists, Avi Lewis; see below 10 full episodes of Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines, which I enthusiastically consider one of the masterpieces of contemporary non-fiction television.

These several hours of great investigation about our world’s present situation take us on a ride around the world: there are reports on Detroit’s auto-industry collapse; about Haiti’s attempts at reconstruction after devastating earthquakes; about Canada’s ongoing alliance with Israel, despite Zionism’s genocidal practices against the civil population of Gaza and the West Bank; about Bolivia’s fight against the climate crisis, in an epoch when, for the first tim in its history, the country has an indigenous leader as its president (Evo Morales); and so on and so forth…

Great in-depth interviews – with Arundhati Roy and Cornel West, for example – and detailed reports about the U.S.A. in the Obama Years are also to be found in these highly informative and contextualized pieces of authentic investigative journalism.

Without further praising, i’ll leave you to watch them!

 A quick intro about Avi Lewis and his career also follows, sliced from Wikipédia and Al Jazeera:

“Avram David “Avi” Lewis (born 1968) is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, former host of the Al Jazeera English show Fault Lines, and former host of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) current-affairs program On the Map. (…) In 2004, Lewis and his wife Naomi Klein collaborated on The Take — a documentary that detailed the “recovered factory” movement in Argentina. (…) Lewis began hosting CBC Newsworld’s The Big Picture with Avi Lewis in the autumn of 2006 and On the Map in 2007. He became host of Frontline USA for Al Jazeera television in 2008.” (via Wikipédia)

“In the late 1990s, as the host and producer of counterSpin on CBC Newsworld, Lewis presided over more than 500 nationally televised debates in three years. In the early 1990s, he hosted City TV’s landmark music journalism show The New Music, interviewing hundreds of musicians, from David Bowie and Leonard Cohen to The Rolling Stones and The Spice Girls. At the same time, he was Much Music’s political specialist, pioneering political “uncoverage” for a youth audience and winning a Gemini Award for Best Special Event Coverage…” (via Al Jazeera)

Enjoy!