Corruptors of Governments

The other day I mentioned in passing the law suit that temporarily bars Venezuela from control over its own oil supplies -- the order passed down freezes 12 billion dollars in assets.

I've been avoiding Venezuela. I'm not sure I can do it any more justice today. As if to underscore that fact I clicked on a link to "current local time in Caracas;" It's 6:29 am there -- which is exactly a half an hour off of the time here. Good Grief.

I was told last year that Venezuela was the biggest story not being looked at in oil world-wide. Venezuela, one of the largest oil suppliers in the world, I was told, is letting their fields languish in pursuit of it's socialist ideals... putting money into social programs and such at the expense of the oil fields. "Isn't that a good thing?" I said at the time; feeling silly even as the words came out.

The latest law suit with Exxon has to do with Chavez attempting to exert control over their own oil reserves -- asking Exxon and others to abandon billions of dollars of investment.

The problem with this story is that I don't trust the reporting. That is my least favorite situation to be in. For the most part I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that the American press is an amazing institution -- but occasionally I do feel like I'm reading non-thinking pop-language soundbites at best -- government propaganda at worst.

Venezuela’s government has been seething since Exxon recently won orders in British, Dutch and American courts freezing as much as $12 billion in Venezuelan oil assets abroad — refineries and other oil-related infrastructure that Venezuela owns. Venezuela vowed to overturn the decisions before arbitration over Exxon’s attempts to win compensation for its nationalized oil project.
By Simon Romero, NYT

Seething? Vowed? It has seemed clear over the past few months in trying to delve into this story that Chavez is turning into a cartoon.

"I'LL GET YOU MY PRETTY, AND YOUR LITTLE DOG, TOO!"
I watched the Wizard of Oz this weekend with 6 kids between the ages of 5-7.

Chavez, for his part, is certainly an easy target -- the propaganda he spews aids the image...

“I speak to the American empire, because that’s the master,” Mr. Chávez said. “Continue, and you will see that we won’t send one drop of oil to the empire of the United States.” Referring to Exxon, he said, “They are imperialist bandits, white-collar criminals, corruptors of governments, overthrowers of governments.”

The issue is language again, and how do we trust people who are so clearly trying to tell us what to think... so clearly communicating with words intended to elicit feeling, not thinking...

The problem inside Venezuela is that there is still an extreme food crisis.

The problem outside Venezuela is that world oil prices being effected.

I guess one question is whether or not socialism can exist at all in this globalized world -- and how on earth that works in a country so enmeshed in the oil market.

Boundaries 2

I'm still thinking about boundaries -- about where they exist and don't.

The Oil Drum reported,
Today, someone in the NYMEX pit session paid $100 a barrel for front month crude oil.

That just means the price didn't stay there, but it got there. Big Deal (as in it is -- as in, it's no.)
The article on Bloomberg said:

``This is the culmination of everything that we talked about last year,'' said John Kilduff, vice president of risk management at MF Global Ltd. in New York. ``Various geopolitical problems have deteriorated overnight, in particular Nigeria and Pakistan. Commodities, and in particular oil, have become safe havens in a dangerous world.''
Nigeria, The Middle East, Venezuela... And: Prices rose 2.9 percent last week partly because of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's former prime minister. Pakistan borders Iran, which holds the world's second- biggest oil reserves, and is located along the Arabian Sea, where tankers travel before entering the Persian Gulf.

These things between us -- between here and there, you and me, up and down -- I'm much more interested in the way we travel over, and yet these markers seem to hold some undeniable psychological weight. It's not at all unlike New Year's day itself, really -- here we are, it's all the same as it was yesterday...

Passage over Water

by Robert Duncan

We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,

lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us.

The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last

under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars.

Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time

our love like a knife between us

defining the boundaries that we can never cross

nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,

cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths

and the dark wound closed in behind us.

Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made,

gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward,

the rooms where we had come together bombd.

But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel

your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt

over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now,

you pass with ease into the destructive world.

There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails,

falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore

and within the indestructible night I am alone.

link to the Poetry Foundation Archive
Robert Duncan, “Passage over Water” from Selected Poems. Copyright 1950 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Reserves

This week I had two conversations about oil reserves -- one was with a friend who works in the economic sector -- and another who works for Care.

The first said the largest driving force of the price of oil was the situation in Venezuela, a story I've been trying to understand for weeks. Venezuela is producing less and less oil.

A May article from Peak Oil quoted government numbers and said:
The IEA reported that Venezuelan oil production dropped by 40,000 b/d in April to 2.35 million. The transfer of the Orinoco heavy crude projects to government control has increased the uncertainty about the future of Venezuelan production. Last month, Orinoco heavy crude oil enhancing projects supplied only 455,000 bpd -compared to their 630,000 bpd capacity- because of both "nationalization" and compliance with the OPEC production.

My friend said that Chavez was concentrating on the people inside of the country and letting the oil field languish (I don't think he used the word languish...). I said that is a good thing, isn't it? I felt like Shirley Temple. He was talking about the economy of the world.

My friend who works with Care was talking about another country where mining (not oil, it's true) operations were stalled because of money distribution issues. She said, "All that energy is in the ground, not doing anybody any good."

re·serve (r-zûrv)

8. An amount of a mineral, fossil fuel, or other resource known to exist in a particular location and to be exploitable.

Known to be exploitable...
language again.

The Army Reseves
The Federal Reserves
reserved demeanor
reserved table
reserved for you

Future and containment reside in every definition.

Yes, maybe containment is entirely disruptive in the present.
Yes, maybe containment is a way to stop suffering in the present.
Yes, maybe containment is keeping what resides from doing good in the present.

My son was up, screaming, from 1-4.
I'm dizzy, and calling on my own reserves today.

Not A Poem

Maybe it's the season -- but I'm still thinking about things that are missing. I'm still missing ...

Yesterday there was a "huge" explosion and fire at an oil jetty in Nigeria. I read about it on Peak Oil, which lead to an un-bilined article in Afriquenligne which reported:

Lagos, Nigeria - A huge explosion triggered by a dawn fire Wednesday rocked a jetty operated by the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) at Okrika in South-eastern Rivers state, partially destroying the facility and some vessels that were being loaded with crude oil , and leaving several people injured, the police said.

Rivers state Police Commissioner Felix Ogbaudu told journalists the cause of the fire had not been ascertained.

The story wasn't covered in the Times -- or the London Times, the BBC, The Guardian or NPR.

The Associated Press also didn't have the story -- but there was a really disturbing article (if taken in this context) on Monday, two days before the fire:

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) -- Nigeria's main militant group Monday urged all armed factions in the restive southern oil heartland to unite and cripple Africa's biggest petroleum industry.

Now, I have no idea if these stories are related. Again, from silence comes lack of grounding. Is Nigeria on the brink of civil war? Does this matter to me? Should it? Does it matter to the global landscape of oil? According to numbers on the Energy Information Administration site, Nigeria is the 5th largest oil importer to the US. In October we imported 1,184,000 barrels of oil a day from the country. The issue in Nigeria seems to be, again, that oil money is not making its way anywhere near the people of the land it is drilled from.

Almost exactly a year ago a pipeline explosion in Lagos killed 250 people and was widely reported.


Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters

That is one of the most beautiful/moving/all telling news photographs I have ever seen. Akintunde Akinleye, thank you.

Information and communication are proven, over and over, to be the only real source of change -- of responsibility, relationship, understanding. How news judgments are made effects the overall story -- effects history.

So, again, what are we missing? If we don't follow the daily, if we are in touch only with disasters and events, are we really connected at all? If no one died in Nigeria yesterday, and therefore it is not a story, yet a civil war is brewing and no one hears -- is information conveyance served? If every day, everyone in America heard about the daily lives of the people in the lands where the oil came from would it make any difference?

One problem with the news is that often history and flow become lost to the moment. A series of things may happen over time, and if we experience them as singular, it becomes impossible to put them into context or explore their meaning. Not unlike a photograph -- a singular image. But the difference between the singular image and the singular news story is that the image strives to capture a whole. A small news story makes no such attempt. Necessarily it must not -- singular facts have to be its only purpose.

This is why we need art. The real communication is not transmitted in the news -- and while we need to know the news in order to understand the contexts in which we live, real communication is felt deeper, understood in the moment of connection like a touch. Maybe it is touch I am missing...

Last summer, NPR ran a story on a poet from Lagos, Aj Dagga Tolar.

He writes, in an excerpt from the title poem of his book, "This Country is Not a Poem:"

Who cares
For the poetry of our existence
The way they care for poetry
Leaving us every moment with metaphors
To feel not at all the failing of poetry

This country
Dare you to ask
"Have you seen dead bodies before?"
Answer with another ask
"Are there not dead bodies everywhere?"

Stuff enough to make more poems
Who cares to hear
Lagos is a poem, not a place
Ajegunle is a poem, not a place
Cannot sit to hear this poem

SUNG in Yoruba:
Kile ni wa gbo
Kile ni wa wo
Ara mo ri ri
Kilo oju ori leko ri
Kile ni wa gbo
Kile ni wa wo

Going, Going...

The question about peak oil is pretty simple. Oil is a finite resource. Our demand continues to increase. Eventually, it stands to reason, we are going to run out. After that, we will look back and know on exactly what day in history all the oil fields in the world produced the most oil.

We seem to be right around the peak of oil extraction -- the US, it seems, topped out in the 1970s. Drillers have recently found new ways to get oil from wells already deemed unproductive -- these methods are sort of like blowing air into the bottom of a glass to free the dust. Because of this US production has gone up of late -- kind of like finding $20 in your back pocket -- except it's billions of barrels of oil.

There are debates about how much the world has in reserve. There are debates about how much oil is left to be found.

It seems to me these are all just questions of semantics and procrastination. Some things simply end. We may try to stall or change our relationship with oil -- but we are merely diverting ourselves from moving on.



Read more Signe Wilkinson

Calculation request of the morning -- how long would it take for us to use it all, given our current rates of increase of consumption, if we suddenly found the entire core of the earth was filled with oil?

I have also have been wondering where the pockets in the earth go -- when they are void of what filled them.

Gullibility Is In The Air

We can find people to tell us whatever we want to hear. That's always the case -- in love, in science, in war. Trying to decipher global warming is not really that far off, is it, from trying to determine whether or not love exists or poetry matters... we are all just trying to figure out what ground we are walking on, and where to take the next step.

Last week (December 5, to be exact) the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial entitled "The Science of Gore's Nobel."

Through the course of the article, Holman W. Jenkins Jr., a member of the WSJ editorial board, questions the validity of the concept of global warming and asserts that the entire thing is politics and money.

It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn't. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they've chosen to believe.

A response was printing on Yahoo News and reprinted in one of the oil energy blogs I've been following:

The bar for Wall Street Journal editorials, in the journalistic equivalent of limbo dancing, keeps dropping. In a piece titled, "The Science of Gore's Nobel " (UPDATE: Open access link), Holman W. Jenkins Jr. of the WSJ ed board, manages to slander the media, Al Gore, the Nobel Committee, and all climate scientists -- without offering any facts to back up the attacks:

Yesterday I said I would be looking into peak oil this week, and I will -- but I think it's important at this point to think about rhetoric for a minute. For myself -- I'm having trouble at this point finding reliable sources when it comes down to some of the greater issues. In part because our country is so conservative, the debates are often taking place in the non-regulated arena of the Internet -- where there is little accountability and often even less respect. It is a relief to me that I know so many people, as it turns out, working in the fields of science and energy -- they allow me the benefit of their knowledge coupled with a personal trust of friendship it is hard to come by in the greater arena.

Really, all we do is trust the people around us to share what they know. We have ideas about who we will trust based on our experience -- and ways that we trust and don't. I trust Keegan to pick my kids up at school if I'm in a car accident -- I trust my father to send me $10 bucks if I need it -- I trust others to forgive or care about me from a distance...

I know that the Wall Street Journal's editorial board is known for its conservative and often inflammatory nature.

I trust the Wall Street Journal's reporting. I've read a lot of their stories, studied some of their mistakes in grad school, know they have tremendous firewalls between their editorial boards and their journalists and their advertisers.

The government doesn't allow us these same safeguards, and the attack on the media is one of the strongest allies in the war against the freedom of information in this country. There are problems with our media to be sure, but seek out good reporters and reporting institutions and you will find the points of entry of most of the major debates we are having.

There are people who say global warming doesn't exist.
There are people who say the debate about peak oil is silly too.

Did you ever hear the joke where someone says -- gullible isn't in the dictionary? In high school I looked it up. Really. (It's in there, by the way.) Maybe that's why I became a reporter -- to trust facts. Maybe that's why I became a poet -- there are no facts.

At any rate -- there are warmer and warmer falls.
At any rate love is not all...
At any rate, there are poems.

Fiduciary

by Randall Mann

the relationship between

� � � blackbird and fencepost, between

the cow and its egret, the field

� � � and wildflowers overrunning the field—

so little depends upon their trust.

� � � Here, in God we trust

to keep our cash and thoughts in line—

� � � in the sky, an unexplained white line

could be the first of many omens.

� � � But this is no country for omens,

the line as chalky as the moon,

� � � bleak and useless as the moon

now rising like a breath of cold air . . .

� � � There is gullibility in the air.