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https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/11/15/welcome-to-the-oil-death-spiral/

Welcome to the oil death spiral

There is something deeply tragic about watching people who would be dead within a fortnight without oil nevertheless calling for oil – and fossil fuels more broadly – to be banned immediately.  It is possible, of course, that these people believe that food grows inside supermarkets or that the chemicals used to provide clean drinking water can be beamed to the waterworks using Star Trek technology.  The hard reality though, is that every aspect of modern living – even for those of us surviving on the margins – depends upon oil… and not just any old oil.  The workhorse behind the modern, hi-tech western economies is the roughly 30 percent fraction of an average barrel of oil called diesel.

Take a look around the room where you are reading this.  Every item your eyes land upon was, at some point in its life, transported on a truck – if you are in the UK, a large part of it will have arrived on a ship from Asia too.  Almost all of those trucks used diesel as a fuel.  Some smaller trucks and vans may have used petrol (gasoline) and an even smaller number may have been electric… but only the small ones – you cannot run a large semi using batteries (at least, not if you want to leave some space for cargo).

Take another look around the room for anything made from or with plastic, or anything which is painted or dyed.  These, too required oil in their manufacture.  Almost everything made of metal or requiring metal as a component began life in the bucket of a diesel-powered crane, which loaded it as an ore onto a diesel-powered mining truck, which delivered it to a fossil fuel-powered grinding machine which, in turn moved the crushed ore to a fossil fuel (coal or gas)-powered smelter.

Even if the electricity you are using to read this post was generated using a wind turbine – something which is increasingly common on windy days in the UK these days – you still haven’t escaped fossil fuels.  The average, two-megawatt land-based turbine requires some 30,000 tons of concrete – about 60 truckloads.  Then there’s the steel:

“For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers…  Steel used in turbine construction embodies typically about 35 gigajoules per metric ton.”

The other thing with wind turbines is that they are mostly located in remote areas so that they rack up thousands of miles – at around 6.5 miles per gallon of diesel – transporting the components from the factory to the wind farm.  And then there’s the thousands of miles of copper and aluminium cables to connect them back to the urban centres that need the electricity… all of it manufactured and transported with fossil fuels.

Here’s a question you might not have thought about:  when did the world reach the coal limit of coal production?  Because the world today is more dependent upon coal than at any time before – largely because the western economies offshored our industry to China, and because China has leaned heavily on coal to develop its economy.  But almost all of the coal production today depends upon diesel-powered machinery.  The days when steam power – combined with animal and human labour – could provide us with all of the coal we needed, ended in the second decade of the twentieth century:

Coal (and gas) produced since then has depended ever more on a steady supply of cheap diesel, so that, by 2002, China had burned more coal than Britain has done since the dawn of the industrial revolution.  And had it not done so, the imports which we depend upon – ironically including wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear components – would simply not have appeared.

Put simply, without oil – and especially diesel – we are done.  So we can thank our lucky stars that there is still plenty of oil yet to recover… right?  Well, not quite.  While some estimates claim that – including the source rock – there is as much oil beneath the ground than all of the oil we have consumed so far, most of it will never see the light of day.  This is because all of the big, easy to extract oil fields have been discovered, and most of them are depleting.  The fields which remain tend to be small; and are often in difficult locations – such as the Arctic or the northeast Atlantic – where – reflecting the thermodynamic limit – the cost of recovery may be higher than the price the oil can be sold for.

You will, of course, have been painfully aware of the recent spikes in the price of oil – at one point taking them above the psychological $100 per barrel mark.  Although for most of us, awareness comes when we fill up at the pumps or when we have to pay ever higher prices for anything that arrives on a truck.  Most people believe the establishment media BS about it all being Putin’s fault – if true, they should make Putin the next Doctor Who, because it would take time travel for a war which broke out in February 2022 to cause prices to spike in September 2021.  Worse still, by ignoring the real causes we are left unable to respond to what is coming.

There are five broad causes of the oil death spiral.  The first goes back to the early 1990s, when politicians wrongly believed that diesel-powered cars would mitigate climate change because they are more energy-efficient than petrol cars.  The trouble was that the existing oil refining infrastructure could not handle a growth in demand for diesel.  Restructuring the existing infrastructure would cost billions.  Developing new infrastructure would be even more expensive.  And with a growing environmental opposition, few politicians wanted to risk giving the go-ahead.  The answer – as always – was to offshore production… in the UK’s case, to Russia… what could possibly go wrong?

The second problem is with oil itself.  Although we can talk about an average barrel of oil in order to give a sense of the refined products we get from the refinery, oil deposits are inconsistent.  At one end of the scale, hydraulically fractured oil from shale tends to be very light.  At the other end, tar sands are more like the asphalt we use on road surfaces than anything you would want to put in your car.  Different refineries around the world require their particular density of oil, so that even net exporting countries like the USA must import some of the oil they need.  The American oil refineries, for example, need to import heavier oils.

The third problem is that global oil production peaked at the end of 2018.  Today we are producing around five million barrels-a-day less than we had been at the peak.  This, in and of itself, would have caused prices to rise… had it not been for the fourth problem: that an insane public health technocracy was allowed to lock down the global economy for the best part of two years without even considering the economic impact this would have.  Instead of sending the correct price signal – higher oil prices – the lockdowns created the opposite; oil so cheap that at one point you couldn’t give it away.

Everyone in the oil industry, from the drillers to the refiners responded accordingly, shutting down production and mothballing infrastructure.  Meanwhile, investors – who might otherwise have seen rising prices as evidence of a good investment opportunity – moved their money elsewhere.  The result was that when we were eventually given permission to get on with our lives again, there was nowhere near enough oil to go around.  And so, price increases turned into price spikes and an energy shortage turned into an energy crisis.

Another reason why investors were – and remain – reticent about putting money into the oil industry is that – problem five – the technocracy has decided that we can do without oil entirely.  The use of ESG investing rules makes it harder for the oil industry to attract investment anyway.  But the bigger problem is that the returns on investment tend to be long-term.  If, for example, someone was foolish enough to stump up the billions required to build new diesel-producing refineries in the USA or the UK, it might take ten or twenty years to reap the rewards.  But the governments of both countries have said that they will ban internal combustion engine vehicles in just eight years’ time and will have banned fossil fuels entirely just twenty-eight years from now.

Neoclassical – aka “wrong” – economic theory argues that faced with shortages, rising prices will encourage competition.  New investment will come in to boost production and bring supply back into balance with demand.  When this happens, prices will fall once more.  As the old adage has it, “the answer to high prices is high prices.”  But this isn’t what’s happening.  There is no appetite among investors or those with capital already sunk in the oil industry to develop new production and new infrastructure.  Indeed, given the forced march to the net zero utopia, it makes more sense to let someone else deal with the shortages and instead enjoy the fruits of higher prices while they last.  As Bloomberg reported last month:

“Diesel appears scarce heading into the northern hemisphere’s winter and will push fuel prices higher, bedeviling policymakers who are focusing on crude to tame energy inflation, warned Goldman Sachs Group in a note to clients…

“Underinvestment in the nation’s fuelmaking capacity, exacerbated by refinery closures and disruptions, is leading to a shortage of refined products, especially diesel, whose stocks are at ‘unprecedentedly low levels,’ said the bank…  As a result of what it’s describing as a structural shortage of product, Goldman raised its price forecast for gasoline and diesel next year to $4.32 and $5.34 a gallon, respectively, from $3.99 and $5.07. The bank sees gasoline prices higher even as it forecasts demand falling below 2021 levels.”

This spells bad news for European economies – including the UK’s – which have fewer dollars with which to bid for diesel as the shortages grow.  As Ron Bousso and Laura Sanicola at Reuters reported recently:

“Traders are diverting Europe-bound tankers carrying diesel to the U.S. East Coast as the two regions battle for supplies amid an acute shortage and soaring prices.  At least two tankers carrying 90,000 tonnes of diesel and jet fuel are heading from Europe to the U.S. East Coast, according to traders and Refinitiv ship tracking data.”

The recent G7 decision to attempt to impose a price cap on Russian diesel will only exacerbate the problem.  Although in theory, the higher prices ought to be causing an investment boom, as Irina Slav at OilPrice reports:

“This boom has yet to materialize, however. In the meantime, fuel demand remains robust, resulting in a shortage. In Europe, there have been contributing factors, such as the French refinery workers’ strike, which has made the shortage much worse than it would have been otherwise, and the upcoming planned maintenance-related refinery closures.

“Europe is currently buying a lot of Russian diesel to fill the gap, but this will have to stop next February as the embargo on Russian fuels kicks in, further aggravating an already complicated situation with the supply of middle distillates in a major consuming region.

“Argus reported this week that Europe is in for a major diesel supply shock because of low inventories and strong demand.”

This growing shock is not on most people’s radar, simply because we are still reeling from the eye-watering rises in gas prices which, because we rely on gas for electricity and fertiliser, are the main driver of price rises.  But in the longer term, a growing shortage of diesel is going to be far more damaging.  And thus far, there seems to be no recognition among the technocracy, the establishment media or the public at large, that without a serious course correction we face ruin.  As Juliet Samuel at the Telegraph put it recently:

“The meeting goes like this: ‘We need you!’ say the politicians. The producers scratch their heads as they mull $20 billion, 20-year investments, and wonder whether, when the war is over and the green bandwagon rolls back into town, the politicians will still sound so sweet on them. ‘Your green targets still say we need to shut down by 2030,’ they point out. To which Europe says: ‘Well, of course. Fossil fuels are evil!’”

That’s the real irony – the Just Stop Oil crowd don’t need to throw soup over artworks or glue themselves to motorway gantries, because the politicians and technocrats have already called time on the oil age.  There’s an old saying from Aesop’s Fables (c. 260 BC): “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!”  Those activists and politicians clamouring for an end to fossil fuels would do well to study its moral message.  Because the world has entered an oil – or rather, a diesel – death spiral from which we will likely not recover.  And the future is not some green techno-utopia, but something more akin to a new dark age.

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/85142/biden-creates-new-permanent-office-of-pandemic-preparedness-and-response-policy-laying-foundation.html

Biden creates new ‘permanent’ Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, laying foundation for second round of medical martial law

Will Americans be duped again into complying with high-pressure masking, group-think, forced lockdowns, and repeated mRNA jabs?

Last week on Friday, July 21, the Biden administration quietly announced the creation of a new permanent office within the White House called the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, or OPPR. 

Joe Biden has named a military man, retired Air Force Maj. General Paul Friedrichs, to head up the new office.

Why now? I thought Covid was over. Biden said months ago Covid was over, totally conquered.

The only folks I know who are still getting Covid are the ones who got multiple mRNA Covid jabs, causing their immune-compromised bodies to continue to manufacture the toxic spike proteins, which then make them sick. We also continue to hear weekly of young healthy people who are dying “suddenly” with no warning.

By creating this new office and emphasizing that it will be “permanent,” this is a red flag that should have our keen attention. Is the government, still drunk with new powers gained from the last pandemic, telegraphing to us plebiscites that another pandemic is right around the corner?

The significance of this step by Biden last Friday cannot be fully and properly contextualized without going into a little history dating back to 2019 and 2020. We could go even further back to show how U.S. laws were changed in preparation for a massively hyped pandemic, but for the sake of space I will only go back a few years.

While the media and the entire globalist establishment did their best to hide it, the United States, in the spring of 2020, went into a form of medical martial law.

In a May 15, 2020, news release from the Department of Defense, the Trump administration announced the appointment of “General Gustave F. Perna as chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, the administration’s national program to accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics (medical countermeasures).”

Below is Trump at the White House podium with General Perna as he announced the launch of Operation Warp Speed.

On May 14, 2020, Reuters reported as follows:

President Donald Trump is mobilizing the U.S. military to distribute a novel coronavirus vaccine when one becomes available and will focus first on older Americans.

“You know it’s a massive job to give this vaccine,” Trump said in an interview broadcast Thursday on Fox Business Network. “Our military is now being mobilized so at the end of the year, we’re going to be able to give it to a lot of people very, very rapidly.”

He said he believes there will be a vaccine by the end of the year and the United States is mobilizing “our military and other forces” on that assumption.

Where did that assumption come from? Who was Trump relying on for his information and guidance in placing a Covid vaccine, which we are told did not even exist at that point, let alone been tested for short, medium and long-term safety, under the U.S. military?

I’m not sure if this had ever been done before, at least not in America.

Militaries are built to mobilize for war. And this was no different.

The war was about to be waged against the American people. The weapons of war in this case would be a fierce propaganda campaign to prepare the battlefield, followed by a massive effort to inject a bioweapon directly into the bodies of every man, woman and child, down to 6 months of age.

The establishment waged this war for two years. Get a shot. Get another shot, and another, and another. They paid you to get it. They threatened you with loss of job, loss of rights to travel and assemble, loss of healthcare, and loss of various benefits if you didn’t get it. When has that ever happened before?

On September 1, 2022, Biden delivered his infamous “red speech” in which he threatened Americans who opposed his policies on Covid vaccines and other issues while flanked by two U.S. Marines. The symbolic message was unmistakable.

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA – SEPTEMBER 01: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers a primetime speech at Independence National Historical Park September 1, 2022 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. President Biden spoke on “the continued battle for the Soul of the Nation.” (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) " data-medium-file="https://leohohmann.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/biden-red-speech.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://leohohmann.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/biden-red-speech.jpg?w=660" />

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA – SEPTEMBER 01: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers a primetime speech at Independence National Historical Park September 1, 2022 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. President Biden spoke on “the continued battle for the Soul of the Nation.” (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The leash of tyranny has been loosened over the last 10 to 12 months. Travel has returned to normal, most of the mandates have been dropped, but all of the unconstitutional laws, rules, logistical practices and executive orders remain in place and at the ready to once again ramp up the heat on Americans to comply with whatever “new normal” the globalists desire to impose next.

And Biden is getting ready for it by creating this new OPPR.

But before we get into Biden’s latest government creation, we have to finish the story of what has led up to this point.

President Trump placed the distribution of an unproven, untested Covid vaccine under the U.S. military and engaged his White House Covid-19 Task Force, which was run by then-Vice President Mike Pence along with Dr. Deborah Birx.

Pence, a globalist neocon and an ex-Marine who comes across as almost robotic and soulless, was the perfect man for the job. He no doubt worked closely with the military-industrial complex to get this bioweapon offloaded into the civilian centers where it could be mass injected into the population.

The whole Covid response soon became all about vaccines. Every other treatment was demonized in the state-run media and on social media. Any counter messaging, any questioning of the vaccine’s safety or efficacy fell into what the government would call “mis, dis, or mal information” and had to be eradicated, just as the globalists had war-gamed during the Event 201 tabletop exercise on October 19, 2019, in New York City. It was here that CIA agent Avril Haines participated along with representatives of the CDC, the Chinese CDC, the United Nations World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation and other globalist entities would rehearse their response to the upcoming Covid biowarfare production.

The Covid vaccine program became the most intense marketing and propaganda operation in world history, with people from all ages and all walks of life pressured to comply. I can still hear Trump bragging about the “medical miracle,” followed up a few months later by Joe Biden whispering “get the shot.”

When criticized for his role in bringing out an unsafe and ineffective vaccine based on all-new mRNA technology, Trump doubled down.

In May 2021, Trump gave himself credit for the coronavirus vaccine rollout, calling it “one of the greatest miracles of the ages.” 

Trump issued a statement saying that without his administration’s help with the purchase and military distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine, the U.S. wouldn’t be where it’s at in terms of the number of vaccinated Americans, adding that it took his team just nine months to develop a vaccine while “everybody was saying it would take at least 3-5 years.” 

These two men, Trump and Biden, are more alike than many of us are willing to admit, because when the chips were down, neither one was a true leader. They simply did what the same group of unelected “experts” told them to do.

The whole theater production remains to this day a largely military psychological operation based on fear and mass compliance.

After initially criticizing what Trump had done in terms of “operation warp speed,” Joe Biden, once he took office, continued the Trump policy of militarizing and pressurizing the vaccine rollout. Almost no American could honestly say they did not feel at least some pressure to submit to the shots. If you didn’t then you live in a cocoon.

The declaration of a national emergency was the key component used to engage the military and shield the vaccine manufacturers from even rudimentary levels of accountability and liability for their products. Because the vaccine was presented under “medical counter-measures” and placed under the military, all national and international laws protecting the civilian population from harmful experimental medical treatments were waived. Tens of thousands of Americans have paid for this outrage with their lives. Others have been permanently harmed and placed on disability, no longer able to work.

Among the laws that were waived was the requirement that all people offered experimental treatments must be granted “informed consent” – a requirement that’s embedded in both the U.S. Emergency Use Authorization laws as well as international law through the Nuremburg Code.

Physicians were allowed to violate informed consent, which requires full disclosure of all ingredients and all potential side effects, in the experimental treatment. Most doctors and nurses never even questioned what was in the vaccines, let alone advised their patients about potential adverse events. If they did, they risked losing their medical licenses. So, they just repeated the narrative sent to them by the narrative creators. It was “safe and effective.”

In doing this, the doctors also violated their medical oath to “do no harm.”

Only under a situation of medical martial law could all of the laws and procedures meant to protect people be waived as they were in 2021 onward.

That’s the back story.

Fast forward to July 21, 2023.

The aforementioned military operation was so successful that the Biden administration is now making it permanent and taking it to the next level.

On Friday, July 21, the White House announced in a press release the creation of a new permanent office called the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, or OPPR with Maj. General Friedrichs at the helm. 

Friedrichs has served as “special assistant” to the president as senior director of global health security and biodefense at the White House National Security Council. He’s also been in leadership positions with NATO.

So this is a man who’s right up there with General Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin in terms of his ability to rise up the ranks of the U.S. military. Guys like Milley, Austin and Friedrichs are essentially globalist military bureaucrats who get promoted up the ladder by kissing the right backsides, not because they are particularly brilliant or wise. That’s how it works in Washington.

The July 21 White House press release states:

“This will be a permanent office in the Executive Office of the President charged with leading, coordinating, and implementing actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats or pathogens.”

I thought that was why we had the CDC, the HHS, and multiple other agencies. Why do we need another biomedical-security office run by the military?

The release further states that this new office will, “Coordinate the Administration’s domestic response to public health threats that have pandemic potential, or may cause significant disruption, and strengthen domestic pandemic preparedness. This includes ongoing work to address potential public health outbreaks and threats from COVID-19, Mpox, polio, avian and human influenza, and RSV.”

Notice every one of the diseases listed has a vaccine ready and waiting.

But just in case you aren’t convinced that this new office will be all about getting more Americans injected with more of Big Pharma’s new generation of mRNA vaccines, the very next paragraph of the news release spells it out, stating that the new office will:

“Drive and coordinate federal science and technology efforts related to pandemic preparedness. Specifically, OPPR will oversee efforts to develop, manufacture, and procure the next generation of medical countermeasures, including leveraging emerging technologies and working with HHS on next generation vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 and other public health threats.”

I suspect, after reading through this release, that the next big pandemic is already on the shelf and waiting to be released, to be followed by another vaccine rollout and mass-propaganda campaign.

In February 2022, Bill Gates told CNBC: “We’ll have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time.”

How does Gates know this? It was 100 years between the Spanish Flu and Covid. Why is he so certain the next one is imminent and that it will be a different pathogen?

It’s no coincidence most countries are rolling out digital IDs and central bank digital currencies with some, such as Ethiopia, spotlighting 2025 for when these changes will be fully operational and mandated. Think of the possibilities if the next pandemic were to hit in the summer or fall of 2024 and just gets worse into 2025 as a new president is taking office. The globalist elites will by then have a newly upgraded digital enforcement mechanism to lock people down that was not available to them at the peak of the Covid plandemic in 2020 or 2021.

Covid 2020-2021 was a valuable test run, launched by the globalists to see how many people would accept their “new normal” of 24/7 surveillance, mandated and repeated mRNA vaccines, restrictions on travel, speech, assembly, religious practices, and all purchases.

Wash, rinse, repeat. The first round was successful beyond the globalists’ wildest dreams in conditioning people for the coming beast system. They won’t be able to resist a second round. The question is when, not if.