Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America?: "The world is quickly running out of oil.... Known reserves are being drawn down at 4 times the rate of new discoveries. The reason for the drop off is that not only have all the “big” discoveries already been made, the rate of consumption is increasing dramatically."

"Perhaps it goes without saying but it deserves repeating anyway: oil is the sine qua non of “industrial” civilization—the one thing without which such civilization cannot exist... When oil is gone, civilization will be stupendously different.. the past 60 years of US policy in the Middle East can only be understood as the effort to control access to the world’s largest supply of oil... Fully 60% percent of the world’s proven reserves of oil are in the Persian Gulf."

"But the provocation occasioned by grabbing the oil, especially from nations ideologically hostile to the US, means that military attacks on the US and the recourse to military responses will only intensify until the US is embroiled in unending global conflict. This is the perverse genius of the Grab the Oil strategy: it comes with its own built-in escalation, its own justification for ever more militarization—without limit. It will blithely consume the entire US economy, the entire society, without being sated. It is, in homage to Orwell, Perpetual War for Perpetual Grease."

"Under the Patriot Act, a person can be arrested without probable cause, held indefinitely without being charged, tried without a lawyer or a jury, sentenced without the opportunity to appeal, and put to death—all without notification of…anybody. This is simply a Soviet Gulag and it has been rationalized by the hysterical over-hyping of the War on Terror. The fact that it is not yet widespread does not diminish the more important fact that it has been put in place precisely in anticipation of such procedures needing to be being carried out on a mass scale in the future... That is the reality we are confronting today—offering up our democracy in propitiation to an Empire for Oil. It will be a fateful, irreversible decision."

Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America?: "The world is quickly running out of oil.... Known reserves are being drawn down at 4 times the rate of new discoveries. The reason for the drop off is that not only have all the “big” discoveries already been made, the rate of consumption is increasing dramatically."

"Perhaps it goes without saying but it deserves repeating anyway: oil is the sine qua non of “industrial” civilization—the one thing without which such civilization cannot exist... When oil is gone, civilization will be stupendously different.. the past 60 years of US policy in the Middle East can only be understood as the effort to control access to the world’s largest supply of oil... Fully 60% percent of the world’s proven reserves of oil are in the Persian Gulf."

"But the provocation occasioned by grabbing the oil, especially from nations ideologically hostile to the US, means that military attacks on the US and the recourse to military responses will only intensify until the US is embroiled in unending global conflict. This is the perverse genius of the Grab the Oil strategy: it comes with its own built-in escalation, its own justification for ever more militarization—without limit. It will blithely consume the entire US economy, the entire society, without being sated. It is, in homage to Orwell, Perpetual War for Perpetual Grease."

"Under the Patriot Act, a person can be arrested without probable cause, held indefinitely without being charged, tried without a lawyer or a jury, sentenced without the opportunity to appeal, and put to death—all without notification of…anybody. This is simply a Soviet Gulag and it has been rationalized by the hysterical over-hyping of the War on Terror. The fact that it is not yet widespread does not diminish the more important fact that it has been put in place precisely in anticipation of such procedures needing to be being carried out on a mass scale in the future... That is the reality we are confronting today—offering up our democracy in propitiation to an Empire for Oil. It will be a fateful, irreversible decision."