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fascinating yet disturbing reading – The CIA's Interest in Peak Oil |
HIGHLIGHTS A recently declassified CIA document casts new light on some of the most significant geopolitical events of the past quarter century. This classified "Secret" document, was issued in March 1977 by the Office of Economic Research and until now the document has prompted little discussion. Oil production in the U.S. had peaked in 1970, just a few years earlier. This was arguably the most important economic event of the past half-century... The recently declassified secret document predicts an impending peak in Soviet oil production "not later than the early 1980s." "During the next decade," the unnamed authors of the document conclude, "the USSR may well find itself not only unable to supply oil to Eastern Europe and the West on the present scale,and also predicts that the oil peak will have important economic impacts: "When oil production stops growing, and perhaps even before, profound repercussions will be felt on the domestic economy of the USSR and on its international economic relations." Two years after their oil production peaked, the economy of the USSRcrumbled and its government collapsed. Did the Reagan administration base its Cold War strategy on the CIA study, in the expectation that a Soviet Unioneconomically weakened by oil depletion would collapse if pushed hard on other fronts? We know that the Bush-Cheney team is independently aware of the issue of peak oil because international oil investment banker Matthew Simmons, who has written extensively and forcefully on depletion issues, was an advisor to Vice President Cheney's now-infamous Energy Task Force in 2001... Links: http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/132 http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/081503_cia_russ_oil.html |