Oh Mikey, You Gotta Lotta Splainin’ to Do!
It is now time, fearless readers, to revisit some of the events of 2004 – the year that a suspiciously well-organized band of ‘Peak Oil’ salesmen began cranking up the volume of their propaganda campaign while simultaneously attempting to shout down any dissenters in the crowd. Some of the events that will be covered here have been commented on before on these pages, but in a largely disjointed manner. With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that what is needed is a timeline, which I now present, for the very first time, under an arbitrarily chosen title.
March 3, 2004: Philip Watts, CEO and former chief of exploration for Shell Oil, is asked to step down amidst a scandal involving allegedly inflated reserve estimates. Two months earlier, Shell had dramatically lowered its estimates of recoverable reserves, claiming that earlier figures had been faked. Both Watts and Walter van de Vijver, who had replaced Watts as chief of exploration when Watts became CEO, are forced to resign. Watts is the first CEO in the company’s century-long history to be forced from office.
April 19, 2004: Judy Boynton, Chief Financial Officer for Shell, is fired in the ongoing scandal over ‘faked’ reserve estimates. Boynton’s departure is accompanied by a further reduction in Shell’s estimated reserves.
April 28, 2004: Spokesmen for Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company announce that they are more than quadrupling their previous estimates of recoverable reserves, adding that the new estimate of 1.2 trillion barrels is “very conservative.”
May 1, 2004: Unidentified ‘terrorists’ strike out against key components of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry.
May 21, 2004: Saudi spokesmen again announce that the kingdom sits atop vast stockpiles of recoverable oil reserves.
May 29, 2004: ‘Terrorists’ again attack the Saudi oil industry. No further announcements are forthcoming from Saudi officials.
June 22, 2004: Professor Thomas Gold, the West’s most vocal and influential proponent of the abiotic origins of hydrocarbons, dies suddenly on the Summer Solstice.
July 2004: Russia’s Yukos Oil is charged by the Putin government with tax evasion.
August 3, 2004: Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, announces that it has mapped vast new oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico, enabling it to more than double the country’s estimated recoverable reserves.
August 20, 2004: Green Party activist Walter Sheasby, who six months earlier had penned a piece exposing the true backers of the ‘Peak Oil’ ruse, dies suddenly, reportedly from the West Nile Virus.
October 2004: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, CEO of Yukos Oil, is arrested and – appropriately enough – sent off to a cell in Siberia.
November 1, 2004: Raul Munoz Leos is forced out of his position as CEO of Pemex following a manufactured scandal. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Laos’ ouster came “a week after Mexican newspapers detailed how his wife, Hilda Ledezma Mayoral, billed the company for liposuction treatments costing a total of $12,000 last year and this April. Although Pemex insisted that any of its employees and their dependents were entitled to similar medical reimbursements and that Munoz Leos repaid the company, the damage was done.” (Chris Kraul “Mexico Replaces Oil Monopoly Boss,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2004)
I hope to expand upon this timeline in the coming months, possibly through tips sent in by alert readers, but already we can see that, in the span of just eight short months, two of the West’s leading critics of ‘Peak Oil’ theory turned up dead and the CEOs of three of the world’s major oil producers got axed. One of those three oil giants (Pemex) had just announced the discovery of massive new oil fields, another (Shell) had just been ‘caught’ supposedly inflating reserve figures, and the third (Yukos) is the leading producer of oil in a country whose entire petroleum industry is based on the teachings of abiotic oil theory. In addition, a fourth major player in the oil industry, Saudi Arabia, saw some of its key oil installations attacked immediately after it had announced dramatically increased reserve figures.
The pattern here seems rather clear: contradict the lie that the world is running out of oil, and you end up either dead or exiled to Siberia.
There is one other thing that I need to add to my timeline: in October 2004, at the tail end of this extraordinary series of shameful events, all of which appear to have been aimed at preparing the playing field for the ‘Peak Oil’ scam, Michael Ruppert posted a piece on his From the Bilderbergswebsite in which he triumphantly declared, “We Did It!” Oh yes, Mr. Ruppert, you do indeed gotta lotta splainin’ to do. And when Mikey’s done explaining his position on ‘Peak Oil,’ maybe he can then explain something else that has been troubling me for the last several weeks: how is it that a seasoned police detective could do such an amateurish job of staging a crime scene? (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/070506_offices_burglarized.shtml)