It's all about the oil

A couple of articles about "peak oil" and our current involvement in the Middle East (also the focus of the post below) have come to my attention, and they deserve far greater scrutiny than I can here give. The first is James Howard Kunster's Rolling Stone piece, "The Long Emergency," about the belief (the fact?) that the planet is running out of dead dinosaur juice. The second is Michael Klare's very incisive "Oil, Geopolitics, and the Coming War with Iran."

Kunster's overview discusses peak oil theory, as well as the rival abiotic theory, which alleges that oil derives from non-organic sources and is therefore plentiful, provided one digs deep enough. There is also much derisory discussion of energy alternatives, including biomass energy and hydrogen. One alternative receives insufficient attention:

You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.

True enough, but the Nazis ran one hell of a large war machine without access to the Middle Eastern oil reserves. Their facility at Leuna pioneered the hydrogenization process, and there has already been some talk of gearing up once more. 60 years of technological progress has occurred since the end of World War II, and one would think that, in all that time, some bright person might have thought of a way to make synthetic oil practical without resort to slavery.

Indeed, there are a few wags who posit that "peak oil" is itself something of a deception operation -- many of this theory's key proponents have ties to the oil industry.

But if (as some believe) a concerted research and development effort can get the price of synthetic oil down to a reasonable level -- then why are we (as professor Klare rightly insists) so intent on invading Iran?