Signs Of The Times  

Yesterday's solar power plant announcement here made The Times - its always interesting reading offshore impressions of local news - how anyone could get the impression the Rodent is taking "urgent" action over global warming is beyond me - its mostly been high priority inaction thus far.

AUSTRALIA is to build the world’s most advanced solar power station using thousands of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy and produce enough electricity to meet the needs of 45,000 homes. Taxpayers will shoulder about a third of the $A420 million (£170 million) cost of the project as the Government of John Howard, confronted with a crippling drought across the nation, urgently seeks ways to slow the effects of global warming.

Fields of mirrors — about 20,000 in total — will concentrate the power of sunlight by 500 times on to high-performance solar cells. Each cell produces about 1,500 times more power than that produced by a typical roof-top solar panel.

The power station, to be built near the town of Mildura in the southeastern state of Victoria, will spread its fields of mirrors and solar cells over about 800 hectares (2,000 acres) on several different sites in order to reduce the visual impact. The mirrors will rotate to track the Sun.

The builder, Melbourne-based Solar Systems, has been perfecting the technology for more than a decade. John Lasich, the technical director, said yesterday: “This is a new generation of solar technology. The secret is to be able to make a solar power module work about 1,500 times harder than typical solar panels. If you can do this . . . you have the recipe for an infinite supply of clean energy at an affordable price.”

The company has already built smaller solar power stations employing the new technology to supply electricity to some Aboriginal communities in the Outback.

California has a solar power station, larger than that planned for Victoria, which is located in the Mojave desert. But it employs older, thermal technology using the Sun’s energy to make steam to drive a turbine power generator.

Mr Lasich said that it was far more efficient to convert concentrated sunlight directly into electricity, as the Solar Systems plant would.

The FT is also looking at energy - in their case they have a long look at the oil supply and peak oil - still preferring to believe there is plenty of oil out there - but nasty foreigners might not let us have it.

As major oil discoveries become rarer and as motorists face the highest petrol bills in a generation, the debate over whether the world is running out of oil is again rearing its head. In books, speeches and articles, and particularly on the internet, the doomsayers - known as “peak oil” theorists - are warning that the world’s oilfields are on the decline and will soon be unable to match mankind’s insatiable appetite for energy. ...

So, just as the world begins to breathe a sigh of relief, after four years when the price of oil has tripled, the resulting complacency risks starting the cycle anew. Though we may not be running out of oil as peak theorists believe, we risk running out of the ability to pump it from the ground. The faster we consume hydrocarbons without finding significant alternatives, the sooner we will slam against the political barriers that stop some of the world’s biggest oil and gas fields from being developed.

Andrew Leonard at Salon also has a look at the oil supply - and notes that merger activity in the energy sector is because its cheaper to buy oil than to find it.

Pity the poor oil companies. A daily news alert from the Wall Street Journal, while providing teasers to three not particularly interesting articles on the international news business, did let slip an interesting observation. Third quarter profits for Big Oil are still looking good, but after that, "it's clear they are now being squeezed between falling crude prices and rising oil-field costs, raising doubts about the continuation of the big run-up in profits at companies like Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC and BP PLC."

That falling oil prices should lead to smaller profits for oil companies isn't noteworthy. But the acknowledgment of rising oil-field costs is. The Journal has been a leader in fueling the backlash against peak oil theory that has taken strength from the falling price of crude over the past several months. But the moment-to-moment fluctuations of the price of a barrel of oil mean little as far as the validity of peak oil is concerned. Rising oil-field costs, on the other hand, mean a big deal.

Rising oil-field costs might refer to the energy-intensive process of extracting oil from Canada's tar sands. Or drilling in unprecedentedly deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Or employing new technologies to extract the last bit of black goodness from nearly exhausted fields. Or, more prosaically, security costs in Nigeria, or Russian-style government-sponsored extortion. Whatever -- it all points to the same thing. The era of cheap oil is over.

Michael Connolly, author of the news alert, writes that "With prospects of finding more easy-to-tap oil dwindling and many governments demanding a higher share of proceeds in exchange for access to oil fields, oil companies might find it more lucrative to launch into a period of acquisitions."

There's a well-established cycle in the oil business. When oil prices fall, it's cheaper to buy other companies than to explore and develop new oil fields. But it seems like this cycle has a little bit of an extra twist to it. Oil prices are still relatively high. But the price of finding new oil is even higher.

TreeHugger has an early April Fools post (though unfortunately its not a joke) - Lee "Jabba" Raymond has been appointed to "solve America's Energy Crisis". I suspect the world's global warming crisis will be exacerbated as a result.

Or perhaps it is a Halloween prank with someone in a Jabba the Hutt costume; In any case, the Bush Administration's Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman has hand-picked former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond to" lead an influential study to develop policy solutions to America’s energy crisis". We suppose that even with a 400 million dollar severance you can get bored in retirement, but surely putting the fox of big oil in charge of a henhouse like this is a dumb move. Don't remember Lee? read David Robert's great farewell in ::Grist and join the campaign to overturn this appointment at ::Exxpose Exxon

Also at TreeHugger, a post on developments in solar power using Stirling dishes.

Infinia , a company based in Kennewick, Washington, plans to release a Stirling solar dish about the size of a large satellite TV receiver. Instead of using photovoltaic cells, it will use the sun's heat to generate electricity. Standard solar photovoltaic panels are generally 12 percent to 15 percent efficient at converting light to electricity, though some can go up to 22 percent. Infinia's planned 3-kilowatt Stirling engine will operate at 24 percent efficiency. The product is slated for final design later this year and commercial release in 2008. The target customers for Infinia's first solar Stirling engine are larger organizations such as city governments. Infinia's dish looks like a scaled-down version of the dish by Stirling Solar Energy, which has been in development for many years. Stirling Solar Energy is building power plants with arrays of giant dishes with more than 80 mirrors in the California desert to generate hundreds of megawatts of electricity. It has signed two power generation contracts with California utilities.

Heading back to Salon, Andrew Leonard has 3 more interesting articles which are relevant to the news I've been following here lately.

The first wonders if a "Solar bubble" is forming - noting that Home Depot has followed the lead from B&Q in the Uk and has begun selling solar panels to consumers.

Two years ago, there were five publicly traded solar power companies. Last year, 30. This year, 60.

The numbers are from a muddled UPI article that is a little confusing. It's not clear where these companies are traded. Worldwide? Europe? The U.S.? But if the trendline is accurate, it's pointed rather steeply upwards and to the right.

Does that mean bubble? The dot-com boom is ancient history and housing's glory days are long gone. Is it time to put your money on greentech? The explosion of solar companies with shares available suggests someone thinks so. And you'd need a pretty big parasol to block the rays of solar hype currently beaming from every direction.

Treehugger informs us today that Home Depot is moving into the solar power consumer installation market. Google made a big splash two weeks ago when it announced plans to install 1.6 megawatts of solar power generating capacity on its sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters. In August California governor Arnold Schwarnegger signed into law the much-ballyhooed Million Solar Roofs Initiative.

So is "pop" the next sound we're going to hear? Or are we merely faced with the possiblity of some minor turbulence?

In a recently published book preaching the inevitability of the solar power "solution," Travis Bickford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, calls the oncoming solar power surge a second "silicon revolution."

Like the first silicon revolution, the next one will see industries transformed and massive wealth created. Solar millionaires and billionaires will emerge, and markets may even experience a bubble or two of speculative excitement. However, in the end -- undoubtedly within our lifetime -- we will arrive at a world that is safer, cleaner, and wealthier for industrialized economies and developing ones and in which solar energy will play a dominant role in meeting our collective energy needs.

Call now for your free Home Depot installation consultation!

The next looks at a glimmer of encouragement in the water situarion - noting water use (both total and per capita) in developed countries is falling - an example of the Environmental Kuznets Curve .

"It is a little-known fact that the United States today uses far less water per person, and less water in total, than we did twenty-five years ago... It's a shocker. People don't believe it, but it's true. Finland, parts of Australia, much of Europe, and even Hong Kong also have experienced decreases in per-capita water consumption," writes Specter, suggesting that the phenomenon falls into the same category as environmental improvements that appear to track growing economic affluence -- a phenomenon referred to as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC).

Specter presents the EKC as something of a fait accompli. But as has been pointed out here before, the EKC doesn't always work. It's good when measuring things that are visible and annoying to large numbers of people, like particulate matter in the air, or sewage flowing in the streets. It's not so good for things that are less obtrusive, like increasing carbon emissions or deforestation. It's also not immediately obvious how it applies to using less water per capita. Is there really an EKC for energy efficiency or conservation of resources?

Maybe that's a side issue. The deeper, and profoundly hopeful, message is that the United States' track record with water appears to prove that a growing economically affluent population does not have to consume more water over time. It can, amazingly, consume less. (Although it must be noted that Americans still consume more water, per capita, per day, then anyone else on the planet.) If the same could be true for other precious commodities (oil, anyone?) then our prospects for an extended stay on this planet for the human race might be looking up.

Then finally "The overlords are getting nervous" (CNN has a slightly different spin on the same issue, pondering a revolt of the fairly rich - well off professionals angered at the massive gap between them and the ultra-rich).

When Wall Street Journal business columnists start worrying about the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States, you really begin to believe that a tectonic shift in the political landscape is underway.

Alan Murray, the assistant managing editor of the Journal, starts out wondering much the same thing as did the New York Times' Eduardo Porter earlier this week: Why do polls of voters show discontent with Bush's handling of the economy? Unemployment is low, inflation is not too bad, the stock market is surging, and oil prices have come down from their highs. But unlike Porter, he gets to the point much faster.

Large numbers of Americans seem to have lost their belief in John F. Kennedy's famous aphorism that a rising tide lifts all boats. "They know the economy is white hot," says political analyst Charlie Cook, "but they also know they aren't in it....There's a feeling that some people are getting theirs, but we aren't getting ours."

There's a well-known litany of reasons for that. Median earnings have been growing at a disturbingly slow pace, even as profits and high-end pay have soared. Health-care costs are not only increasing, they increasingly are being paid by consumers, not by employers or the government. Pensions are disappearing, as is job security -- and any sense of long-term loyalty from employers....

Meanwhile, a thin slice of America is enjoying unprecedented prosperity. CEO pay is one of the most visible manifestations, rising in the past decade at triple the rate of the median worker's pay.

Germany's "Der Spiegel" has a longish, gloomy article on prospects for the US dollar.

Last century, the United States already suffered from one deep economic crisis that gradually spread to the rest of the world. The Great Depression lasted 10 years and brought mass unemployment and starvation to the United States. The country's economic power sank by one-third. The crisis virus wrought havoc all over the West. Six million people were unemployed in Germany when the economic fever was at its peak.

Today's investors face a difficult choice, one they're not to be envied for. They can see the relative weakness of the US economy and they're registering the tectonic shifts in the world economy. They know that a great statistical effort is being made to prolong the American dream. For some time now, government statistics have announced sensational productivity leaps for the US economy -- productivity leaps that, strange as it may seem, haven't led to any rise in wages for years. This is in fact genuinely bizarre: Either capitalists are reaping the fruits of increased productivity all by themselves -- which would be a political scandal even in capitalism's heartland -- or the productivity leaps exist only on paper.
There is much to suggest that the second hypothesis is correct.

Half the world is impressed by the low levels of unemployment in the United States. The other half knows that these statistics aren't official, but the result of a voluntary telephone survey. Many of those who declare themselves employed are assistants and day workers. Working just one hour a week is enough for one to be classified as "employed." Given that it's considered antisocial to declare yourself unemployed, the US statistics may well say more about American society's dominant norms than about its actual condition.

The US economy's high growth rates aren't to be completely trusted either. They are the result of high public and private debt. In no way do they express an increased output of domestically produced goods and services that the United States has achieved by its own strength. They say more about the successful sales ventures of Asians and Europeans. New loans taken by the US government were responsible for fully one-third of US economic growth in 2001. In 2003 they were responsible for a quarter. The United States is an economic giant on steroids -- doped so its decline in performance doesn't become too apparent.

For capital market investors, reality isn't reality until the majority of investors are convinced it is reality and have begun reacting accordingly. Right now, everyone is watching everyone else closely. Everyone knows the dream of the stable economic superpower has ended, but everyone is keeping his eyes shut just a little longer.

Government bonds and shares don't have any objective value -- nothing you can see, weigh, taste or even eat. Their value is measured by investors' faith that the purchasing power of $1 million will still be $1 million 10 years from now, rather than having been reduced by half. This faith is measured on the markets almost every second -- and the measure used is nothing but the faith of other investors. As long as the faithful outnumber the skeptics, everything works out fine for the dollar (and the world economy). The trouble starts the day the scale begins to tip.

Tom paine has a look at US dependence on Venezuelan oil called "Hunting Hugo".

In late June, U.S. Southern Command, the arm of the U.S. military in Latin America, concluded that efforts by Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia to extend state control over their oil and gas reserves posed a threat to U.S. oil supplies. While Latin America produces only 8.4 percent of the world's oil output, it supplies 30 percent of the oil consumed in the United States.

“A re-emergence of state control of the energy sector will likely increase inefficiencies and, beyond an increase in short-term profits, will hamper efforts to increase long-term supplies and production,” the study concludes. In an interview with the Financial Times , Col. Joe Nunez, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Army War College, added an observation that ought to send a collective chill down the backs of the three countries named: “It is incumbent upon the Command to contemplate beyond strictly military matters.”

That one of the U.S. military's most powerful arms should find itself deep in the energy business should hardly come as a surprise. Four months after Bush took office, Vice President Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group recommended that the administration “make energy security policy a priority of our trade and foreign policy.” The administration has faithfully followed that blueprint, using war and muscular diplomacy to corner U.S. energy supplies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

What most Americans don't know is that Venezuela's reserves are enormous. According to a department of energy estimate, they are considerably greater than Saudi Arabia's, and may be as high as 1.3 trillion barrels. Most Venezuelan oil is heavy and expensive to refine, but as long as oil stays above $50 a barrel—and few doubt it will go lower—it is an almost endless gold mine.

The bone the U.S. is picking with Hugo is not about bombast. It's about oil.

Shortly after Southern Command's report, the White House appointed J. Patrick Maher, a 32-year Central Intelligence Agency veteran, to head up a special task force for gathering intelligence on Venezuela and Cuba. The only other similar posts are for North Korea and Iran, members of the so-called “axis of evil” reportedly developing nuclear weapons. In a move that almost exactly parallels how intelligence was handled in the run up to the Iraq War, as “Mission Manager,” Maher will bypass the CIA and report directly to Bush.

What really worries the U.S. is that Chavez is trying to diversify Venezuela's clientele. Venezuela is currently building a $335 million pipeline across Colombia in order to ship more oil to China, and is working on plans for a $20 billion natural gas pipeline through the Amazon and on to markets in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.

China is pouring in billions to develop fields in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador to give it the inside corner on future resources. The “China connection” is one that concerns the Bush administration, not only because it siphons off oil that normally would go to the United States, but also because the White House sees China as a rival and has done its best to elbow Peking out of the Middle East and Central Asia.

But Latin America is a different place than it was a decade ago when it was mired in debt, characterized by low growth, and beholden to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. When Rice told House members that the Bush administration was building a “united front” against Venezuela, it is likely to be a narrow front indeed.

Venezuela has helped bail Ecuador and Argentina out of debt, invested in projects in Bolivia, and is selling oil to Cuba at a deep discount. According to Greg Palast writing in The Progressive, Chavez has withdrawn $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserves, and “at the same time, lent or committed a like sum to Argentina, Ecuador, and other Latin American countries.”

Given Chavez's enormous popularity in his country and elsewhere in Latin America, it is hard to see what the White House can do about Venezuela's president. But that is not likely to discourage it from trying, and the people the administration has recruited to target him are just the kind of operatives who won't shy away from anything up to, and including, the unthinkable: assassination.

Billmon notes that the first US presidential debate for 2008 will be at the home of the Ku Klux Klan, hosted by their modern day descendents.

FOX News and the South Carolina Republican Party have announced that they will host the first 2008 presidential debate on May 15, 2007.

Business attire required. Hoods and sheets optional.

The Neofiles episode on speed freak fascists I linked to a while back took a detour away from methedrine abuse in the third reich to ponder the question of where fascism first arose. The interviewee's view was that the KKK was actually the first fascist organisation - a defeated army that morphed into a racist paramilitary organisation bent on regaining control and their preferred societal order, with a ethnic minority (or several) to scapegoat for their problems.

I noticed another reference to the KKK in the comments at RI yesterday (yes - its tinfoil time), with one perceptive paranoid noting a possible reason why Bush spent 2 weeks delaying signing the bill suspending habeas corpus which had been so urgently passed by Congress - he wanted to wait for the anniversary of the previous suspension by Ulysses S Grant - which was done in order to quash the KKK in South Carolina. Tinfoil types have a thing about freemasons and I was intrigued by the claim that Albert Pike (freemason supremo for many years) was also the founder of the KKK (there seems to be a lot of debate about whether or not this is true though).

Consider this: You most probably know how Mohandas Ghandi led the masses in India on salt marches to the sea to gather salt, in defiance of the British raj's prohibition against gathering or manufacturing salt. This not merely ended the monopoly on a commodity necessary for life in India, but the repeated acts of non-violent civil disobedience led to the fall of the raj, and with it, other parts of the British empire.

That said, there is a House Bill floating around the US congress that defines acts of NON-violent civil disobedience, AND ALSO, any non-violent actions which may adversely effect the profits of a corporation (and that would include investigative journalism bringing to light corporate wrong-doing, as well as consumer boycotts) as ACTS of TERRORISM.

Yes, that's right, there's a bill pending in the house (which is now along with the Senate on its election recess) that would make advocating a consumer boycott, or writing the truth about a corporation's misdeeds, and any number of other conventionally accepted acts of American citizenship, as ACTS of TERRORISM, punishble now under the recently signed Military Commissions Act, by arrest with secret evidence, secret imprisonment, even execution, all without the right to see the "evidence", to confront the accuser, OR even to know necessarily what one is charged with. AND, your loved ones would never even have to be informed as to what happened to you.

Welcome to Tierra de Desaparecidos, Norte.

So, can we slaves still unshackle ourselves? Good question. Now, just to tweak you both a little bit, consider this fact:

After pushing the House and Senate to pass this bill urgently, which each body did as the last act of legislation before recessing for the election, Bush waited two weeks to sign it. Why?

Well, he waited to sign it on the exact day of the 135th anniversary of the day that President Ulysses S. Grant had signed the suspension of habeus corpus for only the State of South Carolina. The reason for Grant's suspension of h.c. in S.C. was to facilitate the quashing of the Ku Klux Klan and to help enforce the rights of newly freed slaves.

The same KKK which was co-founded by Albert Pike, and in South Carolina, home then of the mother lodge of the world for all of freemasonry. Kind of at least makes you shake your head in wonder, doesn't it?

Coincidence, that Bush would wait two weeks to sign this URGENT piece of legislation, so he could do it on such an anniversary day as a kind of in-your-face retaliatory triumph? I rather doubt it.

Keith Olbermann noted the coincidence of dates, but in the role designated to him as subversive, partial truth teller, intoned with all his whiny gravitas that "surely Bush could never have imagined that this was the same exact day."

Uh, yeah, sure. Riiiight.

Speaking of RI, I was intrigued to see a small flamewar had erupted in the comments of one recent post about Mike Ruppert and peak oil. Iridescent Cuttlefish (who seems to hold a dim view of peak oilers in general - I wish people would seperate out hard core doomers from people simply interested in a geological science) spake thusly:

Well, I guess this is slowly turning into some sort of vaguely civilized debate, although it's still greatly hampered by your continued antagonism and shrillness. Can you drop the childish "IC must be a disinfo network" and just talk about the issues? You suggest going back through my previous posts to determine whether I'm working for DARPA--please do, as you'll soon enough see that I'm all by myself here, just expressing myself as I see fit, with no allegiance to any organization of any kind. In fact, your fanatical adherence to the word of Ruppert and your indefatigable defense of his presumed honor indicate something far beyond your explanation:

So why do I defend Mike Ruppert?
Because he is the one who has been attacked here.

And why do I hold Mike Ruppert in high regard?
That would take some time to answer, but the main reasons are (1) that he tries hard, in difficult circumstances, not to degenerate into a narcissistic, paranoid Jeremiah, and (2) because he checks his facts.

Lots of folks are "being attacked here"--the ferocity of your loyalty is still unexplained. Look, you're the one brandishing the sword of disinfo suspicion, not me. Given that those who really do such things are not restrained by any conventions of common courtesy or decency and have unlimited resources at their disposal, is it really so impossible, as you suggest, that this connection to eugenics "is simply a ploy by the elites to give Mike Ruppert some street cred?" Have TPTB not done such things before?

So here's my suggestion. Let's stop this "No, you're working for the cabal" nonsense and just talk about the issues, as I've been asking you from the start. How do you intend to 'prove your case' when you keep screaming "Blasphemy!" at the top of your keyboard-lungs? You sound completely deranged, not the disinterested bystander you proclaim yourself to be. Are you ready to talk yet, or is it more dodging the issues with declarations of outrage and condemnation?

Assuming you're willing to actually discuss what you're so upset about, here we go (again). First off, what about my questions? Shall I list them again? Here's a partial list, if you want to talk to me, or argue your case, or however you view this crusade by tirade, then please address them:

1.) Why is it that the Peaker Apocalypse is based on extrapolations of current consumption patterns, when significant reductions in the rates of consumption change the entire "prediction"? Is it written in stone somewhere that gas mileage in American cars has to remain at its artificially maintained low level? Even adopting the fuel efficiency of European cars (which is not anywhere close to the state of the art) would dramatically revise Mike's Doom. Please explain.

2.) The plastics & fertilizer lie. Your explanation is laughable. There's not enough room to grow the hemp which would replace the petroleum products upon which we've been made to "depend"? Really? Do you know what demanding soil conditions are needed for the frail hemp plant? Are you aware of the labor intensiveness of hemp cultivation?

3.) What about those energy/greenhouse gas reductions through sustainable architecture, which is not only storm-proof, conducive to a cooperative, non-stratified social construct, but also considerably cheaper? Can you understand how this changes the calculations of the Peakers?

All of the above are what first made me suspicious of Ruppert, not McGowan's analysis, which I only saw for the first time a few months back. Look at it this way: taking the case of China alone, it's more than obvious that the wasteful, unsustainable pattern of resource consumption and subsequent environmental degradation that is the American lifestyle cannot be repeated around the globe. The Earth can't even handle one America, much less an entire planet living this way. Since it's blatantly unfair for the Americans, and the West in general, to hog the resources of the whole world and to ruin everybody's only home, it means that the old paradigm must be changed, and soon.

As it turns out, this is not only technologically feasible, it would actually be cheaper than business as usual. I quoted some important statistics before concerning the source of much of the greenhouse gases which are driving both climate change and energy consumption: our criminally stupid architecture, which accounts for 45% of those emissions, could be converted to sustainable models which would not only eliminate those emissions, but also reduce energy consumption by 80-100%.

Why is it that Ruppert and the Peakers would rather comtemplate "the most humane methods of population reduction" than fix the bloody problem? When people like Simmons and the sinister Club of Rome pretend to be the friend of the common man and "sadly lament that redistribution of wealth is impossible" and that the population must be reduced because there isn't enough wealth or resources to go around, it should set off alarm bells in every sane person's head. It's a lie, a vicious, self-serving lie that the rich tell the poor, dressed up in the shabby sophistry of neo-Malthusian arrogance and superiority. In every single case of a country's standard of living being raised, the birth rate falls, dramatically. Look at Europe during the 20th century and tell me this isn't true.

The same sort of defense of privilege is at work in the so-called immigration debate in the US. The question is always "How can we keep them out?" and "What in god's name will we do when there's more of them than us"? It's racist, it's self-serving, and it's based on a lie. What no one in that "debate" will acknowledge is that if the West didn't profit from the imperialism of modern capitalism, then the Mexicans ans all the others wouldn't want to come to this stinking, racist, caste-system of a country. But no, we couldn't possibly share the Earth's bounty; it's ours by right of might, finders-keepers, get your hands off my stash. Nevermind that every person on the planet could enjoy a rich and rewarding lifestyle and that biosphere could be healed in the process, easily and cheaply, let's just prop up that status quo and "sadly, reluctantly" turn to figuring out how to thin the ranks of the dispossessed. Why would Ruppert go along with this swindle, this lie that the rich use to preserve their position and power?

I put it to you that no one who had a shred of concern for his fellow man would turn his back on the good fight and go along with the unnecessary culling, yes, murder, of 2-3 billion human beings. Aye, murder it is, not suicide--I was being far too kind in my initial assessment of Ruppert and the Peakers. You ask, with perfect, innocent credulity:

"...Ruppert advocates a thorough public debate about how to reduce population humanely, with particular care being taken to ensure that the debate is not dominated by politicians and technocrats. What on earth could be wrong with that?"

Well, and here's the whole point of our disagreement and damn you for a coward and all the things you've called me if you don't answer it: if the death of half the human race is unnecesary, a lot could be wrong with that.