Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline. Many geologists and the International Energy Agency say the world's crude oil output reached its peak in 2006.

While there may be less oil coming out of the ground, the demand for it certainly continues to rise.

Al Jazeera:

The final episode of this series explores what happens when oil becomes more and more inaccessible, while at the same time, new powers like China and India try to fulfill their growing energy needs.

And countries like Iran, while suffering international sanctions, have welcomed these new oil buyers, who put business ahead of lectures on human rights and nuclear ambitions.

At the same time, oil-producing countries have had enough with the Seven Sisters controlling their oil assets. Nationalization of oil reserves around the world has ushered in a new generation of oil companies all vying for a slice of the oil pie.

These are the new Seven Sisters.

Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco, the largest and most sophisticated oil company in the world; Russia's Gazprom, a company that Russia's President Vladimir Putin wrested away from the oligarchs; The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which, along with its subsidiary, Petrochina, is the world's second largest company in terms of market value; The National Iranian Oil Company, which has a monopoly on exploration, extraction, transportation and exportation of crude oil in Iran – OPEC's second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia; Venezuela's PDVSA, a company the late president Hugo Chavez dismantled and rebuilt into his country's economic engine and part of his diplomatic arsenal; Brazil's Petrobras, a leader in deep water oil production, that pumps out 2 million barrels of crude oil a day; and Malaysia's Petronas - Asia's most profitable company in 2012.

Primarily state-owned, the new Seven Sisters control a third of the world's oil and gas production, as well as a third of the world's reserves. The old Seven Sisters, by comparison, produce a tenth of the world's oil, and their control has dwindled to only three percent of the reserves.

The balance has shifted.

In the Caucasus, the United States and Russia are vying for control of the region. The great oil game is in full swing. Whoever controls the Caucasus and its roads, also controls the transport of oil that comes from the Caspian Sea.

Al Jazeera:

Tbilisi, Erevan and Baku - the three capitals of the Caucasus. The oil from Baku in Azerbaijan is a strategic priority for all the major companies.

From the fortunes of the Nobel family to the Russian revolution, to World War II, oil from the Caucasus and the Caspian has played a central role. Lenin fixated on conquering the Azeri capital Baku for its oil, as did Stalin and Hitler.

On his birthday in 1941, Adolf Hitler received a chocolate and cream birthday cake, representing a map. He chose the slice with Baku on it.

On June 22nd 1941, the armies of the Third Reich invaded Russia. The crucial battle of Stalingrad was the key to the road to the Caucasus and Baku’s oil, and would decide the outcome of the war.

Stalin told his troops: "Fighting for one’s oil is fighting for one’s freedom."

After World War II, President Nikita Krushchev would build the Soviet empire and its Red Army with revenues from the USSR’s new-found oil reserves.

Decades later, oil would bring that empire to its knees, when Saudi Arabia and the US would conspire to open up the oil taps, flood the markets, and bring the price of oil down to $13 per barrel. Russian oligarchs would take up the oil mantle, only to be put in their place by their president, Vladimir Putin, who knows that oil is power.

The US and Putin‘s Russia would prop up despots, and exploit regional conflicts to maintain a grip on the oil fields of the Caucusus and the Caspian.

But they couldn't have forseen the rise of a new, strong and hungry China, with a seeming limitless appetite for oil and energy. Today, the U.S., Russia and China contest the control of the former USSR’s fossil fuel reserves, as well as the supply routes. The world watch on as they fought for control, a power war, between three ferocious beasts – The American eagle, the Russian bear, and the Chinese dragon.

Up next, the final installment in the series, Part Four, A Time for Lies.

As the 1960s ended, the Seven Sisters -- the major oil companies -- controlled 85 percent of the world's oil reserves. Today, they control a mere 10 percent.

New territory is needed to satisfy their lust for oil and power, and the Sister's gaze turns towards Africa. With "peak oil," wars in the Middle East, and the rise in crude prices...Africa becomes the oil giants' new battleground.

The real story, the secret story of oil, actually begins far from Africa.

In their bid to dominate Africa, the Sisters installed a king in Libya, a dictator in Gabon, fought the nationalisation of oil resources in Algeria, and through corruption, war and assassinations, brought Nigeria to its knees.

Oil may be flowing into the holds of huge tankers, but in Lagos, petrol shortages are chronic.

The country's four refineries are obsolete and the continent's main oil exporter is forced to import refined petrol - a paradox that reaps fortunes for a handful of oil companies.

Encouraged by the companies, corruption has become a system of government - some $50bn are estimated to have 'disappeared' out of the $350bn received since independence.

But new players have now joined the great oil game.

China, with its growing appetite for energy, has found new friends in Sudan, and the Chinese builders have moved in. Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir is proud of his co-operation with China - a dam on the Nile, roads, and stadiums.

"Everybody thought there could be oil in Sudan but nobody knew anything. It was revealed through exploration by the American company Chevron, towards the end of the 70s. And that was the beginning of the second civil war, which went on until 2002. It lasted for 19 years and cost a million and a half lives and the oil business was at the heart of it."

- Gerard Prunier, a historian

To be able to export half a million barrels of oil a day from the oil fields in the South, China financed and built the Heglig pipeline connected to Port Sudan. Now South Sudan's precious black crude is shipped through North Sudan to Chinese ports.

And in a bid to secure the oil supplies out of Libya, the US, the UK and the Seven Sisters made peace with formerly shunned Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, until he was killed during the Libyan uprising of 2011. The flow of Libyan oil, however, remains uninterrupted.

Desperately needing funds for rebuilding efforts, Libya is now back to pumping over a million barrels of oil per day. And the Sisters are happy to oblige.

On Tuesday, watch for parts three and four. Or of course, you can view them all at Al Jazeera.

China's Army might be training the country's next crop of cyberhackers. An investigation by Mandiant, a U.S.-based computer security firm, found that many of the attacks on American corporations and government agencies are coming from a clandestine People’s Liberation Army base on the outskirts of Shanghai. The report found that many members of China's most sophisticated hacking groups are working from around that area, and it's likely that they are run by army officers or contract workers.

NYT:

The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower.

An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”

Other security firms that have tracked “Comment Crew” say they also believe the group is state-sponsored, and a recent classified National Intelligence, issued as a consensus document for all 16 of the United States intelligence agencies, makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like Unit 61398, according to officials with knowledge of its classified content.

Continue reading »

Since an October 25th story exposing the lucrative business dealings of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jaiabo, the New York Times has been battling constant attacks from the country's hackers. The Times has been fending off the attacks for four months with the help of security experts, who say the methods used by attackers are similar to those of the Chinese military in the past. They targeted the South Asia burea chief along with Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the report about Wen's family.“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said executive editor Jill Abramson.

NYT:

After The Times learned of warnings from Chinese government officials that its investigation of the wealth of Mr. Wen’s relatives would “have consequences,” executives on Oct. 24 asked AT&T, which monitors The Times’s computer network, to watch for unusual activity.

On Oct. 25, the day the article was published online, AT&T informed The Times that it had noticed behavior that was consistent with other attacks believed to have been perpetrated by the Chinese military.

The Times notified and voluntarily briefed the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the attacks and then — not initially recognizing the extent of the infiltration of its computers — worked with AT&T to track the attackers even as it tried to eliminate them from its systems.

But on Nov. 7, when it became clear that attackers were still inside its systems despite efforts to expel them, The Times hired Mandiant, which specializes in responding to security breaches. Since learning of the attacks, The Times — first with AT&T and then with Mandiant — has monitored attackers as they have moved around its systems.

Hacker teams regularly began work, for the most part, at 8 a.m. Beijing time. Usually they continued for a standard work day, but sometimes the hacking persisted until midnight. Occasionally, the attacks stopped for two-week periods, Mandiant said, though the reason was not clear.

Investigators still do not know how hackers initially broke into The Times’s systems. They suspect the hackers used a so-called spear-phishing attack, in which they send e-mails to employees that contain malicious links or attachments. All it takes is one click on the e-mail by an employee for hackers to install “remote access tools” — or RATs. Those tools can siphon off oceans of data — passwords, keystrokes, screen images, documents and, in some cases, recordings from computers’ microphones and Web cameras — and send the information back to the attackers’ Web servers.

Continue reading »

One of Mitt Romney's top campaign advisers wrote a letter to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, asking him to reconsider the Four-Pinnochio ruling that Romney's Jeep-to-China lie wasn't actually a lie. I don't know why the effort to clear one lie from a campaign built upon lies, but that's what Stuart Stevens has done:

Stevens said his note was prompted by Chrysler’s announcement that it would begin building Jeep models in China.

“I would hope that you would take another look at this and stress test it for accuracy away from the heat of a campaign,” Stevens wrote. “I've been doing campaigns and writing about campaigns for some time and I believe that the ad and Romney's statement were completely accurate, unusually so by any standards.”

So the fact-checker looked at it again, and here's just a snippet of what he found:

"First of all, we should note that our critique of the ad covered more than the Jeep issue. We also faulted the ad for incorrectly citing a PolitiFact column to suggest all fact checkers were critical of Obama’s comments on the bailout. And we noted the Detroit News endorsement cited in the ad was highly critical of Romney’s position on the bailout — and lauded Obama for his “extraordinary” response to the auto industry crisis.

Just those facts alone are worthy of at least Two or Three Pinocchios. The Detroit News editorial, after all, actually backed up Obama’s criticism of Romney’s response to the auto industry crisis, thus undercutting a key message of the ad."

These are just the first two paragraphs of many, explaining all of the lies in the Romney "Jeep" campaign ad, including a new statement from Sergio Marchionne, chairman of Chrysler, reaffirming that Chrysler will not be moving jobs from the United States to China.

Kessler wrapped it up with "We reaffirm our earlier ruling of Four Pinocchios."

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing recorded the highest levels of air pollution on Saturday since it began its monitoring system in 2008. The Environmental Protection Agency deems air pollution levels between 301 and 500 to be “hazardous,” meaning people should avoid all outdoor activity. On Saturday night the air-quality monitoring device above the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took a reading of 755, which the embassy’s @BeijingAir Twitter feed called “Beyond Index.” Using the same standards, the air quality index in New York City was found to be 19 at 6 a.m. on Saturday.

Via:

In online conversations, Beijing residents tried to make sense of the latest readings.

“This is a historic record for Beijing,” Zhao Jing, a prominent Internet commentator who uses the pen name Michael Anti, wrote on Twitter. “I’ve closed the doors and windows; the air purifiers are all running automatically at full power.”

Other Beijing residents online described the air as “postapocalyptic,” “terrifying” and “beyond belief.”
...
It was unclear exactly what was responsible for the rise in levels of particulate matter, beyond the factors that regularly sully the air here. Factories operating in neighboring Hebei Province ring this city of more than 20 million. The number of cars on Beijing’s streets has been multiplying at an astounding rate. And Beijing sits on a plain flanked by hills and escarpments that can trap pollution on days with little wind. Meanwhile, one person hiking at the Great Wall in the hills at Mutianyu, north of Beijing, took photographs of crisp blue skies there.

In a 2009 State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official, Wang Shu’ai, told American diplomats to halt the embassy Twitter feed, saying that the data “is not only confusing but also insulting,” and that the embassy data could lead to “social consequences.”

I'm not certain how the destruction of all life on Earth gets filed under "Potential Social Consequences," but clearly this accentuates the need for every able-bodied person to be screaming out for efforts to save the planet to become the primary concern for all governmental leaders and heads of state.

So, Mitt Romney...you say Obama won the election because he gave away free gifts? Well maybe it's just because you're a big, fat liar.

Reuters:

Chrysler Group LLC, the U.S. automaker majority owned by Fiat SpA, said on Thursday it will invest $238 million to boost engine and truck production in Michigan and add up to 1,250 jobs to meet new demand.

The company is spending $198 million to make its Pentastar V6 engine at the Mack I Engine Plant, which currently builds a larger engine for the Ram 1500 truck. Production will begin in early 2014 and Chrysler may add up to 250 jobs there, subject to market conditions.

The automaker is spending $40 million to install a flexible production line at its Trenton North plant, which can build both the V-6 engine and the Tigershark four-cylinder engine.

Romney's false claim that Chrysler was sending all new jobs to China is just one of many of his tall tales from the campaign trail. I doubt his billionaire donors will be pleased to see all of his campaign statements crumble, just like his second failed run for president.

Via The National Memo:

Have you ever seen a Mitt Romney lookalike bobblehead doll? Or the parody video, since removed from the Internet, with former Republican candidate Jon Huntsman’s three daughters interviewing a nodding Mitt bobblehead?

This year, the Romney bobbleheads are marketed on the Internet, along with Barack Obama bobble-eads that are reportedly selling faster. But the original Mitt bobblehead first appeared four years ago and was produced—by Ann Romney’s brother at a factory in China—as a party favor for big donors.

When former Utah governor Jon Huntsman was still in the GOP presidential primary race last January, his three daughters “went rogue” and produced the video, with two of them donning blonde wigs to imitate Fox News anchors, and “interviewed” a Romney bobblehead doll. As they studied their nails and asked sarcastic questions — “Governor Romney, people accuse you of being stiff. Do you agree?” — the bobblehead would rapidly oscillate, indicating yes or no.

If those dolls could talk, they might have a lot to tell about their country of origin and who made them there. Although Romney now complains frequently that China has unfairly “taken American jobs,” the Chinese bobblehead Mitts are yet another example of Romney’s propensity to invest in the People’s Republic—and to enrich family members such as Roderick Davies, his brother-in-law, who oversaw the creation of the dolls in China through a Utah company called Asian Sources, Inc.

Good morning, today is Thursday, October 25, 2012. Your morning open thread begins below.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson has been arrested in a group of protesting northern Illinois workers during an act of civil disobedience in Freeport.

Jackson was taken into custody Wednesday with about a dozen workers. He is expected to be released later in the day.

Sensata Technologies is owned by Bain Capital and in the process of moving its Freeport manufacturing operations to China. That'll cost Freeport 170 jobs.

WIFR:

Jackson spent most of the afternoon in "Bainport”, the make-shift campsite that's been home to Sensata employees and their supporters for the last 40 days. Things took a turn around 4:00 p.m. when Jackson and about a dozen workers decided to march onto company property, before being arrested by police.

You may remember the plant is scheduled to close the day before the election, because around 170 jobs are being relocated to China. Today, Jackson said workers were humiliated because they've had to rain their Chinese replacements. He says he hopes his arrest will get Sensata management to the negotiating table. He hoped to convince them to keep the plant open.

“When these workers lose their jobs, they lose their homes, they lose their cars. Their kids cannot stay in school, they lose their hope. We are fighting for the integrity of the American worker, we're fighting for an even playing field,” said Jackson.

Sensata emerged as a flashpoint in the controversy over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s ties to Bain this summer, with the company’s employees pleading publicly with Romney to help save their jobs from being outsourced to China. Not only does Romney stand to profit from the outsourcing of these jobs to China through the stock he still owns in the company, his 2011 tax returns show that he got a huge tax break by moving Sensata stock to a charity organization he controls -- and that he continues to profit from Bain’s offshore holdings and tax avoidance strategies.

A caravan of about 50 former workers and supporters headed to the fire department where the people who were arrested are to be released.