scapegoat

Matt Simmons died.


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Check out the disparaging personal remarks.

Matt Simmons, Crazy Uncle of the Oil Patch, RIP

Legendary oil industry banker and gadfly Matt Simmons died last night at his home in Maine, from an apparent heart attack while in a hot tub. I’ll miss talking with Simmons. He had become, in recent years, the crazy old uncle of the oil patch. 

Rich, odd, bombastically self-confident, unconcerned with what anyone thought of him. 

He wasn’t often right, but he always had a very strong opinion that he was eager to share. More important than being right, he made us think.

In recent months, his pronouncements about the BP oil spill stretched thin his remaining strands of credibility. A few weeks after the spill began I had a conversation with him where he swore that BP, in cohoots with the federal government, was covering up a far greater leak in the seafloor near the Macondo well, where more than 100,000 bpd of oil was gushing up. He told me that the whole oil reservoir was likely to burst up suddenly through miles of rock and explode into the ocean “like popping a zit.” This would be the worst environmental catastrophe the world had ever known, he said.

Simmons got a lot of press for these ideas — but they were preposterous. The investment bank that Simmons founded (and with which he made a fortune raising capital for oil services companies) went so far as to issue a statement saying that the comments of their dear chairman emeritus did not reflect the beliefs of their analysts and staff. They were, frankly, embarrassed by their crazy old uncle.

He’s also so far been proven wrong about the immediacy of Peak Oil and its dire aftermath of $500 crude and total societal collapse. It might yet happen, and if it does let’s hope that the downslope is gentler on us than it would have been had we not heard Simmons’ Cassandra calls. I addressed his Peak Oil theories in this Forbes Magazine article “Crude Cassandra.”

I first met with Simmons five years ago, upon the release of his book “Twilight In The Desert.” His theory, that Saudi Arabia’s (and the world’s) top field Ghawar was about to keel over and die, enraged the Saudis. The Kingdom has since spent billions of dollars bolstering its reserves and capacity–in part to prove Simmons and all the other worryworts wrong.

Earlier this year Simmons explained to me his new plan to solve the world’s energy problems. The gist: 1. build the world’s biggest windfarm off the windy coast of Maine. 2. Use the electricity generated to desalinate and de-ionize sea water. 3. Use that water, plus electricity and air, to manufacture ammonia. 4. Pipe the ammonia to shore and use it to power a new generation of cars. The cost: $25 billion. “It sounds like a snake oil project, I know,” said Simmons. Yet it does.

But more important, it is also creative and bold and visionary. When, some day, Peak Oil does come to the world and $500 oil is a reality, we’ll likely dust off Simmons’ harebrained ideas and put them to work, and think, hey, that crazy uncle wasn’t so crazy after all.

So I'm not going to sit here and defend Matt Simmons. But isn't it so very convenient that he is dead now and can be the scapegoat for everything the mindfuckers want to disown at this point in time?
 


July 29: A critical examination of Matt Simmons' hyperbolic claims on the Deepwater spill, Business Insider

July 29: News cycle turns in BP's favor, WSJ

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That is the great weakness in the Empire’s plan–by continually operating in a Hegelian manner (always manipulating both left and right, to force a consensus), every argument put forth by politicians or behaviorists, seeking to confine us within a narrow political spectrum, reaches a flipping point, where both synthesis and antithesis change direction, heading towards, instead of away from each other.  It is at this flipping, or tipping point, where the original argument fizzles-out, losing its steam and forward momentum, and the threat we represent becomes the greatest.  The greatest danger in allowing us to access inconvenient or incriminating evidence from the Internet comes just at the point of flipping.  This is why the Internet has not yet been pulled out from under us. ~ Dangerous Conspiracy Theories by Peter Chamberlin