German military report: Peak oil could lead to collapse of democracy
By Daniel Tencer
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 -- 7:48 pm
Peak oil has happened or will happen some time around this year, and its consequences could threaten the continued survival of democratic governments, says a secret Germany military report that was leaked online.
According to Der Spiegel, the report from a think-tank inside the German military warns that shrinking global oil supplies will threaten the world's economic foundations and possibly lead to mass-scale upheaval within the next 15 to 30 years.
International trade would suffer as the cost of transporting goods across oceans would soar, resulting in "shortages in the supply of vital goods," the report states, as translated by Der Spiegel.
The result would be the collapse of the industrial supply chain. "In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse," the report states.
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...With peak oil causing "partial or complete failure of markets ... [a] conceivable alternative would be government rationing and the allocation of important goods or the setting of production schedules and other short-term coercive measures to replace market-based mechanisms in times of crisis."
But the report also warns that the economic crisis caused by shrinking oil supplies and skyrocketing prices could be seen by the general public as a failure of market economics as a whole -- and with it, the political institutions that created those economic systems.
Public anger at the existing system would create "room for ideological and extremist alternatives to existing forms of government." Populations would fragment along political lines and "in extreme cases" this could "lead to open conflict."
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Last Sunday, the UK Observer reported that Britain's Department of Energy and Climate Change is refusing to release documents related to peak oil, even though, as the Observer noted, previously released documents argue the veil of secrecy around the issue is probably "not good."
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And earlier this year, a report from the US Joint Forces Command stated that "by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day."
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/0901/ge ... -democracy
