PowerSwitch

A four-part series that reveals how a secret pact formed a cartel that controls the world's oil.

See: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/spe ... 87582.html

Another informative video from Aljazeera.

Fuelling geopolitics: The oil saga

As the global competition for energy heats up, we examine how new players are rewriting the rules of the great oil game.

See: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/emp ... 22376.html

Interesting. Al Jazeera videos won't download via Firefox. Well, not for me anyhoo. I have a couple of Flash download helpers installed but neither recognise these videos on those pages. Any ideas?

About the oil industry history, there is a really great documentary "la face cachée du pétrole" but which undortunately only exists in French and German to my knowledge (in two parts, adapted from the book by the same title from Eric Laurent, starting from the very beginning of the oil era).

With plenty of key people interviews (Yamani, Gorbatchov, James Akins, Campbell, ex Reagan advisor, plenty others) and archive images.


It mentions this secret meeting and plenty of other things about the seven sisters era, like for instance that the guy who "sold" British influence in Saudi Arabia to the US was a Brit, St John Philby :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John_Philby
(also the father of Kim Philby)

In particular it also tells the true story around the first oil shock, typically that further to the US peak in 1970, western majors needed a higher barrel price to be able to start Alaska, GOM, North Sea, so that pushing the price up was part of US diplomacy (and Akins in particular, US ambassador in Saudi Arabia at the time, sugggesting a $ 4 or 5 a barrel in an Arab producers meeting in Algiers in 1972).

Also that the "embargo" was more or less a non event in terms of barrels taken out of the market, and in particular it was never effective from Saudi Arabia to the US (tankers kept on going from KSA, through Barhain to make it more discrete, towards the US army in Vietnam in particular).
About this Akins mentions senators that were starting to "voice" for some action, he asked the permission to tell them what was going on, got it, told them, there was never any leak.

To me this almost complete myth "first oil shock= Arab embargo=geopolitics and not geologic constraints" is clearly one of the major reason for the current inability to "swallow" peak oil ...

Below the links to this doc (unfortunately the interviews are also dubbed) :
part 1 :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... t5OHnM6Jl8
part 2 :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... QJ-0jAr3LQ

emordnilap wrote:Interesting. Al Jazeera videos won't download via Firefox. Well, not for me anyhoo. I have a couple of Flash download helpers installed but neither recognise these videos on those pages. Any ideas?

get hold of "DownloadHelper". It's a Firefox plugin and it can usually download a video from any site. it just sits on your menu at the top of the browser. It's usage is fairly self explanatory but let me know if you have problems E.

Interesting Alain - particularly in view of the fact that Reagan and the Shah were great buddies and the Shah claimed credit for getting the price of a barrel of oil up. He was a dupe and Reagan was a dybbuk.

stevecook172001 wrote:

emordnilap wrote:Interesting. Al Jazeera videos won't download via Firefox. Well, not for me anyhoo. I have a couple of Flash download helpers installed but neither recognise these videos on those pages. Any ideas?

get hold of "DownloadHelper". It's a Firefox plugin and it can usually download a video from any site. it just sits on your menu at the top of the browser. It's usage is fairly self explanatory but let me know if you have problems E.

That's one of the ones I have, Steve. It's not recognising Al Jazeera videos on my machine. The other is DownThemAll!, which is not grabbing them either.

Maybe it's my machine but I'm just downloading Mother, the film through Firefox, with no bother whatsoever and both plug-ins recognise it. Ho hum.

emordnilap wrote:Interesting Alain - particularly in view of the fact that Reagan and the Shah were great buddies and the Shah claimed credit for getting the price of a barrel of oil up. He was a dupe and Reagan was a dybbuk.

In the doc mentioned above Yamani also tells the story of the king of Saudi Arabia asking him to go see the shah for him to stop pushing the barrel up, he goes there and the shah tells him "you want to please the Americans ? But it is them that want the barrel higher" he brings that back and the king(faissal at the time I think) will never talk about the barrel price with Kissinger anymore ...

And then there is also the story of the counter oil shock, where basically Reagan managed to have the Saudis increase their prod, so as to cut 2/3 of USSR foreign currency input, and bring it down (or put the last blow). But this also did harm US domestic oil industry quite a bit, see for instance :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02F-3l1EKsA

And Bush (the first) was the one to put an end to it (when still Reagan vice president and more or less on his own).

emordnilap wrote:Interesting. Al Jazeera videos won't download via Firefox. Well, not for me anyhoo. I have a couple of Flash download helpers installed but neither recognise these videos on those pages. Any ideas?

Try these:

Episode 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSX6DMnFBDI

Episode 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jajd7-xZlxw

Episode 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCv8LFzNbzA

Episode 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjvPRWJNDzY



BTW, I use Freemake Video Downloader. Works a treat with Firefox 20.0.1

See: http://www.freemake.com/downloads/

Thanks Aurora. The YT vids are downloading now. Freemake is for the dreaded Windows.

emordnilap wrote:

stevecook172001 wrote:

emordnilap wrote:Interesting. Al Jazeera videos won't download via Firefox. Well, not for me anyhoo. I have a couple of Flash download helpers installed but neither recognise these videos on those pages. Any ideas?

get hold of "DownloadHelper". It's a Firefox plugin and it can usually download a video from any site. it just sits on your menu at the top of the browser. It's usage is fairly self explanatory but let me know if you have problems E.

That's one of the ones I have, Steve. It's not recognising Al Jazeera videos on my machine. The other is DownThemAll!, which is not grabbing them either.

Maybe it's my machine but I'm just downloading Mother, the film through Firefox, with no bother whatsoever and both plug-ins recognise it. Ho hum.

A final option is to get hold of a freeware screen scraper. This simply records the entirety of whatever is happening on your monitor including any video that is playing and any sound that is playing. It's a bit of a messy solution but is guaranteed to work.

Well, finally got to watch this. Pretty good but very condensed of course, for such a massive subject.

One thing that struck the OH towards the end: "How can all these different countries all talk about 'energy security' and finite resources in the same breath?"

Now that was outside the scope of the programme.

Note : this 4 part documentary "the secret of the seventh sisters" is in fact an adpatation of below one (from 2009) :
http://secretdes7soeurs.blogspot.fr/

All parts here :
http://www.politique-actu.com/dossier/p ... ie/869118/

(didn't check if it is a direct translation or more an adpatation)

edit : just checked the Collin Campbell interview part in the Al Jazzera English version (beginning part 4), it is quite shortened form the original one, where for instance he says 'for me the peak of conventionnal occured in 2005"

Some YouTube videos can no longer be downloaded by add-ins. Copyright issues maybe.

I solved this by going to www.keepvid.com and pasting the youtube address in there and this will download for you. I think you need to enable Java to get it to work.

I use Ubuntu or Mac so windows software is not an option.

BritDownUnder wrote:Some YouTube videos can no longer be downloaded by add-ins. Copyright issues maybe.

I solved this by going to www.keepvid.com and pasting the youtube address in there and this will download for you. I think you need to enable Java to get it to work.

I use Ubuntu or Mac so windows software is not an option.

Although I don't like Firefox particularly, it is rather good for downloading vids. There are several add-ons available for the purpose.