With crude oil at well over $100 a barrel one would have thought that exporting countries would be producing as much as they could to cash-in on the bonanza. However, a growing number of respected industry figures are now starting to question mainstream forecasts for supply, suggesting that the era of “plateau oil” is nearer than many in the business care to admit.

It remains a fact that whilst global oil demand is projected to grow to more than 100 million barrels per day (bpd) over the next few decades, it also remains a fact that supply is unlikely to increase much beyond the current rate of some 86 million bpd. To make matters worse, even when oil extraction from so-called unconventional sources, such as tar sands and converted from natural gas are taken into account, supply will continue to decline against demand.

A former top official at state oil giant Saudi Aramco is quoted as saying: “Today’s oil prices are high because there are limited new supplies. “There’s a history now. We’re several years into level production.”

Back in 1980, when crude oil first hit $100 per barrel, the impact was alleviated by producing countries and major oil companies increasing production, partly through exploiting new fields. It remains to be seen whether they are capable of responding in the same way this time around - many doubt it.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) conventional supply from outside OPEC has missed forecasts in recent years and appears to have hit an “effective plateau” in terms of production capability. Non-OPEC countries currently extract around 60% of the world’s oil, with the 13 members of OPEC making up the balance. Most OPEC countries, whether for reasons of war or sanctions, lack of investment or falling supply at ageing fields, are deemed unable to raise production. Or, as top oil official for OPEC member Libya, told the media recently: “Opec can do little. Most OPEC countries are producing at capacity.”

Furthermore, a former exploration geologist claims: “Every place is more or less running flat out. They can’t pump enough to meet demand, so the price is going up. Assuming no particular economic crash, the only direction is upwards.”

The view of some experts vary. Some believe that the supply of oil, including unconventional oil, will peak in 2010. Others claim that high prices will sustain a production plateau of 85 million bpd for up to around 2018, thereafter production will go into a long, gradual decline, reducing the world’s supply of oil and natural gas liquids to about 78 million bpd by 2030.

The bottom line, which most experts now agree, is that demand will outstrip availability. The bone of contention is merely whether the point of divergence has already been reached or simply postponed for a few more years. The need to develop new, clean and green forms of energy have never been so acute and is, undoubtedly, one of the major challenges of the Age.

THE LABOUR Government’s ban on hunting with dogs has nothing whatsoever to do with animal welfare.

No government which encourages supermarket cartels to squeeze farmers so ruthlessly that they have to resort to factory farming - rearing chickens in such appalling conditions that 100,000 die of disease, injury or stress every week - has the right to criticise fox-hunters.

No government that exalts Islam as a wonderful religion and turns a blind eye to the brutal ritual slaughter of millions of defenceless herbivores has the right to use essentially emergency legislation to protect a few thousand beautiful, but ruthless, carnivores from the possibility of being chased and caught by hounds.

Labour doesn’t care about animal welfare.

The banning of fox-hunting was about a Prime Minister under pressure, desperately trying to bribe a handful of disgruntled extreme left-wing Labour MPs to back him at the next General Election.

It’s also about old-fashioned Marxist class warfare and Labour’s great ambition - the Abolition of Britain by the systematic dismantling of its identity and traditions.

Robert Baehr, respected environmentalist campaigner and organic grower, provides a personal opinion on food additives and on those who profit from their inclusion in our foodstuffs.

If I could live my life again I would pay more attention in school. History and geography were the subjects that I enjoyed, but I doodled or daydreamed my way through the physics, maths and chemistry lessons. I was a little contemptuous of anyone interested in science, but now recognise that this attitude was born of arrogance and snobbery. It was only later in life that I realized just how fascinating these disciplines really are.

My early disdain for the physical sciences and imagined superiority to the students who showed interest or ability in the field had one beneficial side effect, however. Distrust of scientists was something that has always influenced my thinking. While most people unquestioningly accepted all discoveries and inventions as beneficial progress, I have often, if not usually, had my reservations.

As a result, as soon as I noticed that the food we were expected to feed to our children was full of chemicals I was troubled, to say the least. It was immediately obvious that our children were being poisoned by the chemicals that farmers were spreading on their fields and orchards, and by the colourants, flavourings and preservatives added subsequently by the processing industry.

That food should be natural and unadulterated seemed self-evident but nobody appeared to notice or to care. Everyone trusted the scientists and the regulators. Everyone trusted the government to protect us.

I was far from being a perfect parent, but at least I never fed my children the crap that was dished out to their peers. Despite our relative poverty we always bought organic when we had the option and used unprocessed food to prepare wholesome meals. While our friends saved money and effort at the supermarket we shopped at ‘Earth Foods’, our local wholefood store, spending more on nutrition than we could afford, and spending less on appearances and entertainment in order to fund our unconventional eating habits.

It was not until recently that it occurred to me that this calculated contamination of our food was more than merely an exercise in profit maximisation. It was always obvious that the authorities were not unaware of the disbenefits of chemicals in our food, especially as some additives banned as carcinogenic or behaviour modifying in the US were not only perfectly legal in the UK, but were almost ubiquitous here, especially in the sort of food that would be fed to children. In my innocence I put it down to human folly driven by capitalist greed, no more, no less.

I am a wiser man today, and I know now that there was more to it, something far more sinister than plain, mundane, run-of-the-mill avarice. The food processors, owned as they are by multinational business interests, were already involved in the conspirational programme of genocide-by-stealth that is currently being conducted against the native British peoples, the English, the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. The multi-nationally owned food processors, the suppliers of ready meals, convenience food, breakfast cereals, soft drinks and almost everything found on the supermarket shelves actually WANTED to poison our children, to shorten their lives so as to facilitate more expeditiously the cleansing of our country of the indigenous population. The contamination of our food has been a deliberate act, chemical warfare under the radar. Poisonous chemicals are another weapon in the armoury of the Multiculturalists.

I expect that many will find this very hard to believe, and will consider me a bit of a fruitcake. To be scorned and derided for my beliefs and opinions is something I have learned to live with. As a long-time proponent of organic food, a campaigner for the countryside, the environment and animal rights and an opponent of Third World exploitation I have long since become inured to disagreement and to the disapproval of others, so many of whom would never miss the opportunity to overlook an injustice and who never fail to ignore an impending disaster until it is too late.
Those who laugh at me now, who dismiss my opinions as evidence of stupidity, will mostly be the same people who fed their children the carcinogens that will shorten their lives, the same people who stood by complacently while our global environment was decimated by multinational corporations, while our rainforests were eradicated and our oceans and our air contaminated with industrial pollutants, and while the Third World was denuded of its natural resources.

To those people I say…laugh now, while you may, for tomorrow you will be crying. It will give me no satisfaction to see the miseries of cancer, CJD, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, asthma, obesity, premature ageing and behavioural defects that are set to increasingly afflict our population. It will not make me happy to see others suffer, even if I have been the object of their derision and contumely. If the truth is ever known all I ever wanted was for people to have happy lives, enjoying the good things without abusing themselves or their planet. The hatred that I fight within myself is not for my critics, but for the abusers and the misinformants, for the greedy businessmen and the lying politicians, for those who conspire against our interests and our welfare, and all the other unprincipled, selfish evildoers who have so blighted our lives over the last 60 years.

Our politicians and opinion formers today make a great show of their concern about unhealthy food, as they do about the environment. Believe me, that’s all it is, JUST SHOW! They need you to believe they care, but they don’t care about anything but themselves and their own. Their children, you can be sure, have not been fed the same contaminated food and have not been brought up in the same polluted and deprived environments.

They are simply playing catch up because they are being found out. Their evildoings will soon be exposed so they are having to cover their tracks. Please, let’s not allow them fool us again! When disaster strikes, when the consequences of their heinous policies become manifest and the magnitude of their mendacity becomes evident, I fervently hope that we will have the moral courage to avenge ourselves upon them.

Many of these people, whose love of wealth and power has robbed them of all basic morality, will be dead by the time their misdeeds are brought to light. Though they may need to live forever Nature does not permit, and they are all eventually dragged unwilling into an uncontrollable future. Fabulously wealthy though they may be while still alive they have to leave it all behind them when they go. But, who gets it?

It greatly offends my sense of justice to think that these monsters could have that last compensating satisfaction of knowing their progeny will benefit from their evil deeds. I would rather their last thought was one of concerned anguish for the fate of their heirs who will be facing severe punishments for the wrongdoings of their parents.

Let them know their children will inherit, not their houses and their fortunes, but their guilt and their debt to society. Let them be sure that their descendents will pay that debt in full, and with interest! Let this be so even for the most despicable crimes, such as genocide and treason, and let it include even the most severe punishments.

“ECO-TOWNS: what an oxymoron is that! How can a new town be ecologically friendly when it is built on a green field site which entails concreting over large areas of the countryside and destroying natural habitat?” asks Sally Wood in her Straight Talking column in the June issue of Freedom, the British National Party’s monthly newspaper.

Sally continues:

You only have to think of all the additional traffic and congestion it will generate, free to spew pollutants into the air.

Take the small village of Micheldever in the North Hampshire Downs. Here in this delightful rural landscape of rolling hills and wooded copse: home to owls, bats and a rare pair of stone curlews, Eagle Star Insurance have plans to concrete over it and construct one of these new eco-towns.

Another eco-town is proposed near Couldwell and Roslington in South Derbyshire. Bank Development are planning a 5,700 unit settlement which will entail the felling of national forest trees and a new road to feed its new eco-town of ‘Grovewood’. How eco-friendly is that!

It appears that 40% of these homes are to be affordable housing, but for whom?

The English are simply not replacing themselves, but they are now fleeing our ever increasingly crime-ridden cities to be replaced there by economic migrants. Surely if these economic migrants were told to stay in their own countries their carbon footprint would be lower, and that has to be good for the planet.

From every angle these eco-towns can only be an eco-disaster.

ALLOTMENT WANTED!

ONE of my earliest memories is of peering through railings at an elderly neighbour tending his plot in the allotments at the end of my road in South London.

I still think of that today when I flash passed in the train and spot the same site. The allotments have long since disappeared only to be replaced by an ugly block of flats with a garish mural which adorns the entire flank wall. It seems like something from another country.

Where I live now there was much consternation when the Liberal Democrats, who ran the Council at that time and who are always keen to proclaim their green credentials, decided to allow a Housing Association development on the nearby allotments. Since then many of the council houses in our area have become occupied by Eastern Europeans and others from overseas. When I recently tried to put my name down for an allotment on the sole remaining site I was told there was a waiting list of at least forty people before me and I could be given no indication as to when I was likely to reach the top of the list. Prepare to put your name down when young if you wish to get one in this lifetime!

With the United States now converting a fifth of its corn to ethanol to provide approximately 3-4% of the fuel needed to run its cars and trucks, the price of food worldwide has rocketed. Coupled with that, the droughts in Australia and China have resulted in a shortage of rice which has caused some countries to cease exporting rice completely for fear of food riots.

Britain was last self sufficient in grain, meat and dairy in the 1830’s and today self-sufficiency stands at only 60%, which makes us particularly vulnerable to a decline in food imports. During the last war when this was of concern, ten percent of our food was produced from gardens and allotments. It is hard to imagine such a figure could be reached today especially as many gardens in urban areas are now housing developments having been designated as ‘brownfield sites’.

As for that allotment . . . look around for one and you could well look in vain, for where it used to be you may find instead an ugly block of flats housing people from other lands and giving us the responsibility of all those additional mouths to feed.

It is reported that China’s carbon emissions are now well ahead of the US. Recent figures reveal China is now the world’s largest producer of the claimed global warming gas. The statistics reveal that Chinese produced carbon dioxide pollution increased by 8% in 2007 and was responsible for two-thirds of the year’s total increase in global CO2 emissions, according to experts at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment.

It is claimed that cement production, needed to meet China’s demand for infrastructure, to support its booming economy, was a significant factor. Indeed, half of all global cement production now takes place in China, and the industry is responsible for a fifth of Chinese CO2. Rebuilding roads and homes after the Sichuan province earthquake is expected to increase demand further.

According to the published figures, China is now responsible for 24% of global carbon dioxide emissions, followed by the US with 22%. The EU produces 12%, India 8% and the Russian Federation 6%.

On a “per head of population” basis, China lags far behind the US, which remains the biggest polluter per person by a large margin. Whilst US citizens produce an average of 19.4 tonnes of CO2 each year - those in China produce just 5.1 tonnes each. The figures also show that iRussians produce 11.8 tonnes each, the agency says, with the figure for the EU at 8.6 tonnes, and India just 1.8 tonnes per person.

The Dutch research team used new data on worldwide energy consumption and cement production in 2007 prepared by the oil giant BP. Last year, the same team surprised analysts when it said that China had already overtaken the US as chief producer of CO2.

It is reported that another two more of Britain’s regularly nesting birds are heading towards extinction. In the latest revision of Bird Life International’s “Red List’” the curlew and the Dartford warbler have been listed as “Near Threatened” - which is a classification only one step below those species facing global extinction.

The latest additions swell the numbers of nesting “Near Threatened” birds in Britain to five; joining the red kite, corncrake and black-tailed godwit on the list of endangered bird species.

In Britain the curlew, although still widespread, is a rapidly-declining species in many areas. Meanwhile the Dartford warbler, a largely heathland bird, is said to be expanding its range rapidly from the southern counties of England, largely because of heathland conservation, restoration programmes and milder winters. But the news is not so good for the warbler - which is declining rapidly in other parts of its European range, meaning Britain’s population of this species is of greater global significance.

The latest assessments are based on the population declines of both birds across their global ranges. The curlew is generally found across a belt of central and northern Europe and Asia, while 90% of the Dartford warbler is found in southern and western Europe.

In Britain, curlew numbers have fallen by 53% between 1970 and 2005, and by 37% between 1994 and 2006. It is believed that around 30% of the western European curlew population nests in Britain. The global population is suspected to have fallen by around 25% in the past 15 years.

BirdLife International estimates that the Dartford warbler may have declined in Europe by as much as 40% over the last decade. In its Spanish heartland, the warbler decreased by nearly six per cent per year between 1998 and 2006. Although, in Briton, the Dartford warbler has extended its range and increased its population to a total of 3209 territories in 2006.

Globally, the majority of species on the Red List are confined to islands or have very small ranges, perhaps limited by available habitat.

A RSPB scientist, recently claimed: “Since 1600 only two species of European bird - the great auk and the Canarian black oystercatcher - have become globally extinct. But the inclusion of widespread and familiar species like the curlew and the Dartford warbler to the list of birds facing trouble is deeply concerning and a warning that we will lose more species without urgent action. It is a sign that more and more birds are unable to cope with the fundamental changes, like habitat destruction and climate change that we are wreaking on our continent and the planet. Currently, 50 out of Europe’s 540 bird species are on a path towards extinction. We now need more urgent action to prevent some of our once-familiar birds from joining the great auk in the extinction ledger.”

It is claimed by industry experts that British food will be off the menu within 27 years if farming continues to die out. Shops will stock only imported food �“ which means that the celebrated full English breakfast would feature eggs from Spain and bacon and sausages made from Chinese pork.

The industry continues to decline as youngsters reject the lifestyle, said Lantra, the farming skills council. This is perhaps not surprising considering the hardships faced by the industry in recent years coupled with an apathetic, if not hostile, government.

A spokesman said: “With the industry losing 15,900 workers per year, we predict that by 2035 the farmer could be extinct, meaning Britain will lose its self-sufficiency.”

This disclosure follows short-sighted Government plans to rely heavily on imports to safeguard Britain’s food supply. Official policy states: “Domestic production is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for food security.”

However one agricultural expert responded: “This approach threatens to exacerbate the food shortages around the world. We should be looking to optimise domestic production.”

Reacting to Lantra’s report, the National Farmers’ Union said yesterday: “We believe agriculture, and those that work within the industry, have a very bright future.”

“Not under a Labour regime or within the EU it hasn’t” countered a spokesman for the BNP’s Land & People �“ “Britain’s farmers can only thrive outside the EU and under a government dedicated to self-sufficiency in agriculture”.