My Russian friends would often tell me that, at the time of the Soviet Union, nobody believed the official propaganda but they had no other source of information. In our times, we have plenty of sources of information, but it seems that most of us choose to believe the official propaganda.
I think it was Baudelaire who said, "The devil's best trick is to convince people that he doesn't exist."
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Published on Tuesday, November 27, 2012 by TomDispatch.com
A Thermonuclear Energy Bomb in Christmas Wrappings
World Energy Report 2012: The Good, the Bad, and the Really, Truly Ugly
Claiming that advances in drilling technology were producing an upsurge in North American energy output, World Energy Outlook predicted that the United States would overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the planet’s leading oil producer by 2020. “North America is at the forefront of a sweeping transformation in oil and gas production that will affect all regions of the world,” declared IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven in a widely quoted statement.
In the U.S., the prediction of imminent supremacy in the oil-output sweepstakes was generally greeted with unabashed jubilation. “This is a remarkable change,” said John Larson of IHS, a corporate research firm. “It’s truly transformative. It’s fundamentally changing the energy outlook for this country.” Not only will this result in a diminished reliance on imported oil, he indicated, but also generate vast numbers of new jobs. “This is about jobs. You know, it's about blue-collar jobs. These are good jobs.”
The editors of the Wall Street Journal were no less ecstatic. In an editorial with the eye-catching headline “Saudi America,” they lauded U.S. energy companies for bringing about a technological revolution, largely based on the utilization of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to extract oil and gas from shale rock. That, they claimed, was what made a new mega-energy boom possible. “This is a real energy revolution,” the Journal noted, “even if it's far from the renewable energy dreamland of so many government subsidies and mandates.”
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