Mad world…
Again, which cite are you talking about? 
Is it your post 36, where Glaser says:
Again, what I’m saying is that some people see “$1m a day from oil” and assume that this is a lot of money and that it is most of ISIL’s income. The fact is that they stole a hell of a lot of stuff - billions and billions worth of equipment, both from Iraqis and Syrian security forces. They looted banks. They run kickback schemes. They control some huge percentage of Iraqi wheat production.
An analogy is that GM makes a ton of money selling SUVs. Well, yes, they sell many SUVs, but that’s only one component of GM’s revenue. One cannot ignore how much they make from their auto loans, which is very lucrative.
The point I’m making is that ISIL isn’t a one trick pony of oil revenues. Yes, taking that away would hurt, but that wouldn’t mean the group would fall apart. They’d just turn to other money making schemes, which they are surely capable of.
Full BBC docu, World’s Richest Terror Army
And that’s my night’s viewing.
There’s a link “rakes in up to 50 million a month”
I can’t see how they would replace oil, without, as the CTC says, expanding - and they’re getting pounded. And as the other article says, they’ve squeezed all they can in taxes and gangster stuff.
Good thing they have other sources of revenue then, right? I’m unsure how you can see this and still believe what you believe, but what the hell, it’s not the first time I’ve been mystified by something you write that seemingly contradicts whatever point you think you are making.
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I agree with this mostly, the nit is in the part about “it hasn’t brought them to their knees” AFAIK, the latest news in the field for DAESH is bad, with Kurdish and Iraqi forces expelling them from cities. IIUC DAESH is relying on younger and younger recruits, and it seems to me that no amount of money can make an effective fighting force when they are being decimated.
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Oh, totally agree. While I don’t think they are on their knees quite yet, they haven’t fared all that great on the battlefield lately. But it’s not because of their oil revenue one way or the other, more like they keep biting off more and more before they have even started to chew on what they bit before. Then again, since they are basically an end times fundamentalist apocalypse type religion, their motivations and actions aren’t always what one would expect or driven by goals that more, um, rational people would consider. Since they seem to want to bring about the end of the world, and feel this is the way God has told them to do it, they seem bent on making as many enemies as possible to join the fight against them. :smack:
I’m just looking at the proportions. They have all those other revenue streams, yes, but reports say they are maxed out. The bank raids were a one off, and oil looks to be roughly half their total yearly income. Unless, as in the West, most of the wealth goes to a very few who’s wealth reserves can be tapped when income dries up, it seems reasonable to assume that losing half your income would be crippling.
Regarding OP, though, it’s amazing how we still put up with energy inefficient buildings. I’m sure the tech has been there for a long time now to radically reduce energy use but for some reason we have to stick with old stock and methods. At least as far as UK is concerned.
Alternative energy that costs less than it costs to get oil pumped out of the ground would put an end to the current problems in the Middle East altogether, and then create massive new problems. Since this is not something that would realistically occur soon we’d better come up with a different plan, and start working on a plan for the day that we don’t need Middle East oil anymore.
I’d prefer Nuclear over wind. But in the interim we have enough oil and natural gas for hundreds of years.
Interesting. Why?
Alternative energy to stop ISIS is major case of tail wagging the dog. As noted, the ability of ISIS* to motivate people to its ideology is the fundamental problem. They opportunistically use money from Syria’s minor (relatively speaking) oil production and stopping that would be useful, but wouldn’t get directly at the root of the problem. And it’s hard to say whether a Mideast in general with a lot less oil wealth would be a more or less fertile ground for ISIS and similar ideologies. Also the price of oil is less than half what it recently was, but that doesn’t seem to have particularly curbed ISIS.
The other obvious point is that the world has a much bigger reason to replace petroleum and other fossil fuels than ISIS. But I’m afraid it’s infantile conspiracy theorizing to claim this is being held back by ‘oil interests’. The unfortunate fact is that as of now it would require a politically non-feasible reduction in world living standards to drastically cut global CO2 emissions. It’s a separate debate whether the threat from such emissions is so great that such a sacrifice in living standards ‘should’ nonetheless be made, but it’s just not going to happen as long as it remains as expensive as it is now.
There’s untold wealth to be made solving that dilemma, a way or way(s) to drastically reduce CO2 emissions worldwide (or directly engineer the climate to offset the effect) at a feasible cost. And it’s reasonable to be optimistic that may happen, along with working to adapt to climate change in the meantime. But it’s not reasonable to claim it’s the case now, that’s self delusion. Anyway the uncertain effect of such a solution on ISIS is really a tangent.
*and similar, perhaps eventually worse groups: ISIS is worse than Al Qaeda, who is to say ISIS is as bad as it gets?
Turbines aren’t reliable because of wind variability. They’re prone to mechanical failure.
The ultimate weapon is to not walk away leaving humungous power vacuums in large chucks of oil rich lands occupied by peoples suffering societal levels of PTSD that you caused.
Fair points. But I’m not sure that anyone is suggesting all-wind power generation. But I believe the idea is that wind power is quite cheap, so one might build a lot of that capability and use it when you can, and use some other source that’s more expensive (like natural gas) when you can’t.
That isn’t a weapon. That’s advice. Do we need to have a primer on the plain meaning of words?
Wind power does not scale well. Ten nuclear power plants work just as well as one nuclear power plant does as long as you’re mining more than one power plant worth of uranium, but ten wind farms will not work as well as one wind farm will because not everywhere has good prevailing winds for wind power, and you can’t stick two wind farms next to each other without the front farm screwing up the one in its “shadow”.
This is larger than the amount they receive from oil.
The article states that ultimately the only way to break this is to take the territory back from them.
While it’s far from a magical solution, you do have a larger point. It’s not just oil funding, it’s about our need to be involved in the Middle East to keep oil flowing and the price low enough for us to buy. If we weren’t so oil-dependent, we could leave the region to its own devices.
How about the plain meaning of “metaphor?”
coremelt’s metaphor was so bad that it constitutes a war crime.
Personally, I’m for wind and nuclear. And for solar, too, once the technology matures enough to be competitive. And geothermal and tidal, and for conservation so we can get more out of the energy sources we already have. There doesn’t need to be one single solution.
And while ISIS has other sources of revenue than selling oil, how many of those are indirectly dependent on oil? They’re funded by other nations: How much of their money do those other nations get from oil? They charge tax-like fees of their subjects: How much of the money for those taxes come from oil? Decreasing our consumption of oil would have many ripple effects through that region and the world, and most of those ripple effects would also hurt ISIS.