Our Changing Globe

Archive for the ‘America’ Category

Rupert Murdoch's News International 'Sought to Destroy My Life …

www.hollywoodreporter.com11/30/11

At a Leveson Inquiry hearing, Mark Lewis recounted his horror at seeing the publisher's surveillance tapes of his 14-year-old daughter.

Rupert Murdoch Sells Nearly All His Nonvoting News Corp. Shares …

mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com11/22/11

Rupert Murdoch has sold almost all of his nonvoting shares in News Corporation, but because of the company's dual-class voting shares he still controls the company. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission …

Twenty years after flirting with bankruptcy, Rupert Murdoch is now on the verge of his biggest deal.

The proposed transaction is a complete takeover of UK satellite television operator British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), which would cement News Corporation’s move away from relying on the cyclical advertising market to drive earnings.

Instead, the BSkyB business, as well as News Corp’s global suite of cable TV channels and satellite TV businesses in Italy, Germany and elsewhere, would put the company squarely in the content and distribution business, and be far less prone to advertising’s vicarious ups and downs.

It would also continue News Corp’s migration towards direct consumer subscription revenues!

* Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG, born 11 March 1931 is an Australian-American media mogul and the Chairman and CEO of News Corporation.

Risk And Reward

Twenty years ago Murdoch was facing bankruptcy!

He’d invested heavily in BSkyB which had pretty much drained News Corporation, and it was rumored that he recently paid of his mortgages, which caused a great many investors to sweat.

But today Sky is the giant of television and in addition to soccer Sky Arts, National Geographic and the History Channeland much much more.

How Much Does Murdoch Control The Content?

In the two decades that he has owned the channel, not one editor or journalist that I know of has suggested that he interfered or even made suggestions about news coverage.

How incredible!

Now, twenty years later, Murdoch is on the verge of the biggest deal of his life, benefiting from the greatest of all capitalist drivers, namely risk and reward.

At a conference in London recently he used a quote about the lack of business adventure in Britain:

"We’ve got to get rid of the fear of failure in this country. In America, people start things, fail and shake themselves down and start things again. The animal spirit of capitalism is stronger there".

How Did Murdoch Achieve A Monopoly?

In a nutshell, nobody else had the guts, the nerve or the stunning management skill to take on the establishment.

When he was losing literally hundreds of millions on Sky, his competitors were delighted but now that he has made the greatest television success in all our lifetimes, they yell foul.

What The West Is Now Lacking

Surely with the US and Europe facing bankruptcy, what is urgently needed are more people like Rupert Murdoch.

And dare I say it, "No more Obamas!", because he and his ilk have yet to understand Margaret Thatcher who famously said, "Socialism is fine, until you run out of spending other people’s money!".

Israel's Offshore Natural Gas Fields are a Geo-Political Game …

grendelreport.posterous.com11/9/11

Noble Energy, Inc. Map of Eastern Mediterranean Natural Gas Fields. The Oil and Gas Journal had a report, “Israel's offshore gas reserves poised to rise” that underlined how the imminence of energy independence for the …

Three Israeli Innovations That Could Power U.S. Renewables …

cleantechnica.com10/27/11

Renewable energy needs new innovations to compete with fossil fuels, but that doesn't always happen here. New inventions in Israel could boost US renewables.

Israel Has Oil And Gas?!

Update:

The first oil was extracted last Wednesday (June 29, 2011), and drilling will be clean and won’t leave a footprint.

Read the oil extraction article now.

New Data

New data suggests that Israel may not only have much larger gas resources than previously believed, but actually have the 3rd largest deposit of oil shale in the world!

Put In Perspective

Libyan oil accounts for less than 2% of the world’s oil production, yet the ongoing revolt against Muammar Gaddafi caused the price of oil to leap to more than $100 per barrel in just one month.

Total Share Of World’s Total Oil Supply

According to the US Department of Energy, the Middle East’s share of the world’s total oil supply is expected to increase in the years ahead because the world is using up the reserves of non-Middle East oil more quickly.

Moreover, according to the CIA, of the trillion barrels of proven reserves still left, roughly 800 billion barrels are to be found in the Middle East and North Africa, especially in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq.

Israel’s Political Problem?

The implications for Israel of the West’s growing dependence on Middle Eastern oil would be troubling, for obvious reasons, but two new developments in its energy sector could well offset these trends and eventually alter Israel’s standing in the world, especially with respect to Europe.

Israel’s Gas

The Tamar field, in the Eastern Mediterranean should begin production in 2013, and it’s expected to supply all of Israel’s domestic requirements for at least 20 years, and the recently discovered Leviathan field, which has twice the gas of Tamar, would be completely devoted to exports.

The two fields together have about 25 trillion cubic feet of gas and Greece is already talking to Israel about creating a transportation hub for distributing gas throughout Europe from the Eastern Mediterranean that will come from undersea pipelines.

And what’s more, the US Geological Survey estimates that there are 122 trillion cubic feet of gas in the whole Levant Basin, most of which is within Israel’s jurisdiction.

Israel’s Shale Oil

What is perhaps less well-known, but is even more important, is that a new assessment that was released late last year by Dr. Yuval Bartov, who is the chief geologist for Israel Energy Initiatives, at the yearly symposium of the prestigious Colorado School of Mines suggests that Israel’s oil shale reserves are the equivalent of 250 billion barrels which can be put into perspective by comparing it to Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves of 260 billion barrels.

If the figures prove to be correct then Israel would have the third largest largest deposit of oil shale, after the US and China.

* Shale oil is an underground layer of rock impregnated with kerogen, a petroleum precursor, which ultimately becomes oil when heated.

The Problems With Oil Shale

Until now oil shale mining used to be a very dirty business that used up tremendous amounts of water and energy.

New Technologies

New technologies that are being developed for Israeli shale, seek to separate the oil from the shale rock 300 meters underground and the techniques would actually produce water, rather than use it up.

In a nutshell, the process involves prolonged heating of the rock through boreholes until the residual layer liquefies after which it is then siphoned out and refined.

In 2008, Israel licensed a vast shale deposit at the foot of the Judean Hills to Israel Energy Initiatives, which is currently conducting a pilot project to produce 500 barrels of oil, and if testing proves technically and economically feasible, then the company believes Israel will have a source of high-grade oil worth several decades of energy.

A Seismic Shift

If Israel is able to develop a unique method for separating oil from shale deep underground, that has none of the negative ecological side-effects of earlier oil shale efforts, that technology can be made available to the whole world, and change the entire global oil market, and the effect of the spread of this technology would be to shift the center of gravity of world oil away from Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf to more stable states such as Jordan and Morocco that have no history of backing terrorism or radical Islamic causes.

How Would The Change Affect Israel Politically?

After America’s reserves in Texas and Oklahoma were depleted by World War II, it sought to upgrade its military and diplomatic ties with the Saudi kingdom even before its production capacity was fully exploited, and Saudi Arabia’s status grew as its future position in world oil came to be appreciated, and one only has to look at how the West turns a blind eye to atrocities carried out by the leaders of major oil exporting countries to understand the influence that comes with oil.

Updated international reports verifying the true dimensions of Israel’s undersea gas and oil shale should be forthcoming in the next year and many more international companies are likely to take an interest in its energy sector at that time.

Israel is uniquely situated by its geographical position and would easily be able to direct its energy exports to either Europe or China and India, and although Israel may not have the capital to build this export capacity, the involvement of foreign investors in these projects will give European and American banks new interests in developments.

The world’s policies will not change overnight, but Israel now needs to start telling the the full story of its newly emerging role in the world energy sector in order to alter the way it’s being handled internationally.