Posted on 12/25/2006 2:19:47 PM PST by Flavius
Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues income could virtually disappear by 2015, according to an analysis released Monday by the National Academy of Sciences.
Iran's economic woes could make the country unstable and vulnerable, with its oil industry crippled, Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, said in the report and in an interview.
Iran earns about $50 billion a year in oil exports. The decline is estimated at 10 to 12 percent annually. In less than five years exports could be halved and then disappear by 2015, Stern predicted.
The reason why Iran wants the Bomb badly. They want to control the Oil of Iraq and the Gulf and be unvulnerable.
If we would attack Iran and destroy not only it's WMD sites, but also their harbours and oil-refinery faciliety, they would have no chance to rebuilt their program from scratch again.
Why do you think the Iranians are trying to hard to acquire nuclear weapons? Perhaps they have plans to increase their oil reserves at the expense of their neighbors.
Good.
Let's get the Christians and Jews out of there now, and let the rest starve to death.
Iran's economic woes could make the country unstable and vulnerable,?????
Iran's oil exports could fall to zero by 2008 too, if they don't get their act together.
If there is an iran by 2015. I am inclined to bet against such an outcome.
The Persian culture used the same method quite successfully.
What a poorly written story.
Why is it declining? Are their oil reserves depleted? Unable to bring the oil to the surface? Unable to transport it?
Makes a huge difference which it is. In all likelihood the Russians with their stolen technology will ride in and save the day - at our expense.
+1
Once they have nuclear weapons, they'll be able to control the entire Persian Gulf, and no doubt wax poetic about the second Persian Empire and the ayatollahs will choose someone to be the new Darius or Xerxes.
That's the problem with the Old World. They're often living amid the debris of past glory and want desperately to recreate it in the modern world. Unfortunately, all those past empires tend to overlap, and there's those notions of individual freedom and national soveriegnty to consider for the conquered peoples of those past empires.
Gee, this might be the time for the concept of American exceptionalism again. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why thugs hang together like Achmadenajad (spelling is wrong, I know), Chavez (living out his dream of being Bolivar), bin Laden (desirous of becoming Saladin), Putin (the newest great czar), the communist mandarins of China - we are in their way of the glory they want. Without us, I'd imagine a world in chaos and war as these dreams of glory turned into endless bloodshed.
This has nothing to do with nuke.
Iran hs very large reserves.
Their problem is, these types of societies
have a problem something like this...
Iran's oil facilities are getting older,
Iran imports gasoline...
the 'Great Leader' thinks,
"why spend money on facilities that
lasts forty years, I won't live that long,
I need cash flow now".
everything is left over from the Shah's era,
sorta like Cuba
Iran is already a net importer of NATGAS....although that is expected to change with the deal with the Chicoms.
My exact thoughts. What a waste of screen space.
Most instances when the slippery slope fallacy is cited, it is improperly argued. Goals sought by individuals and groups become apparent, and they will go further in their efforts.
But if that analysis is saying that sanctions will stop Iran's oil exports because of a small decline in current exports, that's a slippery slope fallacy.
Besides, from the way we've dealt with Iran, she's likely to get anything that she wants by building/acquiring a nuclear arsenal.
It has everything to do with nukes.
What you write are the reasons for their economic decline.
The nukes are for them the solution.
They are madmen who want to destroy Israel with nukes? Sure they are. But that's not the primary reason. They want to blackmail us and their neighbours. They want to grab the oil of their neighbours. They want their power and influence to extend over the entire region. They may be lunatics, but they are acting rationally and calculating. Eventually destroying Israel is only part of their lust for conquest in the Middle East.
The original article in Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Science is at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/103/5/1650.pdf .
Iran has the world's third largest petroleum reserve. I find this article completely useless, if not fabricated.
1 Saudi Arabia 262,700,000,000 2005 est.
2 Canada 178,900,000,000 2004 est.
3 Iran 133,300,000,000 2005 est.
4 Iraq 112,500,000,000 2005 est.
5 United Arab Emirates 97,800,000,000 2005 est.
6 Kuwait 96,500,000,000 2005 est.
7 Venezuela 75,590,000,000 2005 est.
8 Russia 69,000,000,000 2003 est.
9 Libya 40,000,000,000 2005 est.
10 Nigeria 36,000,000,000 2005 est.
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