Com­ment: The cov­er­age of China’s sen­tenc­ing of a U.S. Geol­o­gist to eight years in prison has not stressed the fact that Xue Feng worked for IHS, Inc–a firm spe­cial­iz­ing in analy­sis of the petro­leum indus­try and the epi­cen­ter of the “Peak Oil” hypoth­e­sis. A sub­sidiary of Thyssen/Bornemisza indus­tries, IHS pro­vides analy­sis derived from data sub­mit­ted by the petro­leum indus­try. Not sur­pris­ingly, IHS gen­er­ates analy­sis that indi­cates that global oil pro­duc­tion has peaked and that higher prices and relaxed envi­ron­men­tal safe­guards are nec­es­sary to sus­tain our way of life.

Addi­tion­ally, the “Peak Oil” crowd has gen­er­ated sup­port for a Nazi-style eugen­ics pro­gram.

One can only won­der what Mr. Feng was exam­in­ing that ran afoul of the Chi­nese author­i­ties. In FTR #‘s 549, 550, we exam­ined sup­port for the seces­sion­ist Uighurs of Xin­jiang Province on behalf of ele­ments of West­ern intel­li­gence. A Mus­lim peo­ple of Tur­kic extrac­tion, the Uighurs have been push­ing for polit­i­cal auton­omy in the petro­leum and resource-rich Xin­jiang region.

Major sup­port for Uighur inde­pen­dence has come from the UNPO, headed up by Karl von Hab­s­burg, for­merly mar­ried to Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza (whose fam­ily con­trols the indus­trial group to which IHS belongs.)

“Chi­nese Court Sen­tences U.S. Geol­o­gist to 8 Years” by Charles Hut­zler [AP]; Deseret News; 7/5/2010.

Excerpt: An Amer­i­can geol­o­gist held by Chi­nese state secu­rity agents  who stubbed lit cig­a­rettes  on his arms was sen­tenced  to eight years in prison Mon­day for gath­er­ing data on China’s oil indus­try — a case that high­lights the government’s use of vague secrets laws to restrict busi­ness information.

In pro­nounc­ing Xue Feng guilty of spy­ing and col­lect­ing state secrets, the Bei­jing No. 1 Inter­me­di­ate People’s Court said his actions “endan­gered our country’s national security.”

Its ver­dict said Xue received doc­u­ments on geo­log­i­cal con­di­tions of onshore oil wells and a data­base that gave the coor­di­nates of more than 30,000 oil and gas wells belong­ing to China National Petro­leum Cor­po­ra­tion and listed sub­sidiary PetroChina Ltd. That infor­ma­tion, it said, was sold to IHS Energy, the U.S. con­sul­tancy Xue worked for and now known as IHS Inc. . .