CIBC sees oil at $100 (U.S.)

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CIBC World Markets Inc. said Tuesday that dwindling supply and rising demand for oil could see crude prices reach $100 (U.S.) a barrel in the next five years. The price of oil will average around $77 a barrel in the next five years and trade as high as $100 a barrel by 2010, more than twice the previous high reached in the early 1980s after the OPEC oil shock sent crude prices - measured in today's dollars - to around $65 a barrel, according to economists from CIBC.

"Tomorrow's price hikes won't be triggered by sudden supply disruptions like the Arab oil boycott of 1973 of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Instead, they will follow from the inevitable collision between surging global crude demand and accelerating depletion of conventional crude supply," CIBC said in a report called "Not Just a Spike."

Last Thursday, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said oil markets may have entered what it calls a "super spike" period, which could send crude as high as $105 (U.S.) a barrel. In a report, the New York brokerage boosted its estimate for a so-called "super spike" range to between $50 and $105 amid unexpected strength in oil demand and economic growth, especially in the United States and China. Previously, the brokerage's range had been $50 to $80. Light, sweet crude futures slipped 97 cents to $56.04 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange Tuesday, after earlier trading as high as $57.20.

Alan Greenspan says the global economy faces the biggest oil shock in a generation, but the "current price frenzy" in energy markets is already waning as inventories rise.

Even as the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board sounded that optimistic note Tuesday, others warned that oil prices will continue to rise for years - perhaps topping $100 (U.S.) a barrel - before consumers and businesses cut consumption enough to bring soaring demand back into line with the much slower growth of supply.

But Mr. Greenspan, speaking to a petrochemical industry conference, said he believes that is already happening, although on a modest scale.

"Much will depend on the response of demand to price over the longer run," he said. "If history is any guide, should higher prices persist, energy use will over time continue to decline."

The Fed chairman said he believes soaring prices have laid the foundation for their own decline, with the futures market now priced so that refiners and others have an incentive to buy oil and stockpile it.

"That will likely support increased inventories of crude oil," Mr. Greenspan told the conference in San Antonio, Tex., over a satellite link. "If sustained, these market technicals could encourage enough of an inventory buffer to damp the current price frenzy. We must remember," he added, "that the same price signals that are so critical for balancing energy supply and demand in the short run also signal profit opportunities for long-term supply expansion."

High prices will spur investment in new sources of supply, such as an expansion of Alberta's oil sands, he said. "Conversion of the vast Athabasca oil sands reserves in Alberta to productive capacity has been slow. But at current market prices they have become competitive."

So-called unconventional oil and gas resources, including the oil sands or coal bed methane gas deposits, are becoming competitive as prices rise, Mr. Greenspan said.

"The unconventional is increasingly becoming conventional." He also referred to potential energy sources in the future, "perhaps a generation or more." He said natural gas hydrates, which exist as ice-like structures on the sea floor, store "immense quantities of methane."

While there is no commercially viable method to tap hydrates today, the energy contained in hydrates in U.S. waters may be the equivalent of 200 quadrillion cubic feet of gas, Mr. Greenspan said. That's 33 times the world's proved gas reserves.

Global lending organization says prices will remain volatile through 2030, posing 'serious risk.'

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China's growing thirst for petroleum, tight supplies and little spare production capacity will keep oil prices volatile through 2030, with the possibility of spikes as high as $100 a barrel, the International Monetary Fund said Thursday.

"In short, it will continue to be a rocky ride going forward, with a wide band of uncertainty surrounding high expected prices," said Raghuram Rajan, the IMF's chief economist.

As living standards improve in China, India and other developing nations, oil demand will increase, especially for cars and trucks, Rajan told reporters. The IMF forecast indicates that China will be consuming nearly as much oil in 2030 as the U.S. consumes now. Currently the U.S. consumes about a quarter of the world's oil production.

"The oil market will remain tight in the coming years, and high and volatile oil prices will continue to present a serious risk to the global economy," the IMF said in its semiannual World Economic Outlook report.

Through 2010, oil prices will be subject to large swings as non-OPEC producers try to meet incremental demand. "Since the prospects for higher spare capacity are unfavorable, the market will likely remain tight and vulnerable to shocks," it said.

From 2010 through 2030, after non-OPEC output has peaked, the world will be more dependent on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to meet demand. That will also bring "growing upside risks to prices," the report said.

The IMF forecast average world oil prices in a range of $39 to $56 per barrel in 2030, as expressed in 2003 dollars. That would represent a range of $67 to $96 per barrel in nominal terms.

For 2005, the average world oil price will be about $52.23 a barrel, IMF analysts said. That is sharply higher than the $37.25 a barrel than the IMF forecast in its September report.

$100/Barrel oil possible
U.S. crude oil soared to a record high of $58.28 per barrel on Monday in a buying frenzy triggered by a Goldman Sachs forecast that prices could spike as high as $105 per barrel.

"To the extent that there is some kind of supply disruption, $100 a barrel does not seem outlandish," he said. "Is it the most likely scenario? I think not necessarily. It depends on how the market evolves."

The new IMF report estimated world oil demand will grow to 138.5 million barrels per day in 2030 from 82.4 million bpd in 2004.

Significant growth will come from China, which was forecast to consume 19 million bpd of oil in 2030, more than triple the amount used in 2004, the IMF said.

Rising incomes in China mean its motor vehicle ownership rate will soar to an estimated 267 vehicles per 1,000 people in 2030, up from just 16 vehicles per 1,000 people in 2002. By comparison, the United States is forecast to have 843 vehicles per 1,000 people in 2030, up from a rate of 812 in 2002.

Demand for OPEC oil will more than double to a range of 61 million to 74 million bpd by 2030, the IMF said. To meet that demand, cartel members would need to invest about $350 billion to increase production capacity, it said.

However, one economic model suggests that OPEC's optimal world oil market share is 41 percent to 46 percent for cartel members to balance gains from higher output against the resulting lower prices. That would put OPEC output at 52 million to 59 million bpd in 2030, the IMF said.

"Consequently, OPEC may not have an incentive to significantly increase its current market share of just below 40 percent," it said.

Not Just A Spike

Jeff Rubin
From Occasional Report #53, CIBC World Markets
April 15th, 2005

Over the next five years, crude prices will almost double, averaging close to $77/bbl and reaching as much as $100/bbl by 2010. That's over twice the previous 6-year high (1980-1985) following the second OPEC oil shock, when crude, in today's dollars, averaged the equivalent of $65/bbl. Tomorrow's price hikes won't be triggered by sudden supply disruptions like the Arab oil boycott of 1973 or the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Instead, they will follow from the inevitable collision between surging global crude demand and accelerating depletion of conventional crude supply. By 2010, prices will have to take out nearly 9 million barrels a day from world oil consumption-no mean feat for a world that has never been more thirsty for oil.

As in the 1970s and early 1980s, energy will once again come to dominate both the economy and financial markets. But there are likely to be some fundamental differences. On the economic front, the impact of surging crude prices is likely to be far more deflationary than inflationary. During the 1970s, surging fuel costs were the catalyst for a huge outbreak of wage-price inflation, as workers futilely tried to protect the purchasing power of their incomes through ever-escalating wage demands. But that was in a world where most workers in G-7 economies were protected by huge trade barriers against competition from cheap offshore labour. In today's world, where production and jobs can easily be shifted to low-wage economies, North American wages will have to eat energy price increases, and in the process, stomach the loss of purchasing power that comes along with it.

Hence the implications for monetary policy couldn't be more different than the ones posed by the OPEC shocks. Instead of draining the system of liquidity to starve out wage-price inflation, the primary concern of monetary policy in oil-importing economies like the US will be to support economic growth. Offsetting the massive terms of trade effect, and its taxing implications for both American consumers and American businesses, will require a much more accommodative posture than today's Federal Reserve Board has so far acknowledged.

On the financial market front, energy stocks will become almost as dominant in equity markets as tech stocks were in the last decade. As oil prices continue to rise, energy stock valuations, already characterized by some as a bubble, should follow a similar trajectory to the one they charted in the 1970s. Between 1973 and 1979, the oil and gas index of the TSX more than doubled. While long-term oil price expectations embedded in the oil strip curve have moved up sharply over the last three months, longdated contract prices for 2010 still show oil prices at only $50/bbl, half of what they are likely to be trading at by the end of the decade (see pages 2-6).

The first two oil shocks were transitory, as political events encouraged oil producers to seize full sovereignty over their resources and temporarily restrict supply. This time around, with suppliers already running full tilt, there's no tap that can suddenly be turned back on.

Crude Prices Will Almost Double Over Next Five Years
by Jeff Rubin and Peter Buchanan

Many oil "experts" were sure 2004's high oil prices and hot demand growth was just an aberration. While the flattening of the futures curve suggests markets are now boosting their expectations for longer-term prices, they may still have a long way to go. Accelerating global demand concurrent with accelerating global depletion points to much higher energy prices over the next five years. In fact, the trajectory of future price hikes may even challenge the very nature of backwardation in the oil strip curve (Chart 1).

On the demand front, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has just upped its forecast for global crude demand this year by almost half a percentage point to 2.2%. This marks the third time the energy watchdog has changed its views of late. And last month's revision is by far the single largest so far (Chart 2).

Chances are that the IEA will once again have to ratchet up its estimate before the year is done, with global demand likely to grow by at least 2.5%.

While demand forecasts are ratcheting up, those of supply growth are moving in the other direction.

Among those are last year's stunning reserve downgrades by a number of major oil firms, and cloudy prospects for the world's top producers of crude. Saudi Arabia, traditionally the backstop of global supply, is already experiencing rising water rates in its mother lode Ghawar field, an early indicator of depletion that has already resulted in falling production levels in neighbouring Oman. And Russian production, which has accounted for three-quarters of non-OPEC oil growth in the past five years, seems to have recently peaked out.

Faster Demand Growth Likely to Continue

For 25 years global crude demand grew at a stable 1% average, in large measure because the bulk of that demand came from a handful of highly industrialized economies whose energy intensity had been falling since the OPEC shocks of the 1970s. Suddenly that all started to change about five years ago with the massive movement of industrial production from high wage countries to emerging industrial giants like China. Not only is China much less energy efficient than the economies most of that production was exiting from, but also the rapid rise in Chinese incomes has spearheaded a huge increase in their domestic energy consumption. As a result, world crude demand grew by 3.4% last year-the strongest pace in nearly 30 years and over three times the average pace of the past 25 years. China singlehandedly accounted for almost 40% of the global increase. Yet, per capita oil consumption in China, already the world's second largest importer of crude these days, is still in its infancy, just an eighth of South Korea's level (Chart 3). Even if China's consumption grows at 15% a year for the next five years, fully matching 2004's increase, it would still only be a quarter of Korea's present energy consumption per capita. But China isn't the sole reason oil demand is on the rise. Oil use is also rising explosively in other developing countries like India, which saw a 5% increase last year. Next to China, oil demand in the rest of developing Asia is growing at the fastest rate of any region in the world.

And demand may not even moderate in the world's largest oil consuming economy, the US. American crude consumption per capita has been rising steadily since 1990 and shows no signs of abatement (see Chart 4 and Occasional Report #51: Is the US Economy Really Less Vulnerable to Energy Prices?). While that economy is certainly more energy efficient than it was thirty years ago, the increase in efficiency has been more than surpassed by the increase in energy usage. For example, the improvements in fuel economy for autos have been eclipsed by the increase in miles driven, while energy efficiency improvements in air conditioning and heating have been dwarfed by increases in home size.

Exploding crude demand from rapidly industrializing Asian economies has permanently ratcheted up global crude demand growth. Even if energy demand growth slows in the US and Europe, and actually declines in Japan, world crude demand is unlikely to grow by less than 2.5% per year (Chart 5) without significant increases in crude prices.

The implications of current growth may soon become staggering relative to available supply growth. From a current base of just over 84 million barrels a day, global crude consumption would grow as briskly as it did before the OPEC shocks, with demand reaching almost 96 million barrels a day by 2010. Unfortunately, supply is unlikely to be able to keep pace. To the extent that it cannot, prices must ultimately ration demand.

Limited Supply Growth to Lag Demand

As noted in January Monthly Indicators, there is growing concern that future supply will not be able to respond to that pace of demand growth. The 5 to 6-year timeline for bringing a major new supply project on stream means that the trajectory for oil supplies through decade-end is largely defined by 50-60 major projects at various stages of the planning and development process. A survey of such projects suggests that beyond this year's estimated 3 million barrels a day of production increase, the supply cushion is getting perilously small. As the oil market is finally beginning to recognize, OPEC spare capacity effectively sits at a record low of little more than one million barrels per day. The world is losing just over a million barrels a day of production from depletion every year. Net of depletion, global crude supply is unlikely to get above 85 million barrels a day this year, leaving a scant 1 million barrels a day of spare capacity in the system.

And contrary to conventional wisdom, the oil market is poised to get much tighter, not slacker over the next four years. In fact, surveying the production schedules for new supply sources, 2005 is slated to be the biggest single year over the next four. Additions to gross supply fall off markedly in 2006, even more in subsequent years (Chart 6). Only about 300 thousand barrels of net new supply are likely to come on stream annually from 2006 through the end of the decade, as the new capacity added by major new projects does little more than offset declining production from mature fields. Global production is unlikely to get beyond 87 million barrels a day by the decade's end.

Limited planned additions to new net supply suggest, moreover, that 2.5% trend demand growth in oil will run up against a supply barrier as early as 2007.

Obviously, prices will have to rise to keep demand within the available supply constraint. Keeping a million barrels a day of reserve capacity in the system, demand must be constrained by the supply barrier. Next year, prices will have to take out over one million barrels of crude demand per day. But this figure rises rapidly in 2007 and 2008 as net supply growth tapers off (Table 1) due to the fall-off in mega-projects coming on stream. In 2007, demand must be cut by almost 3 million barrels a day, while in 2008 some 5 million barrels a day must be cut from trend demand. The demand cuts continue to rise, reaching 9 million bbl/ day from trend by 2010.

Further Large Price Increases Needed to Balance Market

How much prices have to rise to achieve those demand cuts depends on the price elasticity of demand for crude. Unfortunately, in the short-run there is very low price elasticity, meaning that it takes relatively large price increases to dampen demand. As a rough guide to estimating the price needed to confine demand to available supply, we have used an elasticity of 0.15 for global oil use. (That figure is derived by weighting US Department of Energy estimates of demand in major oil consuming regions by each region's share of global oil demand.) A 0.15 elasticity means that a 10% rise in crude prices lowers crude demand by only 1.5% taking today's roughly $55/bbl price as the benchmark, crude prices must rise to an average $61/bbl next year and to an average of $70/bbl by 2007 to achieve the needed demand cuts from trend (Chart 7). As those cuts begin to mushroom after 2007, so too must the price hikes required to bring them about. Crude prices need to rise to an average $80/bbl in 2008 and continue to rise to $101/bbl by 2010 (Chart 8).

I have used an elasticity of 0.15 for global oil use. (That figure is derived by weighting US Department of Energy estimates of demand in major oil consuming regions by each region's share of global oil demand.) A 0.15 elasticity means that a 10% rise in crude prices lowers crude demand by only 1.5% taking today's roughly $55/bbl price as the benchmark, crude prices must rise to an average $61/bbl next year and to an average of $70/bbl by 2007 to achieve the needed demand cuts from trend (Chart 7). As those cuts begin to mushroom after 2007, so too must the price hikes required to bring them about. Crude prices need to rise to an average $80/bbl in 2008 and continue to rise to $101/bbl by 2010 (Chart 8).

In constant dollars, those prices would represent the highest the world has paid for oil since the second OPEC oil shock, some forty years ago. In today's dollars, oil prices peaked at around $90/ bbl back in 1980. (It was actually about $40/bbl in the current dollars of the time). While prices are not expected to reach that level until 2010, the projected path of price increases nevertheless closely proxies the real cost of oil seen during the oil crises of the 1970s (Chart 8).

Under our price targets demand tapers off markedly with global consumption growing at only an average 1% pace, roughly half of the trend growth we see now. Beyond 2010, the supply picture opens up again and no doubt $100/bbl oil will trigger accelerated development of tar sands and other non-conventional sources of crude supply. Since those are high cost supplies they may provide little moderating effect on price. Only the discovery and development of new conventional supply "elephants" would bring real price relief. Whether such discoveries will be made remains to be seen. But in the words of Matt Simmons, a noted oil commentator-"When it comes to oil exploration, you don't leave the easiest for the last".

It should be noted that the projections do not take into account the possibility of a global recession and the subsequent feedback of recession to global crude demand. Past evidence shows that cyclical swings in demand can overwhelm any year-to-year change in supply growth. While a recession is certainly plausible over the next five years, particularly in light of how high crude prices will otherwise rise, it would serve as only a temporary diversion from rising energy prices. Throw in a year of flat global demand like we saw during the 2001 recession, and we would at most buy one to two years of price relief before global demand would quickly return to trend growth and an inevitable collision with supply constraints.

by Jeff Rubin and Peter Buchanan
from Occasional Report #53, CIBC World Markets
April 15th, 2005
Originally published April 13th, 2005

http://www.321energy.com/editorials...ubin041505.html

[Resurgent Japanese nationalism is a dangerous thing: in part because the cesspool of racist ideology left over from the Axis period has never fully evaporated, and in part because it is the Japanese far-right which will benefit from American opportunism as Asian tensions build. The late Iris Chang was not only a Chinese whose truth-telling threatened the pride of reactionaries in Japan; she was also a genuine intellectual, a cosmopolitan who identified with humanity first, and a brilliant writer to whom the facts were paramount. When she died last November at the age of 36, the reading public may not have understood what had been lost. Now, however, the times are rapidly moving toward a world-system as polarized as the Cold War, but without the eerie stability of that period. As always, there will be two fundamentally opposing sides: authoritarian militarists, and everybody else. "Moderate" rightists are not merely a glad-handing demographic that has chosen a red-state lifestyle; they are the useful multitude on whom gangsters rely for either support or passive tolerance. As is clear from the recent selection of a former Nazi Youth member and Wehrmacht soldier as Pope, "conservative" forces are to be judged by asking exactly what it is they intend to conserve, and how much harm they are willing to do in its name.

The Rape of Nanking was a bestseller and continues to reach millions of people in universities and libraries. But as the pattern of global warfare expands in the coming months and years, a much larger readership may come to associate Iris Chang's name with a humanist tradition in which atrocious violence is neither accepted nor forgotten.
What applies to her bitter subject matter should apply to her own death as well.

Ms. Chang is survived by her husband and their two year old child.

Here, Online Journal editor Larry Chin offers words of solidarity and remembrance. -JAH]

Photo by Jimmy Estimada

Iris Chang and the curse of the whistleblower

By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor
http://onlinejournal.com/Commentary/042105Chin/042105chin.html

April 21, 2005-Whistleblowers are a special breed. In the course of their often very personal confrontations with power and corruption, the real dangers faced by these exceptional individuals (physical threats, harassment and intimidation, surveillance, character assassination, death threats, ridicule, poverty, drugging, poisoning, murder) and the extraordinary personal toll extracted (loneliness, isolation, mental exhaustion, depression, burnout, breakdown, suicide) are scarcely understood, even by those closest to them.

Whistleblowers fight on a unique battlefield-and deserve special consideration, recognition and respect. To say that the late Iris Chang, whistleblower, activist, and author of The Rape of Nanking and The Thread of the Silkworm, earned all three is an understatement. Sadly, she is still due, on all counts.

A new biographical profile, "The Life and Death of Iris Chang" by Heidi Benson (San Francisco Chronicle, 4/17/05), offers some intriguing glimpses into Chang's personal and family life, new facts surrounding her suicide, and details on Chang's final days. But the emphasis of this profile, like so many other mainstream media treatments, is on Chang's personal demons and mental illness. Left answered are key questions that still beg to be investigated-separate from the fact of any mental afflictions she suffered.

Was this whistleblower's life in danger, as she herself feared? Were the threats she described taken seriously, or were they dismissed as the ramblings of a paranoid and troubled woman?

Chang had become a target of backlash after The Rape of Nanking. The book was met with a wave of angry reaction from Japanese nationalists, massacre deniers, and pro-Japan counter-intellectuals, counter-historians and politicos from all over the world. Entire volumes of counter-massacre material were published to refute Chang's book, and to attack her credibility. For example, The Nanjing Massacre by Honda Kitsuichi, a book designed to refute The Rape of Nanking contains an overview by Frank Gibney, a former US Navy intelligence operative and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Iris Chang had struck a nerve.

Quoting from the San Francisco Chronicle profile:

. . . torrents of hate mail came in, Brett [Douglas, Chang's husband] said. "Iris is sensitive, but she got charged up," he recalled. "When anybody questioned the validity of what she wrote, she would respond with overwhelming evidence to back it up. She's very much a perfectionist. It has hard for her not to react every single time."

Most of the attacks came from Japanese ultranationalists. "We saw cartoons where she was portrayed as this woman with a great big mouth," Brett said. "She got used to the fact that there is a Web site called 'Iris Chang and Her Lies.' She would just laugh."

But friends say Iris began to voice concerns for her safety. She believed her phone was tapped. She described finding threatening notes on her car. She said she was confronted by a man who said, "You will NOT continue writing this." She used a post office box, never her home address, for mail."

This is tragically familiar territory for whistleblowers.

Unlike Gary Webb, another whistleblower who recently took his own life, Chang was involved in a potentially controversial project in her final months: a history of the Bataan Death March, and its forgotten horrors. It was during her final research trip to interview World War II veterans that she suffered an apparent mental breakdown. She was hospitalized and given medications.

From the San Francisco Chronicle account:

Normally, Iris never did interviews alone. She preferred to meet someone in each town who could introduce her to the veterans and their families.

"I knew Iris was not right," her mother said. "She couldn't eat or drink. She was very depressed." She asked if Iris had any friends there she could call for help. One of the veterans-a colonel she had planned to meet in Louisville-came to the hotel. [Research project liaison] Smith said the colonel spent only a short time with her. "She was afraid of him when he showed up," Smith said. "But he spoke to her mother on the phone and told Iris, 'Your mom is on the phone, so it's OK.'''

That afternoon, she checked herself in to Norton Psychiatric Hospital in Louisville, with help from the colonel. Through a third party, the colonel declined to be interviewed.

"First they gave her an antipsychotic, to stabilize her," her mother said. "For three days they gave her medication, the first time in her life." (The family would not name specific drugs.)"

Who was the colonel? What really happened to her during this harrowing time, spent alone and apart from family and friends?

Chang wrote in her own suicide note that she was the target of a government operation to discredit her.

She wrote: "There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.

"Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government's attempt to discredit me.
"I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead."

These portions of the suicide note, which were not included in earlier media reports of her suicide, have apparently been dismissed as symptoms of her depression and bipolar disorder. Is it significant that these passages were, according to the Chronicle piece, the final revision of Chang's suicide note-possibly her most important final thoughts? Again, unlike the suicide of Gary Webb, there are unanswered questions.

Sergeant Dean Baker, Santa Clara (Calif.) homicide detective in charge of the investigation into Chang's suicide concluded that there was "no evidence that any kind of conspiracy caused her death." But this does not address the possibility that a conspiracy existed, or that the "forces" named by Chang may have contributed to the pressures of her condition-even if they did not "cause" her death. Local police would not have any incentive to look into far-ranging political issues that do not fall within the strict parameters of a suicide case.

The curse of the whistleblower is to have one's lifelong pursuit of conspiracy fact dismissed as conspiracy "theory," their fears written off as coincidence, paranoia, and mental illness, and to have protections and legal support removed.

Is it paranoid to ask if a disservice been done to Iris Chang? Is it too early to close this book, or not soon enough?

It is painful to wonder what if. What if she had reached out and found help, from other whistleblowers-perhaps the only people in the world who could really understand the bizarre battlefield that she thought she faced alone?

If there is a positive to this tragedy, it is that Iris Chang left behind a legacy so powerful that it almost renders all else moot. The doors that she kicked down will never again be closed. No matter who or what may have wanted to close them.