We Are Married to Oil and the Breakup Will Be Ugly.

The end of the Petroleum Age will lead to hardships, civil unrest at home and abroad and war.

Limiting consumption of petroleum is the only way forward.

More and more scientists and analysts are concluding that Peak Oil has occurred or will do so in the near future.

So what does this actually have to do with you? Won't this help climate change?

The average American consumes nearly 3 gallons of oil a day, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Petroleum is the foundation of modern civilization

Ninety percent of all transportation relies on oil. Everything it affects—all of the world economy—will be hit hard.

Led by two former CIA directors, a high-level “war game” called “Oil Shockwave” concluded the world economy would quickly spiral into recession.

The price of food will skyrocket. Modern agriculture relies on oil for everything from farming to fertilizer to pesticides to delivery.

Ten percent of all oil is used to make everything from aspirin to plastics to microchips to computers, all of which take many times their weight in oil to produce.

Worst of all, future oil shortages will lead to an age of resource conflicts and wars.

The immediate cause of riots in Burma recently, as well as civil unrest in Iran, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and other states all directly trace back to oil supply.

“Oil is unique in that it is so strategic in nature,” said Dick Cheney in 1999. Energy is truly fundamental to the world's economy. The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality.”

As for climate change, as soon as oil becomes uneconomic, governments will predictably turn to coal.

The IPCC estimates enough coal left to produce a whopping 3500 bil tons of CO2, well past the 400 bil tons ‘allowable’ to prevent catastrophic climate change, according to Dr. Leggett.

This makes recent reports all the more salient.

The Energy Watch Group, based in Germany, just released a report that says global oil production peaked in 2006.

Energy analysts like former Bush administration official Matthew Simmons say we have already peaked globally in’05.

There are evens signs from within the industry itself.

“The era of easy oil is over,” exclaims Chevron in a telling new ad campaign.

Worldwide oil discovery peaked in 1965. The last year we discovered more oil than we consumed was 1981. In 1998, we used three times the oil discovered, according to IHS Energy Group.

The U.S. (Pennsylvania specifically) was once the largest oil producer in the world. Against the wishes of his industry, oil geologist M. King Hubbert calculated that oil supply was finite and soon production in the US would peak.

Within a year of Hubbert's prediction, production in the U.S. peaked in 1970 and has been steadily declining ever since.

Oil exploration experts like Dr. Colin Campbell and Dr. Jeremy Leggett say this is happening (or has already happened) now globally.

Even so, to focus solely on the numbers is missing the point entirely. Hubbert came out with his theory more than 30 years ago and people are still arguing over it.

“[The debate over when exactly ‘the peak’ will hit] is being used as a tool for inaction,” says UW Professor of Forest Resources Kristiina Vogt. The problem needs our attention now.

The solution? First, urgent and decisive attention is required from our leaders.

“We don’t have the luxury of continuing how we have been,” Professor Vogt warns, “or we’re going to have some major conflicts.”

There is no silver bullet solution, Vogt adds. Solutions have to be localized and consumption will have to be cut back by those who use excess amounts.

Petroleum substitutes like tar sands, shale, and heavy oil cannot replace crude oil. Alternative technologies like hydrogen, solar, nuclear, wind, and others offer the potential to help but will not replace oil. In fact, they all need oil for development and implementation.

Environmentally sustainable solutions are urgently needed. For example, Vogt has calculated if we use forest waste biomass for biofuels, we could substitute for 48% of the gasoline used in Washington State.

The government, however, is still dragging its feet, offering gimmicky ‘band-aid’ solutions that appease and subsidize powerful lobbies at the expense of renewable technologies.

Most Americans have never even heard of Peak Oil – and this article barely scratches the surface—but soon they will have to act on it.

“It is only a matter of time before this scenario comes to pass, says Michael T Klare, Professor of Peace and Security at Hampshire College.

“If we act now to limit our consumption of oil and develop non-petroleum energy alternatives, we can face the "twilight" of the Petroleum Age with some degree of hope.”

Greenspan says prime reason for Iraq was oil

read the whole excellent article by Ray McGovern, here are some excerpts:

Greenspan writes:

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Then, there were Cheney’s revealing, damning remarks as Halliburton's CEO?

“Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand,” Cheney said in autumn 1999. “So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. The Middle East with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies."

must-read of the day

Stan Goff over at Huffington post rights one of the best essays on the state of the world I've read in a while.

Here are some other things that are not being said:

The average consumption lifestyle of the United States, which keeps politicians in office, is based on extortion, violence, and plunder in places we don't see, and from activities the media seldom mention. To maintain that lifestyle, which is an imperial political payoff for a quiescent home base, requires ever expanding inputs of finite resources -- many from abroad -- and the continued ability to back up financial extortion with military force where necessary. The pivotal resource that makes it possible to make all the other consumer goods, be they cars, clothes, computers, or whatever, is fossil energy. The United States, with five percent of the world's population, used 26% of the word's energy supplies. Our domestic production has been falling since 1973, even as our aggregate demand has continued to rise steeply. The United States has allowed car companies and developers to establish an economic infrastructure that depends absolutely on private automobiles. This massive fleet of around 250 million automobiles runs on oil. This oil cannot be replaced by biofuels, contrary to the bullshit being propogated to support a fresh new vote-buying-and-corporate-welfare scheme for Cargill, Monsanto, and Archer-Daniels-Midland.

Follow the logic.

The US economy cannot continue to operate as it is without guaranteeing its access to fossil fuel that comes from abroad. The establishment wants this to be our dirty little secret, and that's why we twist ourselves in knots talking about it, including deluding ourselves that we can continue our energy profligacy and ignoring the wet work that gets done to maintain control over a region as strategically vital to this end as Southwest Asia. This, of course, means that when Republicrats use coded language about "vital American security interests in the Middle East," they are really talking about maintaining secondary political control over the human beings who live on top of those energy lakes. If you accept that maintaining the American way of life is the highest priority, then you have to accept that the US has to intervene with force when necessary to get the energy supplies, and even that this force be maintained through a constant threat, i.e., a permanent US military presence in the region and support of unsavory regimes to act as our surrogates.

If you believe that people in that part of the world should have the right to decide when, where, and how to use their own resources, then you have to accept that this might result in a dramatic and painful change in the "American way of life."

It's that simple, that stark.

be sure to read the whole thing...

Peak Oil stats and graphs

World Oil Forecasts Including Saudi Arabia - Update Aug 2007.

Oil

Check out this interview on oil (lots of economics).

heres more.

Peak Oil

$100 a barrel of oil in the coming months? via Bloomberg

July 23 (Bloomberg) -- The $100-a-barrel oil that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said would prevail by 2009 may be only a few months away.

Jeffrey Currie, a London-based commodity analyst at the world's biggest securities firm, says $95 crude is likely this year unless OPEC unexpectedly increases production, and declining inventories are raising the chances for $100 oil. Jeff Rubin at CIBC World Markets predicts $100 a barrel as soon as next year.

BusinessWeek chimes in with the piece titled "From Peak Oil To Dark Age?," here is an excerpt:

Peak oil refers to the point at which world oil production plateaus before beginning to decline as depletion of the world's remaining reserves offsets ever-increased drilling. Some experts argue that we're already there, and that we won't exceed by much the daily production high of 84.5 million barrels first reached in 2005. If so, global production will bump along near these levels for years before beginning an inexorable decline.

What would that mean? Alternatives are still a decade away from meeting incremental demand for oil. With nothing to fill the gap, global economic growth would slow, stop, and then reverse; international tensions would soar as nations seek access to diminishing supplies, enriching autocratic rulers in unstable oil states; and, unless other sources of energy could be ramped up with extreme haste, the world could plunge into a new Dark Age. Even as faltering economies burned less oil, carbon loading of the atmosphere might accelerate as countries turn to vastly dirtier coal.

GIVEN SUCH UNPLEASANT possibilities, you'd think peak oil would be a national obsession. But policymakers can hide behind the possibility that vast troves will be available from unconventional sources, or that secretive oil-exporting nations really have the huge reserves they claim. Yet even if those who say that the peak has arrived are wrong, enough disturbing omens—for example, declining production in most of the world's great oil fields and no new superfields to take up the slack—exist for the issue to merit an intense international focus.

The reality is that it will be here much sooner for the U.S.—in the form of peak oil exports. Since we import nearly two-thirds of the oil we consume, global oil available for export should be our bigger concern. Fast-growing domestic consumption in oil-exporting nations and increasing appetites by big importers such as China portend tighter supplies available to the U.S., unless world production rises rapidly. But output has stalled. Call it de facto peak oil or peak oil lite. It means the U.S. is entering an age when it will have to scramble to maintain existing import levels.

CNN profiles a billionaire investor discussing what he perceives as the next issue.

Educate yourself at this site, The Oil Drum, which provides an introductory overview.

Then watch these videos:

A short (15 minutes) new segment from Australia that provides a basic outline.

A longer three-part series from ABC (Australian) for comprehensive information.

A documentary from Ireland that's very well made.

And here is some more media.

CNBC, Bloomberg on Peak Oil

Via The Oil Drum.