Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Jun 09, 2012 11:29 pm

Saurian Tail wrote:I wonder how much oil is out there to be fracked now that the technology is there to get at it? My guess is lots. Perhaps the biggest weakness in the peak oil calculation is underestimating the extent that the profit motive can drive technology when required ... as well as the willingness to do _whatever_ it takes, no matter the environmental cost.


The turn to fracking and shale oil (and mountaintops, and ocean floors), with attendant contamination of fresh water supply and release of CO2 on scales exponentially greater than before, is firm evidence that "peak oil calculations" were correct; the conventional, easy-to-reach, high-EROIE stores are being depleted. Perhaps the biggest evidence of psychopathy in how this civilization approaches energy questions is that it has now chosen to greatly accelerate an already-rapid process of species suicide by adopting the most destructive means available just to keep a hydrocarbon economy for a few more decades, when sustainable alternatives could be implemented in the same period. The cost is not "environmental," a word I'd like to retire in such contexts insofar as it implies the cost is external. The cost is suicidal.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Ben D » Fri Jul 06, 2012 6:54 pm

We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all

A boom in oil production has made a mockery of our predictions. Good news for capitalists – but a disaster for humanity

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 July 2012 20.30 BST

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.

Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia … cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)

Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time.

A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun. The constraints on oil supply over the past 10 years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that.

Maugeri's analysis of projects in 23 countries suggests that global oil supplies are likely to rise by a net 17m barrels per day (to 110m) by 2020. This, he says, is "the largest potential addition to the world's oil supply capacity since the 1980s". The investments required to make this boom happen depend on a long-term price of $70 a barrel – the current cost of Brent crude is $95. Money is now flooding into new oil: a trillion dollars has been spent in the past two years; a record $600bn is lined up for 2012.

The country in which production is likely to rise most is Iraq, into which multinational companies are now sinking their money, and their claws. But the bigger surprise is that the other great boom is likely to happen in the US. Hubbert's peak, the famous bell-shaped graph depicting the rise and fall of American oil, is set to become Hubbert's Rollercoaster.

Investment there will concentrate on unconventional oil, especially shale oil (which, confusingly, is not the same as oil shale). Shale oil is high-quality crude trapped in rocks through which it doesn't flow naturally.

There are, we now know, monstrous deposits in the United States: one estimate suggests that the Bakken shales in North Dakota contain almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia (though less of it is extractable). And this is one of 20 such formations in the US. Extracting shale oil requires horizontal drilling and fracking: a combination of high prices and technological refinements has made them economically viable. Already production in North Dakota has risen from 100,000 barrels a day in 2005 to 550,000 in January.

So this is where we are. The automatic correction – resource depletion destroying the machine that was driving it – that many environmentalists foresaw is not going to happen. The problem we face is not that there is too little oil, but that there is too much.

We have confused threats to the living planet with threats to industrial civilisation. They are not, in the first instance, the same thing. Industry and consumer capitalism, powered by abundant oil supplies, are more resilient than many of the natural systems they threaten. The great profusion of life in the past – fossilised in the form of flammable carbon – now jeopardises the great profusion of life in the present.

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground. Twenty years of efforts to prevent climate breakdown through moral persuasion have failed, with the collapse of the multilateral process at Rio de Janeiro last month. The world's most powerful nation is again becoming an oil state, and if the political transformation of its northern neighbour is anything to go by, the results will not be pretty.

Humanity seems to be like the girl in Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth: she knows that if she eats the exquisite feast laid out in front of her, she too will be consumed, but she cannot help herself. I don't like raising problems when I cannot see a solution. But right now I'm not sure how I can look my children in the eyes.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Jul 06, 2012 8:01 pm

Oh George, George...

The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields.


In other words, the basic idea that oil fields deplete has never been in doubt. Prices are rising and making this new phase possible, why? Uuuuummm... Conventional oil has or is peaking and the multis and oil barons are moving on to greater eco-destruction in ever more remote places. This shift to terrible new methods is due to depletion. Gaining decades at the cost of turning the world into hot sludge.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri Jul 06, 2012 11:29 pm

Yes, it's just shockingly weak from Monbiot. That pompous apodictic headline, "We* were wrong on peak oil.", followed by not the merest hint of a serious argument to support it. On the contrary.

*Royal, or what?.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby ninakat » Sat Jul 07, 2012 12:54 am

^^^ most definitely the royal wee. What a piss-ant.

Monbiot: Twit Of The Year.... or, given his track record, how about Twit Of The New Millennium.

Three strikes, buddy: (1) 9/11 Truth denier, (2) nuclear energy embracer, and (3) peak oil denier. They must love him. They are probably rewarding him handsomely.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Jul 07, 2012 11:23 pm

It occurs to me Monbiot's even more fundamentally wrong than we've said. He locates the cause of disaster in the fact that, confronted with peak oil, capitalism is innovating new but more destructive ways to get at previously inaccessble hydrocarbon reserves. This can actually be a good thing insofar as it buys more time for a smooth conversion, assuming of course that conversion is pursued. But conversion on a mass scale isn't happening. The real disaster is in the inability of capitalism to reform itself even when capitalist civilization is at stake. Conversion means enormous new industries, a maker of the hallowed profits and jobs. But it can't overcome the entrenched energy industries that blindly pursue their own narrow self-interest, not as long as these maintain the higher profit margin, and not as long as the narrow self-interest ideology dominates. New destructive means of hydrocarbon extraction is not the disaster, unrestrained capitalism is the disaster.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Saurian Tail » Sun Jul 08, 2012 9:43 am

I don't understand the reaction here to the Monibot article.

Peak oil is the point of peak extraction, not peak extraction of easily available oil. It seems pretty clear that the royal we refers to those of us who thought we were there now.

Monibot doesn't say that peak oil is a hoax or a myth. He says we were wrong that it is right around the corner. And he says this means that there is enough extractable oil to fry us all and that he can hardly look his daughter in the eyes. How does this make him a twit or a denier?
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Saurian Tail » Sun Jul 08, 2012 9:56 am

JackRiddler wrote:It occurs to me Monbiot's even more fundamentally wrong than we've said. He locates the cause of disaster in the fact that, confronted with peak oil, capitalism is innovating new but more destructive ways to get at previously inaccessble hydrocarbon reserves. This can actually be a good thing insofar as it buys more time for a smooth conversion, assuming of course that conversion is pursued. But conversion on a mass scale isn't happening. The real disaster is in the inability of capitalism to reform itself even when capitalist civilization is at stake. Conversion means enormous new industries, a maker of the hallowed profits and jobs. But it can't overcome the entrenched energy industries that blindly pursue their own narrow self-interest, not as long as these maintain the higher profit margin, and not as long as the narrow self-interest ideology dominates. New destructive means of hydrocarbon extraction is not the disaster, unrestrained capitalism is the disaster.

That whole dialogue seems to be implicit in Monibot's article.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Jul 08, 2012 10:42 am

Saurian Tail wrote:That whole dialogue seems to be implicit in Monibot's article.


Okay, maybe. It's the headline and the "we" and the defeatism, the aid and comfort to the enemy so to speak. The original idea related to accessible reserves, and it turns out to have been right about the approximate time window, just wrong about the lengths to which the machine will go. But plenty of people have never picked a date.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby bks » Sun Jul 08, 2012 1:02 pm

JackRiddler wrote:

Perhaps the biggest evidence of psychopathy in how this civilization approaches energy questions is that it has now chosen to greatly accelerate an already-rapid process of species suicide by adopting the most destructive means available just to keep a hydrocarbon economy for a few more decades, when sustainable alternatives could be implemented in the same period.


This is the point, though the distinction between recovering a few more decades worth of fossil fuels and keeping the hydrocarbon economy [rather than the hydrocarbon era] alive for a few more decades is crucial. I'm aware of no evidence that there are recoverable fossil fuels totaling even a few extra decades worth of hydrocarbon-based energy at current/projected consumption rates. The Marcellus Shale, for instance, maybe has 3 years worth of recoverable natural gas in it if we restrict consumption to the US only. The first estimates of its gas store were wildly inflated, as you would expect in a gold rush.

If someone knows of a scenario under which reasonable estimates of currently-unrecoverable hydrocarbon deposits in EROIE terms extend the hydrocarbon era 25+ years, please point me to it. Who knows, it could even be in this thread somewhere?

ON EDIT: I mean 25+ years past the projections we've seen more or less since resource depletion became an issue [which extend the HC era to 2075 or so]. Monbiot seems to suggest that the in-ground deposits (as in North Dakota) can do this, though he acknowledges that their harder to extract, without saying just how much in EROIE terms.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby lupercal » Sun Jul 08, 2012 1:51 pm

A quick google search shows that "peak oil," defined as the point of maximum extraction after which world production inexorably dwindles as demand (and of course, prices) inexorably rise, has indeed been proven a hoax, or "debunked," by the same peeps who introduced it: the business press (WSJ), the techno-intelligence-academic complex (MIT), and the oil companies themselves, led by "oilman" Daniel Yergin, whose Sept. 2011 book might be the semi-official statement of the reformulated policy:

Image

Peak Oil Debunked
Daniel Yergin's new book is a valuable guide to how energy drives the world's economy.
Technology Review - published by MIT - September 22, 2011:

With oil prices remaining high, with new sources of natural gas and oil being exploited around the world, and with demand for energy expected to reach new highs over the next several decades, Yergin sets out to explain the history, economics, and politics behind the world's continuing love affair with fossil fuels and show, too, just how hard it will be to end our dependence, given the earth's surprising, and seemingly endless, ability to enable it.

If you're a believer in "peak oil"—the idea that the world is on the verge of running out of oil—you will probably want to burn this book. But if you want to truly understand today's energy problems and opportunities, there are few better places to start than with Daniel Yergin.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/42 ... -debunked/


And so on. Turns out, there's more oil than all those petro engineers in the employ of Chevron, Exxon, Shell and the rest figured, imagine that! So peak oil it seems was just another big misunderstanding, quelle surprise.

Okay. Now let's start to think about what peak oil accomplished in its short life, which coincidentally matched the bush-cheney reign of terra:

1. Depletion allowance vindicated while proving to have been bullshit:

"Depletion allowance" is the handy scam that allows petro giants to deduct 15% of revenue annually from taxation per well as a "business expense" based on the oh-so-scientific assumption that after a certain point (defined in dollars per well of annual revenue) output declines annually because, well, that's what Hubbert pulled out of his butt way back when.

So when all those "depleted" wells and fields come back into production, and prove not to have been the least bit "depleted" after all, well, blame it on that ol' peak oil, which "incentivized" the petro corps to "innovate" and voila, all those environmentally catastrophic tricks that were probably developed in the 1920s if not before are suddenly the miraculous "new technologies" allowing depleted wells to come alive! Ain't the free market great?

2. Environmental restrictions deep-sixed: see above, also Gulf of Mexico and BP's scot free lack of censure or restriction: it was peak oil made 'em to do it!

3. Domestic extraction, which all those Congressional and statehouses commies managed to put a stop to cuz wimps in Santa Monica and Santa Barbara didn't like scraping oil off their birds and beaches every time there was a little accident: looks like the oil boys will have the last laugh, won't they?

4. Stratospheric annual profits, and how about all those wars, keeping the world's biggest petroleum consumer, the US military, as voracious as ever?

Etc etc, but you get the idea. Peak oil was spectacularly successful at helping big oil get everything big oil wanted, and more, for the last ten years and into the indefinite future. Mission accomplished.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Jul 08, 2012 3:54 pm

bks wrote:
JackRiddler wrote:

Perhaps the biggest evidence of psychopathy in how this civilization approaches energy questions is that it has now chosen to greatly accelerate an already-rapid process of species suicide by adopting the most destructive means available just to keep a hydrocarbon economy for a few more decades, when sustainable alternatives could be implemented in the same period.

This is the point, though the distinction between recovering a few more decades worth of fossil fuels and keeping the hydrocarbon economy [rather than the hydrocarbon era] alive for a few more decades is crucial. I'm aware of no evidence that there are recoverable fossil fuels totaling even a few extra decades worth of hydrocarbon-based energy at current/projected consumption rates. The Marcellus Shale, for instance, maybe has 3 years worth of recoverable natural gas in it if we restrict consumption to the US only. The first estimates of its gas store were wildly inflated, as you would expect in a gold rush.

If someone knows of a scenario under which reasonable estimates of currently-unrecoverable hydrocarbon deposits in EROIE terms extend the hydrocarbon era 25+ years, please point me to it. Who knows, it could even be in this thread somewhere?

ON EDIT: I mean 25+ years past the projections we've seen more or less since resource depletion became an issue [which extend the HC era to 2075 or so]. Monbiot seems to suggest that the in-ground deposits (as in North Dakota) can do this, though he acknowledges that their harder to extract, without saying just how much in EROIE terms.


It is somewhat ironic to see folk relate to the quantity of natural gas sequestered in the totality of the Marcellus Shale Deposit in terms of "Years of supply" because it is simply unknown and cannot be known until after all of it as been depleted. To speak of providing three years of energy for any populace from these fields is foolish, especially when considering that it will take decades to extract it.

As natural gas usage continues to increase as it has, being now equal to coal at providing 39 percent of our energy demand, its supply life will be shortened proportionally and its cost will increase. Everywhere, including the Marcellus Deposit.


(The comments may interest you)

The US Energy Information Agency just (June 25th) published the Annual Energy Outlook for 2012, with projections to 2035.

To better understand the supposed 83% over-estimate of the Marcellus Shale Deposit, please read this: HOW MUCH NATURAL GAS CAN THE MARCELLUS SHALE PRODUCE?--AN EXPLANATION
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby ninakat » Mon Jul 30, 2012 5:00 pm

I've been waiting for some decent rebuttals to Monbiot's idiotic column. This one was worth the wait.

Monbiot peak oil u-turn based on bad science, worse maths
by David Strahan, Energy Writer
Monday, July 30th, 2012

In his column of July 2nd George Monbiot recanted peak oil, claiming “the facts have changed, now we must change too”. Much of the article was spent regurgitating a recent report by Leonardo Maugeri, a former executive with the Italian oil company Eni, which Monbiot breathlessly reported “provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun”.

Plenty of ink has already been spilled by oil depletion experts exposing some of the wildly optimistic assumptions contained in Maugeri’s report. More damning is that the work is shot through with crass mistakes that render its forecast worthless.

When I interviewed him, Mr Maugeri was forced to admit a mathematical howler that would disgrace the back of an envelope, and it also became clear he did not understand the work of the other forecasters he attacks. It also looks as if he has double or even triple counted a vital component of his predicted oil glut.

Maugeri forecasts the global oil supply will soar by almost 18 million barrels per day to around 111mb/d by 2020, the biggest increase in production since the 1980s, which he claims could lead to prolonged overproduction and “a significant, stable dip of oil prices”. So, arrivederci peak oil.

Maugeri claims this looming glut has three legs: booming upstream investment by the oil industry; the rise and rise of unconventional production such as US shale oil; and a tendency among forecasters to over-estimate massively the rate at which production from existing oil fields declines. The first point is uncontroversial, the second is moot, but the third is the most important; without it, Maugeri’s glut evaporates.

All oilfields eventually peak and go into decline as production is sapped by falling reservoir pressures, and as water increasingly dilutes the flow of oil from the well. Measuring the impact of these declines on aggregate oil production is a complicated business, but vital to predicting the future oil supply. There have been two primary studies of decline rates in recent years: one by the International Energy Agency in its 2008 World Energy Outlook; and another by the oil consultancy IHS-CERA.

Maugeri cherrypicks numbers from the IEA study and misrepresents them to claim that “most forecasters” work on decline rates of 6 to 10 percent. He then argues this is incompatible with the observed growth of the oil supply over the last decade – and therefore must be wrong – and uses this conclusion to justify his inflated oil production forecast. But the whole thing is a straw man; an email he sent me revealed he simply doesn’t understand the IEA numbers. The IEA’s global decline rate is actually 4.1%, and CERA’s broadly agrees, at 4.5% (see here for more detail).

Even if we were to accept his 6 to 10 percent range, Maugeri has got his sums horribly wrong. In the key section of the report, he claims that even the lower end of the range “would involve the almost complete loss of the world’s “old” production in 10 years”. But this is laughable. A 6% annual decline over 10 years leaves you with 54% of your original production, because each year’s 6% decline is smaller volumetrically than the previous one. So over a decade the decline is 46% – and very far from an “almost complete loss”.

When I put this to him, Mr Maugeri seemed genuinely confused, and tried briefly to persuade me the loss was much larger. “If you have a 6% decline each year over a 10 year period, the loss of production is close to 80%”, he said, but then the penny dropped. It looks to me as if he compounded 6% in the wrong direction – for growth, not decline. “Maybe on this you are right”, he conceded sheepishly. So by his own admission, Mr Maugeri has overestimated the alleged overestimation of production decline by almost three-quarters(1).

Nowhere in his report does Mr Maugeri explicitly state his own decline rate assumptions. The closest he gets is the unsupported claim that “I did not find evidence of a global depletion rate of crude production higher than 2-3 percent when correctly adjusted for reserve growth”. And yet his actual assumptions appear to be far lower. By analysing Maugeri’s forecasts, Steven Sorrell of the Sussex Energy Group and Christophe McGlade, a doctoral researcher at UCL Energy Institute, have shown his actual global decline rate for 2011-2020 is just 1.4% – scarcely a third of the established estimates. Replacing this implicit rate with the IEA number eliminates the Maugeri glut entirely, slashing his production forecast for 2020 to below his estimate of current production capacity. Sorrell concludes “Since most analysts expect average decline rates to increase over this period, this projection must be considered optimistic”. So, buongiorno peak oil.

When I challenged Mr Maugeri about the discrepancy between the 2-3% decline rate and the 1.4%, he said the difference was explained by reserves growth – the tendency to squeeze more oil than originally expected from existing fields, through new technology, the exploitation of secondary reservoirs and so on. But in that case he seems to have counted it twice, to judge by his quote in the paragraph above. Or possibly even three times, since the notion of reserves growth is already accounted for in the existing estimates. Both the IEA and IHS-CERA numbers are observed overall decline rates: they reflect the actual loss of production that happened after – or in spite of – all the industry’s investment to boost flagging output at existing fields.

“If Maugeri has adjusted decline rates for future reserves growth, he has either double counted, because it’s already in the existing forecasts, or assumes a massive acceleration in reserves growth in future”, explains Richard Miller, an oil consultant who previously worked for BP, and was the first to spot Maugeri’s dodgy maths. “Either way, it’s not credible”. When I emailed Mr Maugeri to check if he understood the definition of the IHS-CERA decline number he had quoted, I received no reply.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising. Maugeri is a long standing cornucopian, and has form in the slapdash stakes. In a previous article for the journal Science(2), he sought to disprove peak oil modelling using a graph of Egyptian oil production. Sadly, the graph he printed was not for Egyptian oil production. Worse, if it had been, it would have demolished the very point he was trying to make(3).

What is astonishing is that George Monbiot finds Maugeri’s work so “compelling”. How many times have I read Monbiot banging on about the importance of peer review? Strange then that he should gush that this report was “published by Harvard University” but fail to mention it had not appeared in any peer reviewed journal, and worse, had been funded by BP. I suspect both those organizations may live to regret their involvement. What about Monbiot? If he is as intellectually rigorous as he likes to make out, he will perform not one peak oil u-turn this month, but two.

1) (80-46)/46*100 = 74%

2) L. Maugeri, Oil: Never Cry Wolf-Why the Petroleum Age is Far from over, Science, Vol. 304 mo. 5674 pp. 1114-1115, 21 May 2004 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/304/5674/1114.summary

3) Q.Y. Meng and R.W. Bentley, Global oil peaking: Responding to the case for ‘abundant supplies of oil’, Energy, vol.33 pp 1179-1184, 2008
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby winston smith » Mon Jul 30, 2012 5:58 pm

I think Monbiot has shown the courage to say he was wrong. This isnt about oil its about money. Peak oil is just another fantastically simple manipulation of the markets.

The country in which production is likely to rise most is Iraq


i agree.

Having said that green energy like solar and wind offers the individual the potential to harness their own energy so im cautiously optimistic about it (to borrow a phrase).
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Rory » Mon Jul 30, 2012 6:29 pm

winston smith wrote:I think Monbiot has shown the courage to say he was wrong. This isnt about oil its about money. Peak oil is just another fantastically simple manipulation of the markets.

The country in which production is likely to rise most is Iraq


i agree.

Having said that green energy like solar and wind offers the individual the potential to harness their own energy so im cautiously optimistic about it (to borrow a phrase).


I agree, that admitting you are wrong, takes courage. To base that admission on some shockingly poor arithmetic, cobbled together inaccurately, by an oil industry insider, seems a little dumb (and I mean that in the politest sense of the word).

For all the credit he receives for admitting publicly, that he is wrong, he loses all semblance of credibility for doing so with such an obvious hack job, oil report. That he has 'recanted' now with both big oil and nuclear, marks him as a muppet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -fukushima

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power (what a whore - knickers dropped to big oil and nuclear, on a mere whimsey: A week after Fukishima, when the government and Tepco were lying throught their teeth about how severe and catastrophic the damage actually was; and a shoddy, hack job, oil industry insider report, that lacks basic rigorous arithmetic?)

He threw away all of his goodwill, respect and integrity, on the basis of those two pieces of information? Whore - never to be trusted or taken seriously again. He can admit he's wrong until he's blue in the face for all I care - he is intellectually bankrupt.

BTW: Just as a curiosity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot

his father, Raymond Geoffrey Monbiot, is a businessman who headed the Conservative Party's trade and industry forum,[2] while his mother, Rosalie—the elder daughter of Conservative MP Roger Gresham Cooke[5]—was a Conservative councillor who led South Oxford district council for a decade.

(Pretty Tory party establishment family, one might say)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christophe ... _Brenchley

Monckton was born the eldest son of the late Major-General Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and Marianna Letitia (nee Bower), former High Sheriff of Kent and a Dame of Malta. He has three brothers, Timothy, Jonathan and Anthony and a sister, Rosa, wife of journalist Dominic Lawson.

(Pretty much English establishment family here also - and we know how much Christopher loves climate change)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Lawson

Lawson was educated at Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, he is the elder son of a former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson and socialite Vanessa Salmon, heir to the Lyons Corner House empire, who died of liver cancer in 1985. Lawson had three sisters - TV chef and writer Nigella Lawson; Horatia; and Thomasina, who died of breast cancer in 1993 in her early 30s. Through the Salmon family he is a cousin to the journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot and the solicitor Fiona Shackleton.

(Nuff said - I like Nigella's muffins to be fair - very taste recipe)

Moncktons, Lawsons and Monbiots, sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes climate change denial in a shale oil manufactured baby carriage.
Rory
 
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