Don't know if anyone saw today's Guardian, but it led this morning with the following story: "Key Oil Figures Were Distorted By US Pressure, Says Whistleblower."
The important point is that the International Energy Authority, who are responsible for the 'offical' estimate of how much oil there is left, appear to have been lying through their teeth about oil reserves. The article comes with this terrifying graph.
Take a look at that. The dark blue section at the bottom is 'crude oil - currently producing fields' and lo, it starts going down, and going down fast, before 2010, e.g. now. Gulp. There are some other lovely sections, my favourite is 'crude oil - fields yet to be found' which sounds to me like wishful thinking of the best couldn't-hit-an-elephant-from-here kind. The other cracker is 'non-conventional oil', which means Alberta oil sands basically. Now there are lots of oil sands in this world, but 1) they are staggeringly dirty because the oil is in a kind of bitumen sludge and getting it out releases huge amounts of carbon, and 2) it takes one barrel of oil to get three. In Ghawar, as far we know (i.e. not far at all) the ratio is nearer 1:40. So it ain't cheap. It looks to me like they just added a bunch of other sections to the blue one to make it look like the top line will keep going up and up and up.
The other interesting thing will be see what happens with this story. The Guardian led with it, but by mid afternoon it had been exiled to the environment page and was well behind the latest antics of Messers Jedward on the front page. In other words, I don't see the media picking up on it in a major way which is both staggering and worrying. Don't spook the horses, folks. Oh, Jedward, about whom we will soon be amazed we ever gave a shit in far gone happier times.
I'll be extra concerned when the markets start to think about this and make decisions, even bets they think might not come off (aka speculation) on it. That's when the fur will start to fly. It is interesting, as an aside (which I might return to in more detail in future posts) why they don't do so now. I can only assume that the consequences are so large, that they can't, psychologically can't, think them through and then take them seriously enough to actually act on them.
One final point, the article is written so that the key fact appears to be that the US (boo! hiss! Yankee imperialist running dogs!) have been leaning on the IEA to lie. This may be true, in fact it probably is. Its not that important though. The US pressuring the IEA won't change the geological facts. The important thing is that an IEA insider now says we are pretty well at peak oil. All the US arm twisting in the world won't change that.
3 comments:
"consequences are so large, that they can't, psychologically can't, think them through"
There's another way to look at that. If the consequences are serious *enough*, it makes sense to bet on them not happening.
If the catastrophe doesn't happen, you've won your bet. If it does, then everything is so screwed that your "winnings" are meaningless.
Or to put it another way, "I bet you a million pounds I don't die tomorrow"
Jason,
The difficulty with that analogy is that betting a million pounds or not has absolutely no impact on the chance of you dying (unless your friend decides to kill you and collect the cool million!).
In this case, continued ignorance WORSENS the damage and the potential catastrophe. It's like saying "I may die tomorrow, so I might as well smoke/drink&drive/do-something-stupid-and-deadly today"... which is entirely ignorant of the fact that your choices and actions are heavily changing your chances of dying!
But their individual choices and actions aren't *heavily* changing the chances of dying. Tragedy-of-the-commons (and also the "taxi rank") make it a perfectly rational way of behaving.
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