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Life After the Oil Crash
Deal With Reality or Reality Will Deal With You
Now is the time to invest in micro-solar equipment:
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In November 2009, the UK Guardian reported that two insiders at the International Energy Agency (the agency tasked with figuring out how much oil is left in the ground) informed the paper that the agency has intentionally been covering up this crisis for fear of setting off a panic (emphasis added):
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims [the agency] has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
A bit later in the article:
"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further.
A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added. Source
A few days later, the Guardian published a follow up to the above article:
This all seemed pretty gigantic news to me but . . . did it cause headlines around the world? No, no, no.
The fear is that panicky markets can cause enormous damage – panic-buying that prompts fights over resources, which in turn could lead to power cuts in some places and other such mayhem. But so far in facing this huge challenge, our political/economic system seems unable to cope with reality. We are forced to carry on living in an illusion that we have so much time to adapt to post-oil that we don't even need to be thinking much about what a world without plentiful oil would look like. Reality has become too dangerous. Source
In his column for the Guardian, author George Monbiot wrote as follows:
Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world's oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA's forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency's assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan's blandishments about the health of the financial markets.
If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. Source
Robert L. Hirsch was the lead author of a seminal report on Peak Oil written for the US Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE, NETL) and released in early 2005. In a 2009 interview with EV World, he explained the degree to which he and other were pressured by people high up in the agency to no longer talk about or work on Peak Oil:
Hirsch: When the people at the DOE saw the final report, it shocked them, even though they could see what was coming. . . Management really didn't know what to do with it because it was so shocking and the implications were so significant. Finally, the director decided that she would sign off on it because she was retiring and couldn't be hurt, or so I was told.
Question: Under pressure from whom?
Hirsch: From people in the hierarchy of the DOE. This was true in both Republican and Democrat administrations. There is, I think, ample evidence, and some people in DOE have gone so far as to say it specifically, that people in the hierarchy of DOE, under both administrations, understood that there was a problem and suppressed work in the area. Under President Bush, we were not only able to do the first study but also a follow-on study that looked at mitigation. After that, visibility apparently got so high that NETL was told to stop any further work on peak oil. Source
