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Whistleblower Claims IEA Is Downplaying Peak Oil
Yesterday the Guardian ran a story based on two anonymous sources inside the International Energy Agency who claimed that the agency had distorted key figures on oil reserves. "The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the [IEA] who claims it 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." Today the IEA released its annual energy outlook and rejected the whistleblowers'
charges. The Guardian has an editorial claiming that the economic establishment is too fearful to come clean on the reality of oil suppplies, and makes an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.
Reality A: No withheld data. Data is disseminated with some initial shock that by 20xx we will have oil shortages. People get a chance to plan accordingly. Private business gets a chance to cash in on better alternatives and more efficient products marketed to the consumer. California starts to look a little less crazy. Gasoline and fuel slowly becomes more expensive over the years as production slows. People adjust.
Reality B: It's 20xx, suddenly there's no oil. Mass panic. People flip out. People die. Fuel shortages lead to water/food/heating shortages lead to war. Private industry doesn't have a chance to adjust. People aren't prepared to buy a new vehicle on the spot. Californians ride the nearest comet to Heaven's Gate. Crime increases, lawlessness arises, civilization breaks down, I'm forced into a Thunderdome with Cowboy Neal for my right to live.
If the IEA is capable of any logic at all, they are not cooking the books or withholding data. What's the motive of retaining data or fixing charts?
My work here is dung.
an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.
Great. This argument boils down to "Someone who we were told was wrong turned out to be right. Therefore, this other person who we are told is wrong (and by extension everyone who we are told is wrong) must also be right." I have no idea whether or not these whistleblowers are correct or not, but this "argument" by analogy is worse than useless, because it encourages fuzzy thinking.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
These popular conspiracy theories about group X holding back product/information Y are all debunked by a single thought: IF these people are truly smart enough to rule the world (or an aspect of it), they know better than to try to control every single individual in it.
What does this mean? That they are smart enough to follow free markets. They are smart enough to know that they can't predict the future of the stock market, even if they can control an aspect of it. This assumes that these groups do have a level of involvement high enough to control the government, financial and religious institutions WITHOUT being exposed. You really think that a large group of people is capable of holding a secret so large for so long? A president gets a blowjob from an intern and the whole world hears about it. I doubt an army of engineers, scientists and politicians would be quiet about what really goes on in Area 51, killing people with vaccines, peak oil conspiracies or whatever bullshit is popular that day.
So give your conspiracy theories a rest and please report some real news.
Whistle Blowers have agendas too, sometimes. But it's a moot point, because the proper response is the same either way: fast track nuclear plants. There is no other reasonable solution to the inevitable energy problem. We will switch to nuclear at some point or our civilization will collapse.
Yeah, but we aren't allowed to exploit domestic energy supplies. The NIMBY crowd and enviro-nazi's will see to that, aided by the current political overlords in Washington.
Congrats, you just described supply and demand. Oil is cheap, so no one wants to pollute for marginal gains*. Check back in a couple of years or so, and I think you'll find the balance has changed somewhat.
Hopefully, by that point, you'll have learned how not to Godwin yourself.
*There's also a whole commentary about how smart exactly is was for the US to basically outsource everything. Cost of living is cheap, but the blowback's a bitch.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
By the time that happens we won't have any money left to exploit them with and it will be the Saudi's pumping oil out of the Midwest.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It's all supply and demand
It's really not. OPEC deliberately (and publicly) slows production to keep prices high. They've gotten used to the profits that $70+/bbl oil brings. We're never going back to pre-Katrina oil prices. In the long run, though, this is good - it merely ensures the rise of much more fuel efficient vehicles.
You say "environmental extremeists" as though it's one word.
Environmentalism has a long grey scale that you might be unfamiliar with. And like both current political leanings, there are a lot of other vectors to understand, too.
FWIW, I firmly believe that there's far more oil, pumpable at low cost, than we even know about. The problem isn't exporting oil dollars. The problem isn't exploiting domestic sources. The problem is that burning it blows carbon-oxygen atoms out tailpipes, where they pollute, and ultimately cause atmospheric damage. You can't tell me all of that soot is a good thing.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
My understanding of Godwin's law is not that referencing Nazis is bad (after all, they were a part of history). He just observed that eventually, if a fight goes on long enough, someone will make reference to them. He did not opine if that was bad or good.
Personally I think it's rather silly we can't talk about tyrants or their tyrannical governments. Even if I invoke a different tyrant to make my point, like Communist Dictator Nicholae Ceasescu, I still get accused of Godwining myself. It's like a blatant censorship of history, and the willful decision to put blinders over your eyes and deny that governments can, from time to time, be destructive to their own citizens.
Foolishness.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
It doesn't matter if there is more or not. The total determines the price. THe more simply means we'll be the last to fall, assuming an equal rate of use. However we use a lot more oil than other similar countries so that oil is a mitigating factor and if you think it's going to be sold at a discount to those in the US w/o some sort of government intervention then you are going to be in for a rude surprise.
Yeah, but we aren't allowed to exploit domestic energy supplies. The NIMBY crowd and enviro-nazi's will see to that, aided by the current political overlords in Washington. Apparently it's better that we keep sending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas than it would be to exploit our own resources and keep some of that money within our borders.
Don't worry though, I'm sure our overlords in the Federal Government will come up with a solution. All we need is more energy conservation and investment in key primary states^W^W^Wethanol to save the day.
The NIMBY crowd and enviro-nazi's will see to that....
People complain about the NIMBYs until someone wants to put something in their neighborhood.
"enviro-nazi's"?? Where did you get that name from??
Every environmentalist group that I know of has a goal of basically improving human environments. Clean air, clean water, balanced ecosystem, etc....
Whatever we do to the environment always comes back to us one way or another. It's real easy to be Laissez-Faire when you live in a rich country but it'll only insulate us for so long - that' s assuming we stay rich.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
On the other hand it's possible the EU and China might get mad, and decide to just declare war and take the oil by force.
How exactly do you invade a country with thousands of nuclear warheads and enough firearms to arm every adult citizen, should the need arise?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Maybe you don't realise, but the price of "gas" is factored in in pretty much everything else you buy... That video game, how do you reckon it's transported to the store? That dinner, how do you think its ingredients are harvested, and possible, with what it is cooked?
Price of oil/gas rises --> price of all manufactured goods & services rises --> cost of living rises... This effect is far, far bigger than the "very small part of your recurring bills" that is you directly buying gas...
So, until we have a viable alternative, why not use our domestic resources?
From a strategic standpoint, wouldn't it be better to wait till we've exhausted the oil supplies from everyone else before we start using our own?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Once we have reached the "peak", how long will it take to actually "run out"?
Forever.
We don't "run out." What happens is that the production decreases, and the price increases, so production heads asymptotically toward (but never reaching) zero production rate. As the price rises it becomes economically feasible to extract harder and harder to recover oil, and production never stops.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Would nuclear generation of power be useful? Yes, save we haven't figured out how to deal with the waste products, contamination, and safety issues.
You lost me at "safety issues". The worst accident in the history of American nuclear power resulted in zero fatalities. You'll forgive me if I don't see safety issues as a reason to abandon nuclear power.
The waste issue is a real one, but one that can be mitigated by nuclear reprocessing. In any case, if global warming is actually being driven by mankind's emissions of CO2 then I should think that the choice between a few thousand tons of low-level nuclear waste (the only kind that requires long term storage, high-level waste decays on much shorter timescales) and a few billion tons of CO2 should be an obvious one.
Thanks for demonstrating my original point though. As an environmentalist you find every single option that's currently on the table to be unacceptable. That makes for great politicking but horrible engineering.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The thing is, if you *really* believe we're sticking our collective heads in the sand, borrow a couple of billion dollars and buy oil on a long dated future. If the peak oil doom-mongers are right, in a few years we'll be paying a thousand dollars a barrel. The fact that the price of future-dated oil doesn't reflect this suggests that the smart money doesn't believe peak oil is as imminent as the heralds of doom suggest.
[FUCK BETA]
Offer its industry leaders cheap labour, thus tempting them into moving their manufacturing capacity to your country, letting your enemy run up a debt it has no hope of ever repaying, use threats of not giving more credit to force it to devote more and more of its remaining manufacturing capacity to paying you while driving up taxes and weakening social services until the brightest young minds leave it. When it has been bled dry, cut the supply of goods, discard the hollow husk of your enemy, and keep the manufacturing plants they so graciously gave you.
It's working rather splendidly, judging by the financial crisis.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
What we've seen in past year is that high oil prices destroy economic growth which destroys high oil prices.
That's not what happened at all, the oil prices had nothing to do with economic growth, and the oil prices also had nothing to do with supply/demand which would ordinarily govern such things.
The oil prices were artificially inflated by the OPEC cartel, which is unmaintainable. They reset prices before the bubble burst on them (which would be very bad for OPEC), and for a little while oil was priced a little lower than it should have been.
The economic crisis was a completely separate issue, caused by funny business in the housing markets - particularly the insurance markets.
In fact what was remarkable about the period of extremely high oil prices was consumption of oil did not change much, people simply got a little angry, and put MPG higher on their list of "things I want in a car" for their next purchase. A lot of companies used oil prices as an excuse, but for most of them it was a complete crock.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
You ignore the fact that China must purchase US dollars to keep its currency pegged and maintain the advantage of cheap labor. Their wealth is therefore built upon the value of the paper the US gives it. Make that paper worthless and the value of those holdings dissolves. Further, many of those shiny manfuacturing plants will be left idle and the value of goods made depreciates since the chief purchaser can no longer afford them.
The massive foreign holdings of the dollar has made the United States into the equivalent of a "bank too big to let fail." Just like the corporate fat cats cashing in millions while the economy around crumbled, the US continues to happily give pieces of paper to enjoy cheap goods, finance it's wars, and feed its appetite for oil.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Whether it will run out in 20 years, or in 100 years, Oil WILL run out eventually. Whether we make the investment to retool our entire civilization now or in 100 years, we WILL have to do so.
I'd rather we rush ahead right now and find out we had decades of leeway than sit on our asses right now and wake up tomorrow to find out we didn't have as much time as we thought we had.