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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.
This is why we had $147/barrel oil a few years ago, not speculators.
If the world population were the only factor, oil would still be at $147/bbl, because the world population hasn't gone down.
I suspect that there was rampant speculation going on, and that a great many speculators lost their shirts when the bubble they'd created burst. But I don't know who the winners and losers were.
If you "smooth out" the spike, the price of oil is still going up pretty fast since its trough in the late 90s, even if not quite as fast as the speculation-fueled spike. That would suggest that you're correct: we are looking at a price rise, possibly just based on the supply and demand, and the current dip is just the spike evening itself out.
If that's the case, we'd expect to see oil continue a gradual rise of roughly 5% per year over inflation. But the spikes make it tricky to observe that with anything less than a five-year window.
Maybe I'm the exception, but gas is a very small part of my recurring bills. If gas prices double or triple, maybe I'll skip a new video game or dinner out every month. Whoop-de-do. And the price of shipping goods will increase. So I'll pay $0.79 instead of $0.59 for a potato. I'm just not quaking in my boots. The biggest overlooked fact of peak oil is that it will be a gradual decline as more oil recovery methods become economically feasible. So over the rest of my life, I suspect there will eventually be a cheaper mode of transportation than gas-powered cars. But for now, I'll stick with the convenience of 400 miles/fill-up, gas stations everywhere, and transportation costs (including car payment) below 15% of my income.
> So, there are reserves that are "unattainable" because it is not energetically sane to extract, and they will never be economically feasible no matter the price.
As one witty peak oiler explained it: If I want an apple, I may pay a dollar for it. If I really want and apple, I might pay a thousand dollars for it. But no matter how much I like apples, there's one price I will never pay for one, and that is twoapples.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
A lot of people hate mass transit in general. See Arlington, Texas, the largest city in the US without even a bus service. They have the Cowboys stadium, seating for 110,000, and absolutely no mass transit. It's a nightmare of parking, and yet the council was cheered as the most recent effort to create a bus line was defeated. They believed, as documented in local media, that busses would attract "the wrong sorts of people" to their town. Not all mass transit advocates want to force you to use it or artificially raise automobile prices. It's not always a war or a zero sum game, and don't pretend your side doesn't have a very large irrational population.
Indeed. And in fact Kuwait has already been caught lying about its reserves red handed. Anyone who runs the numbers on Saudi Arabia also finds they are highly suspicious. It's almost certain in fact that OPEC members routinely lie about the size of their reserves and this is acknowledged by the IEA as well.