A Peak Oil Update

[David MacLeod]

Interesting news lately on the 'Peak Oil' front.  Tom Whipple has been writing a column called "The Peak Oil Crisis" for several years now.  His latest article looks at how peak oil is "Killing Off the Recovery."  A good article, but most notable is his reporting that the International Monetary Fund has finally acknowledged peak oil (without calling it that): "in a ground-breaking statement last week, the IMF says oil has entered "a period of increased scarcity," which "arises from continued tension between rapid growth in oil demand in emerging market economies and the downshift in oil supply trend growth." As some observers have noted, this statement sounds a lot like a description of peak oil."

 

I also found a 16 minute audio broadcast from Australia's "ABC" news to be worth listening to.  Called "Peak Oil Just Around the Corner," its got short interviews with three experts from varied backgrounds.  Chris Skrewbowski, a former oil analyst from BP, Jeremy Leggett, who lead a UK Industry task force on peak oil, and Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency.  Officials like Birol are usually supposed to give optimistic statements, so it's a bit startling to hear Birol tell it like it is, giving a rather gloomy outlook and telling us the age of cheap oil is over.

 

Finally, a new documentary covering peak oil was recently shown on CNBC, called "Sprawling from Grace: Driven to Madness."  It seems like kind of an updated version of the 2004 classic, "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American...."  This piece at Energy Bulletin has links to YouTube (edited) versions of both of these movies.  Worth watching if you haven't yet seen any of the classic Peak Oil documentaries.