Peak Oil report done for Bush admin says we are screwed. We should be screwing big oil instead

I stumbled across this on wikipedia looking for something else on Peak Oil. I keep an eye out for oil stories, but this one slipped by me at the time.

Key findings: Peak oil will definitely happen if it hasn't already, and waiting until world oil production peaks before starting a crash program leaves the world with a major gas & diesel deficit for over 20 years. Since this report was done for the Bush admin, their policies of encouraging mass consumption & oil wars to maximize big oil profits are epically criminal.

This is just a reminder that we need to do more this November than kick out oil company stooges Bush & Cheney. We need to disconnect our government from energy industries that base their profits on creating scarcity, and therefore squeezing the economic life out of all but the very wealthiest of us.

Renewable energy is antithetical to the interests of those businesses and individuals. While switching to renewables will create jobs in the short term, once the hardware is in place, the ''fuel'' going into solar and wind is free, and the more that are built, the lower the price of the energy they produce. You only have to compare this to how our transportation economy works. Toyota, GM, and Daimler Benz are not the most profitable corporations in the history of the world, the companies that extract and process the fuel that go in their cars are. Renewable energy wipes out that most profitable sector, and replaces it with something more akin to making houses, cars,and refrigerators: profitable but not masters-of-the-universe, power-of life-and death-over-the-world profitable.

So long as oil companies and energy speculators have ANY place at the table, the rest of us will suffer.

Our government must do to big oil and energy traders what a farmer does to a bull or hog that gets too troublesome: get the sheepshears, snip off their balls, and feed them to the dogs.

The people are irrelevant to Bush/Big Oil (Bush and Big Oil are one and the same).

Is it time to nationalize them there oil companies?

then snuff out the pieces.

n/t

If you are being paid for every drop of gasoline used, it makes sense to encourage me to keep using gasoline until it is all gone. What gasoline that is left in the tank is still seen as "unrealized profits." You want to get at that profit, but that won't happen if I stop using gasoline and start using electricity.

Now, expand the example to all the oil still left in the earth. We're talking perhaps hundreds of billions to low trillions in unrecognized oil company profits. It would be absolutely devastating for them if society switched off oil.

Of course the energy companies and their bought and paid for stooges are going to squeal, but the good of the public is supposed to outweigh the good of the corporations

so oil & auto companies can't buy patents for promising technology and bury them, as was shown in WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR.

Corporatism does not act in the best interests of the people.

Energy and health care are national-security issues and should be treated as such.

More cars, more people, more pollution ad nauseam.

Iraq? Russia? Algeria? Kuwait? Columbia?

Which represent most of our 63%+ of consumption that is imported.


http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html

No it isn't.

"once the hardware is in place...and the more that are built, the lower the price of the energy they produce."

See.

"the companies that extract and process the fuel that go in their cars are"

So we'll be protesting Big Solar and Big Wind next?

So you're paying someone for the sun that grows your lawn?

You can't just take it or use it and not pay a price. Economic, environmental, physical, something. We don't get to escape.

We used live energy when we hunted and gathered food, and we had a decent impact on the habitat, like all life does simply by existing. We use dead energy to increase our ability to exploit live energy today(agriculture, factory farms, etc), and we've increased our impact many times over. With solar and wind energy, now we want to use the energy that helps regulate the habitat/planet/life for the dreams of a single species. We won't solve a whole lot doing that. We'll just create different, potentially worse problems. What will they be? No idea, that's why they call them unintended consequences. But the more activity we're able to extract out of energy, the larger impact we end up having.

We're also not talking about simply letting a ray of sunshine hit some grass. If that were what we were making the solar panels and wind turbines for, we wouldn't be making the solar panels and wind turbines. We would just wake up everyday, and eat a few plants and hunt an animal every now and then. We're talking about harnessing ever increasing amounts of energy. Sure, that is what every species does. However, we do it in the Exxon-esque fashion. We want to write the legislation. We want to make the laws. Just like Exxon can't stop itself, we can't stop ourselves.

We'll use solar and wind energy, because we do think it's free, or that we say it's green, or that we can walk on water when we use it, and there will be no consequences for our actions. But there will be consequences for those actions. Like any good corporation, we will attempt to externalize those costs to the rest of life, and privatize the profits(much like Exxon and Monsanto and all the rest do to us). Where that ends, only time will tell.

http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/petch/2005/0703.html

I've found over the years that Financial Sense has generally been hip to oil depletion.

I, and others, have been using this reports as a reference for three years plus.


http://s31076.gridserver.com/images/uploads/the_hirsch_report.pdf (.pdf)


For example:

I feel the gathering storm is an example of how the market system

is dysfunctional when it comes to infrastructure planning. In this case, the energy and transport infrastructure. Because of the lead times required to transform the energy and transport infrastructure once the ‘market’ signals a problem, through high prices/shortages, massive economic distress is now unavoidable, as concluded in the following report prepared for the DOE.

Realistic efficiency standards and development of alternative energy sources should have begun long ago.

This is different from the 70‘s in that supply will never rebound. The 70’s were short term shocks, efficiency and additional production eventually led to lower prices. This promises to be slow strangulation, concluding with a massive shock that will bring our economic system to it’s knees. With supply chronically outstripping supply, we are one Gulf of Mexico hurricane or one revolution away.

Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management.
Hirsch, Bezdek, Wendling, February 2005

http://s31076.gridserver.com/images/uploads/the_hirsch_report.pdf

. . .

Because conventional oil production decline will start at the time of peaking, crash program mitigation inherently cannot avert massive shortages unless it is initiated well in advance of peaking.

Specifically,
* Waiting until world conventional oil production peaks before initiating crash program mitigation leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for two decades or longer.
* Initiating a crash program 10 years before world oil peaking would help considerably but would still result in a worldwide liquid fuels shortfall, starting roughly a decade after the time that oil would have otherwise peaked.
* Initiating crash program mitigation 20 years before peaking offers the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall for the forecast period.

Without timely mitigation, world supply/demand balance will be achieved through massive demand destruction (shortages), accompanied by huge oil price increases, both of which would create a long period of significant economic hardship worldwide.

Glad you were on top of it.

in mitigating petroleum depletion.

The mitigation options were fossil-centric (GTL, CTL) but in fairness the report stuck to its goals of reviewing proven, scalable, 'off the shelf' technologies ready to deploy as of the reports writing.

I believe, contrary to the report, that EV's are ready to deploy if we can seize the large-format NiMH battery patent Chevron is sitting on (the patent for the batteries used in GM's EV1).

compartment that could accommodate various energy sources to recharge the batteries.

The compressed air car is even cleaner than pure electric

http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4217016.html

available to those who will just look for them while maintaining their objectivity, engaging their common sense reasoning, and making their own decision whether there is, or could be, a problem, based on the available evidence. It's a potentially frightening scenario and some people will immediately throw up their gaurd against anything that assaults their future view of the world and their time in it.

Treason!

Everything they've done since coming to office has benefited them either directly or indirectly at the expense of this country. Every damned move has been designed to line their pockets either now or in the coming years. There is no other way to explain the massive incompetence, fraud and criminal stupidity of their actions. There is no other way to explain the stubborn insistence on staying the course when it's obvious that staying the course is not going to produce desirable results and is impossible in the long run.

It's fortunate that peak oil coincided with the end of the housing boom..

I suppose we'll be seeing the gas lines any day now.

One of the authors of that report, Robert Hirsch (the report is often referred to as the Hirsch Report) also speculated privately that world oil production would peak by 2015. Meaning we are already within range of his mid to worse case scenario.

There was a follow-up report done on the costs of mitigating Peak Oil: $20 TRILLION. That's over the 20 year period we need to start beforehand; where would the money come from in a world recession?

http://www.oilposter.org/blog/2006/07/aspo-5-day-1-robert-hirsch-says.html

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/9/152222/1877

OR

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2008/05/us-govt-peak-oil-report-we-need-to-kill.html

active on this issue.

And, even if there were no problems with oil, the things we would do to mitigate having less of it are things we should be doing anyway just on principal.

Hirsch's worst case scenario is predicated on the basis of starting a crash plan when we peak, which will result in a 20 year recession. There is every indication that we have been riding a plateau for the past three years regarding world oil production and the Bush misadministration has done nothing but pay lip service to our "addiction" (as if he were not our "pusher"). If that is the case, then we will not initiate a crash program until world oil production is in decline and we look backward to say, "My God, we've clearly peaked!" The Hirsch Report doesn't detail a scenario for how long it will take to recover if the world is already in a recession due to economies no longer able to grow as the world oil supply depletes.

You're absolutely right we should be doing this on general principle. Peak Oil and the Global Climate Crisis are both flip sides of the same coin in that both relate directly to our overconsumption of petroleum; one affecting us economically, the other environmentally. Both issues need to be addressed simultaneously to determine the course of our post-petroleum society.