Peak Oil - imposed by nature
The end of oil is one of the most imminent ends of resources in general.
Despite the knowledge that the resources are limited, we continue hunting and gathering for food and minerals in every corner of the globe.
If resource scarcities are mentioned, the standard answer is that humanity has always been resourceful and therefore we will find new ways to satisfy our needs.
Ingenuity, innovation, creativity, investment - as many terms to voice the belief that Techology will allow us to continue living the way we do.
Except that there's no guarantee that we will find the miracle replacement for fossil fuels, especially oil.
Furthermore, even if we would find new energy sources in the same quality and quantity of oil, we will still continue depleting the other resources that humanity depends on, such as the intricate web of plants, animals, insects and tiny creatures (biodiversity on land and in the waters), living space, fertile soils, minerals (metals, fertilisers), potable water, and a normal climate.
Stop-gap
or transitionary energy sources, such as nuclear power, silently assume that technology will find something else, after nuclear has ended and left us with unmanageable nuclear wastes.
The Video provides a stark warning - one that is not listened to by the world's people in power, the opinion leaders, including the media.
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 Peak Oil - imposed by nature - video (Audio recording 30 minutes)
The Video on the right is a 4 minutes extract of the 30 minutes video transcribed below. It shows some key parts with Simmons , Campbell 1, Webb, Campbell 2, Simmons 2, Campbell 3, Simmons 3.
[Transcript of the 30 minute video]
[Introduction to the video]
ASPO is a network of concerned scientists predicting a world wide energy crisis of unprecedented proportions.
They are working to raise awareness of the serious consequences this will have for Mankind.
But vested interests and other forces have done their utmost to prevent the information from reaching the public consciousness.
[Colin Campbell]
"As we move beyond the age of oil, and beyond the economy which is driven by the age of oil, we enter an entirely new world and there are really frankly no experts anywhere who can come forward and say exactly what we do in this situation. It's entirely new to everybody's experience. The are no investors who can say this is a good investment in this situation. There are no politicians who can say this is how we should behave in this situation. Even in a humble business way there is no business that can plan its future because every single aspect of its future is going to change. And so we're left with a sort of vacuum.
[Village images in Northern Ireland]
Here I suddenly got a call in the middle of the dayx. An American voice said: "Nick Hail is here, office of the US Naval Intelligence." And he said I'm by the phone box. So my son in law was with me and we walked down the hill here, got to the phone box and there was nobody inside, nobody there at all.
And I looked around, looking for this person.
And then across the road I saw a man standing with dark glasses wearing a hat - standing like this just sort of looking around like this. Didn't react, didn't say anything, just looked. And I walked across to him and said, "Are you looking for me?"
And he said, "No. But those that are ar'in the shop opposite."
And so I came over to the shop ... and it was this shop here, inside which was a man about 50 with two women. And he was effusive and said, Hi! Nice to see you, and everything. Can I buy you a drink?
So we walked up the road to Coughlin's Bar here, followed behind by the man in the dark glasses.
It was a scene from a movie you could say.
"We know who you are. We are watching what you're doing. We are very interested in what you are doing."
[...commentator] "That's a sign that he's on to something. And the way such things work, so I know Pete, because I've been at this for 25 years and I've had several contacts like that in 25 years - some a lot less pleasant - is that it's also telling you you're on to something. And in a way it's saying: keep going! Because we want to know where you go and what you find out. But tzhey also very much want to know. The primary interest of CIA, let's say, is not whether peak oil is real or not but how close is the ASPO to penetrating the public consciousness with the issues of peak oil and how close is the public to acknowledging what it's going to mean."
[Presentation for the Britsch House of Commons - Colin Campbell]
"What matters is when the production will begin to decline. That is the devastating turning point facing the modern world which runs on oil. I doubt that today there is any real spare capacity anywhere. And probably another price shock is building right now. We're already going through the thirties. It may trigger a new deeper recession, which may in turn dampen demand and take the pressure off price. These vicious circles give a volatile few years before the decline sets in and is perceived as such.
[US Iraq war flashes, and president Bush]
It's important for our country I understand and I think most of the Americans do that we import over half of crude oil stocks from abroad. And sometime we import that oil from countries that don't particularly like us. Countries that could jeopardise our national security. To be dependant on sources of energy from countries that don't care for America, what we stand for what we love."
[---(Colin Campbell?)]
My position is that everything that happened since nine-eleven and including 9/11 is a result of peak oil. It is caused by peak oil because they know that it is coming. According to the math I've made all these predictions and they've all been proven correct. Dick Cheney called this a war that will not end in our lifetimes. And by October November 2001 after 9/11 I was saying this is a war that will be a sequential war to control the last remaining oil reserves on the planet. and it will go from Afghanistan, Pakistan, where there is natural gas pipe lines and oil pipe lines etc, in the Caspian Bay. It will go to Iraq. It will go to Saudi-Arabia. It will go to West-Africa. It will go to Columbia. And that's exactly the way the map is unfolding.
[Colin Campbell]
Hello there. Well, back in Stavanger. I first came to Stavanger in 1980 and I was exploration manager of Amoco then, really the early days of the North Sea and Norway, those prolific source rocks, laid down 150 million years ago, a very unique epoch in geological history and we began to understand this. We could map where it was and we began to find the giant fields. And the peak of discovery in the North Sea as a whole was 1973. Of course at the time we didn't realise that. We thought we were on the brink of something that would go on forever.
You have to find oil before you can produce it. so, although the discovery had peaked, the production was still rising from these early finds. And in terms of production, which is really the only element that anyone takes note of, the real peak didn't arrive till about now.
The UK has now gone over the top. In 1999 and now it's declining about six percent a year. And Norway is going to follow the same pattern. It's over the top. Just about now it's at the top, so that Norway's production is set to fall by about a half within ten years. and I'm so pleased in a way to see that the Norwegian government, that the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, now accepts this. They plots graphs showing this exactly.
[Norwegian, translated]
This is a dying industry.
[Norwegian, translated]
And if our world was limited to Norway and of course many people working in Norway, the only place they do know is Norway.
But gradually you see the same picture unfolding in one country after another. And slowly we're beginning to get this global view of things that - well - everywhere you turn to is facing sooner or later same pattern that is already happening in the United States. Discovery peaked in 1930, production in 1970. It's now extremely mature. Production is falling and nothing an change it.
And so if we look at the world as a whole, it's simply made up of these component parts and we find that the peak of discovery for the world as a whole was in 1964 and that by aroun two-ten [2011] we can't put an exact date on it because it depends on consumption, which in turn depends on demand and recession. But generally speaking around two-ten the world reaches its top and after that production has to start falling. And it cannot be reversed. It just falls forever and ever and ever.
And it falls I would guess at between two and three percent a year.
[Trader]"The conventional wisdom in markets is that oil is going to run out in the year 2100. Therefore it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter when it runs out to the last drop. What matters is what happens when there is less tomorrow than there is today.
When a market reaches an extremity you tend to get volatility at the top. And basically one of the things that we have seen in the last two or three years in the oil market particularly, is that even the slightest amount of production being shut down, maybe a 50 thousand or a 100 thousand barrels of oil, due to a tropical storm in the Mexican Gulf, this is having a disproportionate effect on an energy market where we are consuming possibly the equivalent of a 150, 160 million barrels of oil a day. In my experience, in my opinion from working for some of the largest investment banks in the world, when we see this kind of behaviour in markets it would tend to endorse what Colin Campbell and the ASPO are basically saying, that we are near the peak."
[Norwegian, translated]
[Richard Webb, financial risk analist.]
["How are you? Probably not the best car to be shown on camera. Is everything all right? Are you ready? I'm ready yeah.]
"If you'd to sit down and think of the number of people involved in supplying your everyday needs and where the are located, it is obvious that the world economy is inextricably linked. Everybody depends on each other. And therefore a shock in one part of the system will be transmmitted to other parts of the system. So I think it's very ... Maybe they feel that it's too ... You know, O, we can't do anything about it or we're too... it's not our problem. But it is their problem and you know, noone is independent in the global market. Everybody has bought into the same concept. Anybody who tries to make a stand and not being there in that system, their company, their assets, their compatitiveness is punished."
[Colin Campbell] "What we are facing is the beginning of the decline. And what is so interesting about that is that from our mindset today, everybody is used to growth. We all live on the expectation of growth. We expect our salaries to rise. We expect everything around us as it has done in the last fifty years. And this growth of the past has been made possible by the cheap energy that has been available. And now we face the change.
[Trader, in his car.]
"When we start the transformation process from where we are and where got to go, we will see massive competition between companies as they realise the energy productivity miracle they can embark on, how they can save, or use the resources they got in a more efficient, productive way.
A company that embraces that is gonna see its share price highly valued. A company that ignores the consequences, is gonna find that it simply goes out of business, its share will be trashed outside to be bothered."
[Matt Simmons†] "Peak oil and the implications it has if we haven't prepared for it, in particular if you think that it's an event that might be happening between now and two or three years from now or even ten years from now, is so utterly serious on society that it's my opinion if global warming gets placed as a three on a scale from one to ten, this is a twelve."
"We have no spare capacity. We have no way to address spare capacity. And demand is now a run-away train. Which means it's growing too fast, it is not slowing down at all because of the high prices. And so demand is just about to exceed supply and supply will always equal use.
[...?]
"We need to face the possibility that we would have to give a much larger role to government. That government would find itself almost in a war time situation in which it was going to have to allocate resources, in which it was going to ration it out, which in turn means that they got to decide which uses would have priority and which uses wouldn't. If the prime function of any government is to provide security in the land, obviously the military and the police would have prior acces to fuel. You cannot simply let the price mechanism bid the price higher and higher because you would bankrupt the state if you would do that."
[Matt Simmons†] "I have probably spoken out on these issues as much as anybody on earth in the last couple of years and so if I weren't concerned I certainly wouldn't basically be doing all the speaking. And I've so often be deemed just to be utterly pessimistic, utterly controversial and I'm just trying to basically tell you these are energy facts that as I know them.
If we understand - you know there's an interesting definition, if you look up the Oxford English dictionary, about what the word "crisis" means. The word "crisis" is a series of problems that went unattended until they became terminal. I actually think that the faster we open our eyes to these problems, the faster we start doing [something] about them, then the less painful the problems will be.
And they don't need to basically destroy our society. But, if we actually leave then unattended then they will."
[] "And this is our first speaker meeting on the theme with oil depletion. And the purpose of our meeting is to raise the profile of the energy crisis. We particularly argue the case for a stronger government policy in terms of the productivity of our engineers, of our energy efficiency.
[Coli Campbell] "Without a source there is nothing to find, no matter how hard you look, no matter what technology you do exploit, unless you got something to find, you're obviously not going to find it. And the world I suggest has now been sufficiently explored to know more or less where all the sources of oil are. Remember that all company accounts tacidly assume of business as usual, supply of cheap energy, on which their business depends - well it isn't going to be there much longer. And the financial community now does indeed begin to wake up to the surprise to many banks we're in touch with in these days.
[Colin Campbell] "It has really been successful to the extent that it happened at all and about a disposed 20 to 30 MPs came. And there was a positive reaction. But the minister himself did not come, evidently being warned that this this was a subject it was better not to be publicly associated with. On the other hand Michael Meager, who were the previous member of Blair's government, was there, was very enthousiastic. And you find that politicians out of office are able to understand, react positively. But those in office are more cautious. And if one was generous one could say that they understand very well the situation but find it politically impossible to exactly come out and describe it - for fear that the statement might cause the panic which they are working to prevent."
[] "There is a direct link between population growth, energy consumption and economic activity. You know, if energy, if the available supply of energy is constrained, this has consequences for economic growth. But population trends will carry on for quite some time after basically energy supply starts to struggle to meet demand. So that will accentuate the situation further.
[Colin Campbell] "We're not talking about something a hundred years off, or some speculation or some you know some sort of doomsday story. Because the facts are now in front of us and it's coming quite soon. And I think what is perhaps more interesting than the event itself is the perception of it coming. And we don't have to ask much about that. Look at the Middle East. You know. Well, these famous weapons of mass destruction that Bush and Blair said they were going after - well, nobody has found them. And I don't think anybody thinks they exist. so what was the motive. And I think nobody would doubt that it was oil. So already we are seeing indirect reflections of this growing perception of this dramatic situation that's unfolding."
[Norwegian] "
[Colin Campbell] "You see this shell here? This is the limpid. Patellae is its scientific name. That shell is not changed for 500 million years. This little limpid has discovered a happy way to live on the rocks that was sustainable. The waves washed over it. It found enough to live on. And it was happy. But some decendants of this limpid found a friendly pool to live in. They became sophisticated. They changed. They became extraordinary successful. They proliferated. They grew and they grew and they were very very successful in this little pool. Untill suddenly geological conditions changed, climate changed, and the pool dried up. Now these sophisticated descendants didn't find out how to go back to the simplicity of the little limpid. And they died out. They died out.
[Colin Campbell] "One could say that Darwin didn't wear a watch. He understood evolution and he understood the survival of the fittest. This concept has a huge impact on the way we live today. But since he didn't wear a watch he didn't take into account the time factor. Who is successful for a moment, for a short span of time, is different from he who is successful in a long period of time. And one can say that even in today's world of invasions and battles and wars sure you can win a battle but do you really win a war? This is something we can ask ourselves, we can say."
[Norwegian, , translated] "
Energy is the oxygen to the modern society ... so you wont find any enterprise ... of a size you can invest in ... that isn't highly dependent on energy.
[Webb] "The travel industry, the airline industry, these people will be the first people to feel the pinch. When it affects transport, when it affects the price of moving goods, it's gonna feed through the whole system."
[Colin Campbell] "It's no use if you suddenly come in and raise the price of oil arbitrarily. Then people will react and will feel cheated and they will feel resentful and there will be demonstrations, which we've already seen. If on the other hand you were able to explain to people that this was not a conspiracy by oil companies or governments or OPEC or Middle East but was simply a feature of nature, then I think people would be much more sympathetic to the situation. They would not demonstrate in reaction and do there best to contribute in some useful way."
[Colin Campbell] "The use of oil varies enormously from country to country. In America for example on average each consumes as many as 27 barrels. If you look at the other end of the scale you find that the Indians use less than one barrel. So there's a huge range between the affluent west and the so-called third world. But given the fact that the west now depends so completely on this flow of cheap energy, and it is depleting and depleting fast, the people who suffer most are in fact going to bee the western countires, the big consumers. The Indians can go on more or less forever living their way of life, because they are not dependent upon it."
[Colin Campbell] "The whole economy, the whole financial system, is built on growth. That's how it functions. The assumption growth. And so to turn that around in the financial sense takes a lot of adjustment, a lot of work, a lot of thought to find a new system that will match the reality that is imposed by nature."
[Colin Campbell playing the harmonica] ...
Peak Oil animation video
Matt Simmons presentation in Boston 2007
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On a finite planet economic and population growth are suicide for humanity!
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