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Panic the big threat to planet
Barry Maley, The Australian
IT looks as if the global warming issue will largely determine the fate of the Rudd Government. It has a climate policy based on unproven scientific claims and carrying putative commitments during the next several years that would savage the economy and our way of life.
At stake are billions of dollars in new taxes and costs, reduced export income, the disabling of whole industries and investment in them, and fortunes made by the promoters of horrendously expensive energy substitutes. There will be large-scale net costs imposed on the rest of us. More than $3 billion worth of programs are already committed, with additional plans for trashing household hot water systems and billions for renewable energy.
For months – for years – the Australian public has been subjected to an avalanche of fantastic forecasts about the future of the world climate and its vicissitudes. A sober authority, the British High Court, has recently found no less than 11 inconvenient untruths in Al Gore’s brilliantly misleading film. A formidable and increasing body of knowledge shows many claims that have been uncritically accepted to be so deeply flawed that no rational government could seriously base any action on them.
Government and media have acquiesced in the dissemination of fear-mongering along with abuse and intimidation levelled at those who have sought to raise a dissenting voice. Eminent and respected scientists and the writers who make known their findings have regularly had their motives impugned when they have spoken out in protest.
Unjustified fear is stampeding us in directions that court disaster.
(18 December 2007)
Contributor Bryan Swansburg writes:
Every once in a while I feel like there is some useful movement on the Peak Oil / Climate Chaos issues then I find crap like this.
Summary:
It’s not happening.
If it is it doesn’t matter.
It’s not our fault.
Even if was our fault there’s nothing we can do about it.
If we could do something about it we would have to spend too much money.
I just can’t stand it.
BA: Frustrating articles like this remind me of the quote by Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor:
“When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shamelessness possible?
No. Then don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them.
The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.”
“Meditations” Book 9:42
Brazil’s Not Peaking
Investor’s Business Daily via CNN Money
lobal warming doomsayers have a mirror canard of doom in the peak oil theory, suggesting that the world is running out of oil. So is it? Not with countries like Brazil still not even done discovering it yet.
Last week came news that Brazil may be sitting on even bigger oil deposits than the huge Tupi field discovered just last month. According to Bloomberg News, if a geological formation beneath a two-mile layer of salt in Brazil’s Santos offshore basin is oil-bearing, it may hold “significantly more” crude, says Gustavo Gattass, an analyst with UBS (NYSE:UBS) Pactual in Rio de Janeiro.
That’s no small thing — Tupi alone almost doubled Brazil’s oil reserves and may raise Brazil to the rank of 10th biggest oil producer from 17th currently. Awed at the good fortune, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sighed: “God must be Brazilian.”
Wait a minute. Wasn’t oil supposed to be running out? Wasn’t all the oil out there already discovered? If this new “Sugar Loaf” field in Brazil pans out, the world oil picture won’t be the same.
(17 December 2007)
Plenty of oil left in the global tank
David Smith, UK Times
…A new film just out in Britain, A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, begins with a sombre Philip Glass soundtrack. Its opening line, “Oil is the excrement of the devil”, tells you where it is coming from. It outlines a vision of a world beyond oil and “how our civilis-ation’s addiction to oil puts it on a collision course with geology”.
Peak oil is a broad church. To be fair to A Crude Awakening, it is hard to argue too much with the definition on its website. “Peak oil doesn’t mean ‘running out of oil’, but rather ‘running out of cheap and plentiful oil’,” it says. The film is directed mainly at an American audience, profligate in its oil use.
But what about the peak-oil “ultras”, who claim world oil production has reached or passed the summit? It has such a widespread following on the internet that surely it must be true. Actually, it is wrong.
The “peak oil has already happened” argument was partly based on the fact that global oil production, on International Energy Agency figures, had never been higher than the 86.13m barrels a day of July 2006.
That, however, is no longer true.
(16 December 2007)
`Peak Oil’ Theory Flawed: Korean State-Run Oil Firm
Ryu Jin, Korea Times
South Korea’s state-run oil firm claimed Monday that it would take at least 80 more years before oil is used up, dampening the so-called “peak oil’’ theory, which has been gaining more currency amid high crude prices in recent months.
In a report titled “Is the Era of $100 per Barrel Really Coming?’’ the Korea National Oil Corporation (KNOC) also argued that it will be difficult in the foreseeable future for people to see oil prices beyond $100.
First used by geoscientist Marion King Hubbert in 1956 to predict the U.S. oil production, the model has since been used to predict the peak petroleum production of many other countries and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production domains.
However, some critics argue that the old theory is flawed since it did not take into account several variables such as the discovery of new oil reserves. KNOC also described the claim of a possible oil exhaustion within 40 years as simply “nonsense.’’
“We have some 1.2 trillion barrels of oil at the moment and we produce some 30 billion barrels a year. So, a simple calculation could lead us to a conclusion that the oil would dry up in 40 years,’’ the KNOC said in the report. “But this is a nonsense, almost comedic.’’
While the peak oil is concerned with the amount of oil produced over time, the KNOC added in the report, the amount of “recoverable reserves’’ is important since this determines the amount of oil that could potentially be extracted in the future.
(17 December 2007)
