Be Informed: Peak Oil and its ramifications
One of the best researched articles on Peak Oil ever is found on the independent. It is written by Jeremy Leggett a former geologist for big oil companies looking throughout the world to find black gold. If you want to live for the next 10 years and be prepared of what there might come I suggest taking the half hour to read through this informed in-depth analysis on our near future. Leggett goes through length to dismantle the current estimates from big oil corporations as to when the Peak Oil might come. He shows that not only Peak Oil is a problem but also that overproduction - as seen in one of the biggest oil fields on earth in Saudi Arabia - might shorten the life span of our oil reserves considerably. He even slips into the shoes of the big corporation estimates and shows that even with that nice estimate we are in for total crash of our current civilization by the year 2011 - thats in five years. He shows that the dependency of the west will be challenged by the energy hunger of China that will not stop short of global military confrontation with their one billion people. What really convinced me is the example he gives from the past where industry estimates turned out as big lies - namely the estimate given for the US oil field peak in 1956.
In 1956, a Shell geologist called M King Hubbert famously calculated that oil production in the "lower 48" states of America would peak in 1971. Almost nobody believed him. Shell censored the written version of Hubbert's address to the American Petroleum Institute, changing the wording of his conclusion to read that "the culmination should occur within the next few decades". The US Geological Survey, in particular, did everything it could to hike the estimates of ultimately recoverable American oil to a level that would make the problem go away. The US had 590 billion barrels of recoverable oil, the survey said, in 1961, meaning that the industry had 30 years of growth to look forward to.
The years went by and the "lower 48" did indeed hit their topping point. It came a year ahead of estimate, in 1970, at 3.5 billion barrels. Since then, production has sunk down the second half of the curve at a steady rate.
An exact dupe of what seems to happen now - especially in the light that Shell has already lowered their estimated oil capacity by 20%. The article goes further and is an informed read - apparently there are more people like Leggett who come out of the foggy big oil industry countering the claim for the most optimistic peak oil scenario and I tend to believe them. In the end of the article Leggett gives an example of an english town that made itself self-proficient and cutting carbon emission by 70% and external energy need to one quarter.
What they don't want you to know about the coming oil crisis