I realize that the observation that the MSM, by and large, doesn't want to tell the Peak Oil story is not, shall we say, an original observation.  However, I thought that the way the Dallas Morning News (DMN) handled the recent Boone Pickens story was pretty interesting.    Also, I thought that the week that Khebab and I spent as #1 news sources on Google News was pretty interesting.

The Boone Pickens Story

Last week, buried in the Business Section of the DMN was a brief, cryptic account of a talk that Boone Pickens gave in Oklahoma, where he talked about $5 gasoline.  It sounded like he was talking about a gasoline tax, but the article wasn't' clear.  I did a quick Google search, and I didn't find much additional information.

I didn't get the full story until I logged on to The Oil Drum and found a much more thorough account of the story, posted by Leanan.   It turns out that Mr. Pickens was explicitly advising a Congressman to raise the gasoline tax and cut the Payroll Tax.  I was following the story so closely because I had just written Mr. Pickens a letter a couple of weeks ago asking him to endorse that very idea.

Our Week as a #1 News Source

If you go to Google News, and search under "declining Russian oil production" (without the quotation marks), you will find the article that Khebab and I coauthored on the Energy Bulletin as the #5 listing.  For about a week, we were listed as #1, out of over 4,500 sources that Google indexes.

Why is that?  Why wasn't this article written by any of thousands of real journalists in the world?

I suspect it is because writers, or probably more accurately editors and publishers, aren't asking some questions, because they don't want to hear the answers.

Khebab and I applied the Hubbert Linearization (HL) method to the top four net oil exporters, as discussed in our article.  For those of you who don't study oil issue every day, Russia is a complex case. They had a production collapse, following the collapses of the Soviet Union, followed by a huge rebound in production.   However, if you look at post-1985 cumulative production, Russia is slightly below where they should be, based on HL, and as they get closer to where cumulative production should be, annual year over year growth is slowing, from about 11%, to about 9.5% to 2.7% last year The last monthly number was up only about 1.5% over last year.  Before production starts falling, it stops growing.  BTW, as we predicted in the article, domestic oil consumption is going up in the exporting countries.  For example, car sales in Russia were up 15% in 2005 versus 2004.

As confirmation of this problem we have a quote in our article by the Russian Energy Minister warning that without an immediate exploration effort in frontier areas, Russia is facing the possibility of a "real collapse in production."   Russia is the #2 net oil exporter in the world.

I think this is kind of an important story, don't you?

So again, why was it left to a couple of amateurs to write the story?

BTW, the HL method accurately predicted the 1999 peak in North Sea oil production, when the top 10 majors working the area--using the best engineers and the best data in the world-- were confidently predicting that production would not peak until at least 2010.  Kind of gives you a warm fuzzy feeling of confidence regarding the proclamations of energy abundance by ExxonMobil, et al, doesn't it?

The MSM is under considerable financial pressure, but selective editing--and an outright failure to tell the truth--are going to accelerate the move away from traditional news sources.  I suspect that the MSM is desperate not to upset the status quo "home buying/SUV buying" business model.  Unfortunately, this business model is dying, and nothing will bring it back.  

The MSM is in effect, lashing themselves to a sinking ship.  In the process, they are--in my opinion--in effect engaging in a deliberate attempt to deceive their readers, so that they can sell some more advertising encouraging American consumers to continue buying their $50,000 Hummers to drive to and from their $500,000 mortgages.  Consumers are not going to be happy when the learn that large portions of the MSM have known the truth about finite fossil fuels for a long time, but chose not to inform their readers/viewers.

However, perhaps the CNN story is the start of a crack in the dam holding back a flood of stories about Peak Oil that the MSM can no longer ignore.