I'm a swimming teacher not a geo-physicist. ... some day you might want the general public to understand the issues.

Some of us want that day to be today.

So you're a swim coach.
Let's assume you teach teenagers.
One day, out of the goodness of your heart, you lend your car to one of your adolescent charges.

He calls you from his cell phone.
"Look coach, things may get a little bumpy going forward, but trust me, the fundamentals are still all here."

"Whada ya mean fundamentals? Is my car still with you?"
"Yes coach it's still all here right under my watchful eye. Relax."

"So why are you calling?"
"I just wanted to give you an update on our inventory situation. The inventory is all here and we plan to move it forward on schedule, albeit the schedule may experience some above ground contingencies and undulations."

Now given that he is sub 25 years old and you are a "teacher", you already know he is snowing you and in truth your car is toast.

But what if he wasn't a teen angel? What if he was an "energy expert" like say Mr. Daniel Yergin and he was assuring you the "fundamentals" are all there? What if he was Mr. Steve Forbes of Forbes magazine and he was assuring you oil will go down to $35 before it ever rises above $45 and all those Peak Oil people are kooks?

In simple English, it is the oil magnates who are giving you a snow job and it is the people here who are trying to draw out the real numbers from out of the swamp of disinformation.

Now getting clean numbers is tough because there is a lot of muck and uncertainty out there. But here are some fundamentals: 1) Mankind has not found any new major/giant oil fields in the last 40 years. All oil fields die, some more slowly than others. The big oil field in Mexico is dying. Texas started dying back in 1972 and is still on its long slow slide down into the abyss. "Technology" hasn't come through to save any of the oil fields. "Government" hasn't come through. Are you understanding which way the waves are moving in our global swimming pool? The big splash is in the Iraq corner because that is one of the last remaining backups. After that, there is mostly a bunch of fake swimmers pretending to do the crawl through hot air.