It is fantastic to see the ASPO putting out a media guide! Congratulations!

I agree with Gail. Most media will want to create high quality charts and graphics. And having the data for each of your graphics available would really help (and perhaps ASPO should spring for a graphic designer to polish up the graphics in this guide).

My other recommendation would be to take a look at the Scientific American article by Campbell and Laherrere. That article does a nice job of sketching multiple lines of evidence supporting peak oil. HL is just one.

Here is one on line version
http://dieoff.org/page140.htm

Of those, I think it is very valuable to show that discoveries have been falling since the 1960s. People hear about new oil field discoveries every day and feel that peak oil cannot possibly be true. But once you can see that we are not finding nearly as much oil as we are using, then those stories about Jack 2 wells become much, much less convincing.

You might also consider including a chart showing the relative sizes of oil, coal, natural gas, and wind and solar just so people understand that the transition will be time consuming and difficult.

Here is such a graph from Wikipedia.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/World_energy_usage_wi...

I take your point, Gail. If you'd like to suggest a different graphic, or perhaps a SHORT table of data that could be incorporated as a sidebar, I'll insert it. If the table is too big though, in the interests of keeping this piece short and to the point, then maybe referring to your other doc and the EIA site is the way to go.

Gail,

I agree completely that part of our job is to make it easier for others (media, policy makers, general public) to access the raw data, generate graphics and come to their own conclusions about what has happened in the past, what is happening today and what is likely to happen in the future.

Removing the hurdles to working with the raw data is the entire premise behind the Energy Export Databrowser. The goal is to make generation of high quality data graphics as easy as possible. Chris Nelder recently used several of these graphics in his The Impending Oil Export Crisis article. If you haven't looked at the databrowser since Robert Rapier's article last month you should have another view. The user interface has been updated and it now includes the coal, oil and gas worksheets from the 2008 version of BP's Statistical Review.

And I've tried to make access to the raw data as easy as possible. The Statistical Review comes as an Excel workbook with various inconsistencies that have been cleaned up and converted to ASCII CSV that anyone can use. These files are available from the data page linked from the databrowser.

I have focussed on the historical data from the Statistical Review rather than projected output but I think the same approach would be useful for any of the datasets that we want the media to make use of. The basic principles are:

• clean up the source data and make it available in an easy-to-use format
• create good datagraphics and make them easily accessible
• encourage exploration of the data

If we are going to move away from preaching to the choir we need to empower those disinclined to hear our message with tools that will allow them to educate themselves. The data really do tell a pretty interesting story all on their own.

Happy Exploring!

-- Jon

I agree. All too often we are presented with complicated compound graphs that try the patience of even experts. Ordinary folk won't even look at them. T Boone Pickens knows how to do it. "oil is 85 million and demand is 87 million" Period, end of story. That people can understand. I thought his presentation on CNBC was excellent. He's a good teacher.