The Oil Drum | Drumbeat: August 25, 2009

164 comments on Drumbeat: August 25, 2009

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shaman on August 25, 2009 - 9:33am

Lynch's article is nothing but a fistful of red herrings. Either he doesn't understand what "peak oil" means or he is purposefully attempting a misdirection.

Since he's not a stupid man, I'll have to go with the misdirection. Is that really worth responding to? I'm not sure. In some cases, the most telling condemnation is to ignore.

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louGrinzo on August 25, 2009 - 9:48am

Is it worth responding to??? Only if you think it's important to keep people from being misled into exactly the kind of behavior (both consumption and voting) we don't want to see.

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Apuleius on August 26, 2009 - 7:51am

It's worth responding to because of the venue, not because of the quality of the arguments.

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Leanan on August 26, 2009 - 9:16am

Yes, I agree. This op-ed is causing a huge splash, simply because it's in the NY Times.

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Darwinian on August 25, 2009 - 10:08am

Also Lynch is not above telling outright lies. An example:

When the large supply disruptions of 1973 and 1979 led to skyrocketing prices, nearly all oil experts said the underlying cause was resource scarcity and that prices would go ever higher in the future.

That is nothing more than a bald faced lie and Mr. Lynch knows it. I very well remember those days and no one that I know of said the reason was resource scarcity. We all knew it was because of OPEC. In 1973 it was because of OPEC cutting supply because they were pissed off about the way the West favored Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was on the evening news every night. And in 1979, and for the next few years we all also knew it was because of the Iranian revolution along with the Iran-Iraqi war and the subsequent "tanker wars" in the Persian Gulf.

How dare he make up such a dammed lie? No one, I repeat no one who had any knowledge of the current OPEC situation claimed that it was because of resource scarcity. After all, non-OPEC production during that period just kept right on rising.

And today I might add, non-OPEC production is falling and has been falling since it peaked in 2004.

Ron Patterson

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steve_piper on August 25, 2009 - 10:55am

Ron -

I concur, and appreciate your raising the point.

OPEC deliberately withheld oil supplies as political punishment for US support of Israel in the early 70s. The 'wise and forward-thinking' heads of the time said two types of things: (1) we need alternative energy sources because our access to oil might be constrained, and (2) the OPEC embargo was hurting the Saudis at least as much as it hurt us (the 'let the free market work' argument). Hardly a soul said the world was running out of oil.

Similarly, 1979 was about geopolitics (Iran) not physical supply. With that replay of high prices, the Saudis in particular came to regret using oil constraint as a political weapon and went to the other extreme in the 80s, using oil abundance to drive out alternative supplier and alternative energy competition.

I'm drawing on some excellent pieces by Tom Whipple of ASPO for these thoughts. He seems like a strong 'rebuttal witness' to this line of argument by Michael Lynch.

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Black_Dog on August 25, 2009 - 6:48pm

On the subject of opinion pieces, what about this one from today's WaPo?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/24/AR200908...

Looks like some of those pesky "above ground factors" that Lynch wrote about are still to play out. The quote at the end says it all:

...in five years, absent American help, he answered bluntly: "Iraq will be a colony of Iran."

Are we living in interesting times or what?

E. Swanson

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Brother Kornhoer on August 25, 2009 - 10:15pm

Ron,

Absolutely right. I remember hearing President Carter's energy speech live on the radio, while the family was taking a leisure drive (remember those?) in our 1973 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon (6 mpg in town). Carter did not say that the world was running out of oil, but that we were dependent on Middle Eastern oil, and as such, we were subject to dangerous embargoes, and that we should conserve, use coal, and use renewable energy as a response. He didn't consider invading the Middle East as a solution until later on in his term, after the Iranian Revolution.

My Dad liked to say that the Olds Custom Cruiser was "the last of the dinosaurs." His next car was a 1600 cc Volkswagen Rabbit.

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WNC Observer on August 25, 2009 - 10:19am

He is a "consultant" for the oil industry. I think that we can safely assume that this piece was a paid-for project.

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shaman on August 25, 2009 - 10:36am

Or, if not outright paid for, an attempt to market his consultancy business.

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PeakOil Tarzan on August 25, 2009 - 4:16pm

Here's more advertising for his consultancy business:

"Prices have just begun to drop," said Michael C. Lynch, of Amherst, an oil-industry analyst who heads Strategic Energy & Economic Research Inc. with clients ranging from the U.S. Department of Energy to Aramco, Saudi Arabia's national oil company.

Growing supplies of oil and oil products, coupled with weak demand, which is the response to the past year's high prices, have been reducing the price of crude oil, he said. From its current price of about $67 a barrel, Lynch said he thinks "it will stabilize in the low 40s within the next year."

Springfield Republican, Sept 9, 2006

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oldfarmermac on August 25, 2009 - 10:42am

You can TRY to post a comment about the reality of peak oil or suggesting some resources to check the other side of the story in the comments section of NYT's articles but they will never see the light of day.

I will bet that you couldn't even get an AD prominently placed rebutting this article in the NYT and if you think THIS is bad,CONSIDER THAT MOST PAPERS ARE EVEN WORSE.

I would love to be proved wrong about the comments this time,but how can it be otherwise when thier lead environmental columnist won't touch peak oil with a ten foot pole?

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aangel on August 25, 2009 - 11:43am

Well, I did try and my letter is now currently the only Editor's Selection. Sometimes they listen. (See "Bit by bit...")

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion...

My recent interactions with the Washington Post lead me to believe there is more space for the peakist view than ever before. That's not to say the game is won, not by a long shot, but the journalists I've spoken to are beginning to get it.

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aangel on August 25, 2009 - 12:04pm

Perhaps I spoke too soon...it shows up on my Safari browser but not on Firefox. Odd...

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speek on August 25, 2009 - 12:26pm

Interesting - I've often thought the best way to handle spammers would be to allow them to post and see their own post, but no one else would see it. Don't tell the spammer/troller that you are doing this, and they will simply believe they have succeeded in posting, but then no one seems to be paying any attention to them...

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Leanan on August 25, 2009 - 12:35pm

Most spammers these days don't care if you pay attention. What they're posting is "link spam" - links to try and get higher in search engine rankings. That's why they sneak back to threads that have been dead for months or years to post their spam. No human will see it, but the search bots will. Indeed, avoiding human notice is the point.

That's why we have the warning that links automatically get the nofollow attribute. We still get spam, though. I suspect most of our spammers either don't read English or are not human.

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singlecarrier on August 25, 2009 - 12:47pm

I am not seeing your comment on my IE8 browser.

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karlof1 on August 25, 2009 - 2:40pm

Nor do I, and the page now says, with ZERO comments that "Comments are no longer being accepted."

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aangel on August 25, 2009 - 4:27pm

I'm seeing the same thing...my comment is gone. Could have been a technical glitch I suppose. I thought my comment was rather cordial. Here it is (I've learned to save them before clicking 'post'):

--------------------------

Bit by bit smart people are going through the math and concluding that the near-term peakists (2020 or earlier) are likely correct. It takes time for this to occur, just like it took time for the world's scientists to sort through the evidence for climate change (decades in fact), but now that evidence is solid despite what a few dissenters think. Mr. Lynch is one of the people who will hold out until the end on the matter of oil.

A few big items about oil Mr. Lynch fails to mention:

* yes there is lots of oil out there but it's difficult to extract compared to what we've built our civilization on. On-shore oil production peaked in the early eighties, what's left is the expensive off shore and heavy oils, and much of that is in places inhospitable to Western companies.

* the net exports problem. In short, the oil-producing countries are increasingly using more oil themselves and they export only the oil they don't use. Going forward there will be less oil available for oil importing countries. If their economies continue to expand (likely) we don't have until the end of the century to get off oil, we must be off between 2040 and 2060 — but the problems start much earlier than then.

* the declining net energy profit of oil. At one time we could spend one barrel of oil to get back 100 barrels. Those days are no more. We have to spend enormous amount of money and energy to get oil out and it is getting worse. Just like a business with dwindling profit margins, we are a civilization with dwindling net energy profit. As the money and energy required to get more energy out increases, there will be fewer oil projects and less "energy profit" to spend as we wish, causing the world economy first to slow its expansion, then to contract.

There is much more that Mr. Lynch fails to mention in addition to his mischaracterizing the notion of peak oil. For a more accurate view of the dilemma we face, I recommend the books of Michael Klare, who is much more objective than Mr. Lynch.

-André Angelantoni

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