This is a guest post by Lester R. Brown, founder and President of the Earth Policy Institute. His principal research areas include food, population, water, climate change, and renewable energy; see his list of publications by clicking here.

Today we are an oil-based civilization, one that is totally dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling. Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped 31 billion barrels of oil but discovered fewer than 9 billion barrels of new oil. World reserves of conventional oil are in a free fall, dropping every year.

 

Discoveries of conventional oil total roughly 2 trillion barrels, of which 1 trillion have been extracted so far, with another trillion barrels to go. By themselves, however, these numbers miss a central point. As security analyst Michael Klare notes, the first trillion barrels was easy oil, “oil that’s found on shore or near to shore; oil close to the surface and concentrated in large reservoirs; oil produced in friendly, safe, and welcoming places.” The other half, Klare notes, is tough oil, “oil that’s buried far offshore or deep underground; oil scattered in small, hard-to-find reservoirs; oil that must be obtained from unfriendly, politically dangerous, or hazardous places.”

This prospect of peaking oil production has direct consequences for world food security, as modern agriculture depends heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Most tractors use gasoline or diesel fuel. Irrigation pumps use diesel fuel, natural gas, or coal-fired electricity. Fertilizer production is also energy-intensive. Natural gas is used to synthesize the basic ammonia building block in nitrogen fertilizers. The mining, manufacture, and international transport of phosphates and potash all depend on oil.

This is a guest post by Phyllis Sladek. This post previously appeared in Energy Bulletin. The petition can also be found at Phyllis' blog.

Peak Oil: Our Need for Immediate Scientific Investigation – and Action

A growing number of international geologists and analysts warn of a looming catastrophe with the onset of the decline in the global supply of oil [1]. Likewise, reports by several federal agencies, including the US Army Corps of Engineers, point to the need for immediate action, because the foreseeable impacts on our infrastructure and economy are without precedent [2].

Please sign our petition, calling on President Obama and Congress to direct an immediate scientific investigation by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

ASPO International president, Professor Kjell Aleklett of the Global Energy Systems group at Uppsala University has been in Australia over the past week, presenting lectures in Adelaide and Sydney on peak oil.

ASPO Australia has copies of 2 presentations done in Adelaide - "Energy: The Challenge To Sustainability" (ppt) and "Peak oil, peak gas and peak coal: Setting the scene for future supply problems" (ppt).

This is a guest post by Pedro Prieto from Madrid, Spain. He is the head of ASPO-Spain and organized the ASPO 7 conference in Barcelona last year. See also follow up post, regarding inflation adjustment to parameters.

When the economy started to fade last year, many attributed the cause to subprime lending.

Others put together very successful, hilarious stories, explaining that the ultimate reason for this financial crisis was the NINJA policies of banks (credits granted to people with No Jobs, No Income and No Assets). Many of these stories were uploaded to Youtube.

Neither subprime lending, nor NINJA policies, nor any financial media is able to explain why banks around the world, which had been for decades very cautious in granting a credit without solid collateral, suddenly started to grant loans to insolvent people; or why the strict financial regulatory and supervisory entities started to look the other way.

This is an attempt to offer a different perspective.