Oil Fraud - Part 1

Am I the only one scandalized by the sloppy laziness of the press? Or could it be that there is a vast left-wing enviro-cabal that conspires to defraud the world of it's happiness.

Consider this post from reporter Melanie Gosling of the Cape Times in South Africa as she reports on the visit of US "scientist" Richard Heinberg:

Academic warns of global crisis as oil production peaks

US invasion of Iraq 'A resource war'

"With the rapid decline of global oil supplies, the United States is heading for an economic crash unlike anything since the 1930s. And the collapse of the dollar will affect every nation on earth"


At current levels of consumption - and allowing for no new discoveries of oil, we have 55+ years of oil remaining in known reserves. Obviously, consumption will grow, but so will discoveries of new oil. In 1970 we were told that we would be completely out of oil by now. They were off by over 60 years then, we're probably off by a similar amount now.


"Global oil discovery peaked in the 1960s and oil production is likely to peak as soon as 2007. With a world economy based on fossil fuel, the economic and social consequences will be dire."

Global oil discovery peaked in the 1950 and then again in the early 1963. In each of those years, we "discovered" over 55 billion barrels of oil per year. This, at a time when gas was selling for pennies per gallon. Oil production will peak when demand peaks. If demand continues to grow, then people will continue to search for and find oil. Oil from shale, oil offshore, oil in Mongolia.......

"Natural gas extraction will peak a few years after oil, extraction rates for coal will peak in decades, nuclear energy is dogged by unresolved problems of waste disposal and solar and wind energy will have to undergo rapid expansion if they are to replace even a fraction of the energy shortfall from oil. And the enthusiasm about a hydrogen economy comes from politics rather than science, Heinberg said."


Here Gosling blindly accepts Heinberg's assertions without comment or analysis. The measure for remaining gas and coal reserves in the world is not decades, but centuries. Nuclear waste disposal is not "dogged" by anything but the Sierra Club; while the "Hydrogen Economy" is already growing as companies such as General Motors and BP invest billions of dollars in its future.

I am not an energy company executive; nor am I an energy consultant. But any two-bit reporter with Google could do enough fact checking to know that virtually every assertion made by Heinberg (and by extension Gosling) here is false.