Peak Oil or Climate Change: Which Is Most Urgent?

For a casual, scientifically-inclined observer, climate change used to be easy: the link between CO2 and climate change had been established, CO2 emissions were increasing year after year and unchecked growth was likely to see a world at least 2 degrees hotter than now — and possibly much more.

However, there is increasing evidence that some of the assumptions of fossil fuel availability used by the current set of atmospheric CO2 concentration projections are too high — in some cases much too high.
For instance, in 2004 Germany lowered its hard coal reserves from 23 billion tons to 0.183 billion tons — a 99 percent reduction. The UK and Botswana underwent similar reductions of 99 percent.

It looks like the US is due for a future reduction, too, though not on the scale of these three examples. In 2007 the National Academy of Science studied domestic coal reserves and urged a thorough reassessment because, in their view, “only a small fraction of previously estimated [coal] reserves are economically recoverable.” Subsequent studies put the peak of world and U.S. coal production between 2030 and 2040.

Similar downgrades are occurring with natural gas and particularly oil. It’s now possible to see the end of the seemingly limitless bounty of fossil fuel that propelled the United States to the status of economic superpower. When domestic oil production peaked in 1970, the United States was already importing large amounts of oil to continue its growth. Unfortunately, with the world’s supergiant oil fields entering old age, every non-OPEC country in decline and insufficient new fields being discovered to pick up the slack, the peak in oil production is upon us early in this coming decade. Some petroleum geologists even put it in the past.

Triple Pundit