COP15 failure and Peak Oil success: Why exaggerate Global Warming?

OECD leaders go far out of their way to never, ever mention Peak Oil. This in fact is the biggest real world driver for worldwide Energy Transition away from CO2 emitting fossil fuels. Due to limited world oil reserves and production capacity, moving away from fossil fuels is necessary, whether or not there is climate change or global warming. Complicating this, world pipeline and LNG gas supplies are now entering a period of large or massive increase, depending on country and region, perhaps able to last 5 years or more. While oil can get very expensive, natural gas will likely remain cheap, and international traded coal will likely remain low cost on delivered energy terms.

For OECD leaderships seeking rapid transition away from oil, and cutting CO2 emissions, natural gas is cleaner burning, with lower emissions than oil or coal. This is a rational energy strategy — oil substitution by gas — for the short term.

Waiting for the soft energy and electric car revolution will however be long-haul. Growing the role of non-hydro renewables in the energy mix to anything above 5%, by 2030 without also cutting global total energy demand every year by well above one percent, will be costly, complex and slow.

Setting policies for non-hydro renewable energy, including wind and solar energy, replacing or substituting large proportions of current fossil fuel demand implies long-term, massive funding, and the related industrial and technical mobilization for the task. To date, no such financing and frameworks exist, OECD leaderships seemingly imagine that ‘the market’ can be relied to carry out and sustain this massive, long term, high cost task.

More rationally, more realistic and at least as necessary as acting to limit climate change, substituting the loss of world oil production capacity due to Peak Oil, through the next 20 years, itself sets massive challenges. Here again, however, we enter the realms of politically correct censorship, because until late 2009 the IEA and other energy agencies, and most of the major oil corporations stood together in officially forecasting no possible shrinkage in world oil supply, and perhaps 25% or more supply growth over the next 20 years. Periodic market shortfalls, yes, but not long term declining supplies fixing 90 Mbd as the maximum possible oil output the world can achieve.

VHeadline.com