The Peak Oil Crisis: Congressional Hearings – Round #2

The first congressional hearings on peak oil were held in December 2005 when a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a half-day session devoted to the topic. At the hearing several luminaries of the peak oil community testified that indeed the world was about to start running short of cheap, easy to find oil and that indeed there would be serious consequences for the industrialized world. This view was countered by the man from Cambridge Energy Research who testified that to the contrary, world oil production could continue to grow for decades, never really would

What a difference a year makes. In the intervening 13 months, the world burned up an additional 31 billion barrels of cheap oil, gasoline flew way up and then way down, and more importantly the international scene with respect to the future of oil production grew far darker.

This time, the hearings were held by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. They approached the subject from the perspective of the national security implications of our dependence on foreign oil supplies. By skipping over the arguments on the size of the world