Has the public right to know that we are facing a major world crisis?
Is it time that the world Peak of Oil and Gas become part for a public debate? The banker and analyst Matthew Simmons answer this question as follows:
"It is past time. As I have said, the experts and politicians have no Plan B to fall back on. If energy peaks, particularly while 5 of the world’s 6.5 billion people have little or no use of modern energy, it will be a tremendous jolt to our economic well-being and to our health — greater than anyone could ever imagine. Politicians and policymakers have ignored Hubbert's Peak and have no plans to deal with it: If it's beyond the next election, forget it."
Figure 11. It took nature millions of years to produce our world and gas reserves. Homo Sapiens consumed this energy resource in a couple of hundred years. What next? (after Matt Savinar)
It will take us 200 years to consume the non-renewable resources of oil and gas of our planet Earth. The first oil well was drilled in 1854 by the Polish druggist Ignacy Lukasiewicz and his team in the Carpathians. A full two years later, Colonel Edwin Drake, who perhaps had knowledge of the Polish developments, drilled his famous well in Pennsylvania, an event wrongly labeled by many in the industry as the drilling of the "first oil well". Although Drake's well was no gusher, it was the beginning of an idea. Titusville transformed almost overnight from a quiet farm town to an oil boomtown of muddy roads, hastily constructed wooden derricks, and noisy steam engines. The Pennsylvania oil boom was on. How will the world oil industry look like 200 years later in the year 2054?
Figure 12 and 13. 1859: The first oil well in the US Oil Creek at Titusville in Northwest Pennsylvannia, known as the Drake Well ,after "Colonel" Edwin Drake, the man responsible for the well, it began an international search for petroleum, and in many ways eventually changed the way we live
Two Viewpoints: Enough versus Not enough energy resources for the coming decades
In my article of 1999,
I have assembled two
opposing viewpoints on the availability of oil. The first viewpoint
was
from people, mainly politicians,
economists and oil
executives, who are bluntly ignoring the geological facts on the future
availability of oil.
Now after six years I have found on Internet some of these specialists with later statements (from 2001-2005). It is interesting to see that the standpoints of the two groups did not changed much. Well can I say that the second group has come with far stronger arguments and the first group is fighting a rear-guard action. Especially the economists are thinking still of oil as product of the marketplace. The amount of oil reserves depends, then, on economic and technological factors, not just on geological factors (Michael C.Lynch). Economic students are taught that banks "create" money every time they make a loan, and that the economy is powered by money instead of energy. The juxtaposition of these two data (the first is true, the second is false) leads even Nobel Prize-winning economists to conclude they have discovered a perpetual-motion machine! No person has had a greater influence on the thinking of experts who have become government regulators of the world's oil and gas industries than economist Morris Adelman: "There are plenty of fossil fuels and no limit to potential electrical capacity. It is all a matter of money". But Adelman — and every government regulator he has ever influenced — is wrong. It is a matter of energy! (The only source of energy in money is the medium itself, and a $100 bill contains no more energy than a $10 bill.).
Jerry Taylor (Director of natural-resource studies at the Cato Institute) (2003):":While it is counterintuitive to many people, natural resources are not fixed and finite; they are created by mankind, not by Mother Nature".
(Link: Two viewpoints on the availability of energy resources compared from 1999 to 2005 click here)