Conclusion
Since my last article on the energy resources six years ago, there is today a 'better' view on the coming world crisis. The big question still remains: How we tell it our children? I do not know the answer to this pressing question. On internet I found a message (March 16, 2005) from Steven Lagavulin, another worried inhabitant of this planet who struggles with the question what can we do about the coming world crisis:
"So what action should be taken? What can anyone do to confront the course of events? Sadly, I don't have the answers. But I am trying to work things out. I believe that the only hope of changing things is by building a consensus among people. This needs to happen very quickly, and it will only happen when people are no longer content to just grumble about things, comfortable in the assumption that nothing is going to happen...at least, not anytime soon...and certainly not today. Also, those who secretly long for the coming collapse will be in for a shock. The initial oil shortage, when it does come, will certainly be a serious inconvenience, but the events which proceed after that are going to humble us all to the core. Admittedly, I don't believe that any one of us can voluntarily change events of this magnitude...but I do think we have an obligation to /live/ as though we can".
After my trip around the world in 1999 I wrote a letter to my future readers of my website www.egoproject.nl with the following sentence of which I do not want to change a syllable:
"My feeling is that we are - in our so-called western civilized world - all sitting in a train who is driving with an exponentially accelerating speed towards a brick wall. Unfortunately there is no driver on the train who can stop the train before smacking into the wall. Jumping out this train means suicide. I do not see a way to lead the train to another track and avoiding disaster. All this is very frustrating. The only thing left over is to describe the process of the geological sixth extinction on this planet earth".
Postscript
Homage to M. King Hubbert King (October 5th, 1903 -- October 11th, 1989)
" Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know."
Figure 14. M. King Hubbert King (October 5th, 1903 -- October 11th, 1989)
His prediction in 1956, that U.S. oil production would peak in about 1970 and decline thereafter was scoffed at then, but his analysis has since proved to be remarkably accurate. This Hubbert Curve is today used all over the world to illustrate that the oil party is nearly over.
Note: Michael Lynch (President, Strategic Energy and Economic Research, Inc.) strongly opposes the use of the Hubbert Peak to interpret the current oil production and reserves by Campbell and Laherrère:
"The many inconsistencies and errors, along with the ignorance of most prior research, indicates that the current school of Hubbert modelers have not discovered new, earth-shaking results but rather joined the large crowd of those who have found that large bodies of data often yield particular shapes, from which they attempt to divine physical laws. The work of the Hubbert modelers has proven to be incorrect in theory, and based heavily on assumptions that the available evidence shows to be wrong. They have repeatedly misinterpreted political and economic effects as reflecting geological constraints, and misunderstood the causality underlying exploration, discovery and production".
25 May 2005: I received a message about an article of Alfred J. Cavallo: Oil: Caveat Empty. http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2005/Oil-Caveat-Empty1may05.htm. I will quote some of his highly interesting statements:
"WITHOUT ANY PRESS conferences, grand announcements, or hyperbolic advertising campaigns, the Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the world's largest publicly owned petroleum companies, has quietly joined the ranks of those who are predicting an impending plateau in non-OPEC oil production. Their re-port, The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, forecasts a peak in just five years. In the past, many who expressed such concerns were dismissed as eager catastrophists, peddling the latest Malthusian prophecy of the impending collapse of fossil-fueled civilization. Their reliance on private oil-reserve data that is unverifiable by other analysts, and their use of models that ignore political and economic factors, have led to frequent erroneous pronouncements. They were countered by the extreme optimists, who believed that we would never need to think about such problems and that the markets would take care of everything. Up to now, those who worried about limited petroleum supplies have been at best ignored, and at worst openly ridiculed."
"All the more reason that the public should heed the silent alarm sounded by the ExxonMobil report, which is more credible than other predictions for several reasons. First and fore-most is that the source is ExxonMobil. No oil company, much less one with so much managerial, scientific, and engineering talent, has ever discussed peak oil production before. Given the profound implications of this forecast, it must have been published only after a thorough review. Second, the majority of non-OPEC producers such as the United States, Britain, Norway, and Mexico, who satisfy 60 percent of world oil demand, are already in a production plateau or decline. (All of ExxonMobil's crude oil production comes from non-OPEC fields.) Third, the production peak cited by the report is quite close at hand. If it were twenty-five years instead of five years in the future, one might be more skeptical, since new technologies or new discoveries could change the outlook during that longer period. But five years is too short a time frame for any new developments to have an impact on this result".
"What all this means is that the petroleum industry is approaching a turning point. Conventional petroleum production will soon—perhaps in five years, ten at best—no longer be able to satisfy demand".
Cited from internet: