...Halfway through the article, we perceive the glimmer of the real agenda. To get some substance to the story and to get somebody to go on record, The Guardian spoke to John Hemmings a Member of Parliament, and chair of the UK all-party parliamentary group on peak oil and gas. (You can tell from the group’s title how alarmist Peak Oil theory is already a mainstay of British political thinking.) Mr Hemmings weighs in that, “this” – by which he means the IEA whistleblowers’ personal opinions – “all gives an importance to the Copenhagen [climate change] talks and an urgent need for the UK to move faster towards a more sustainable [lower carbon] economy.”
Ah yes, next month’s climate alarmist jamboree in Denmark that so urgently requires a shot in the arm if anything meaningful in the fight against CO2 is to come out of it. Something, by chance, about which The Guardian, the pre-eminent flag-waver for UK global warming and CO2 alarmism, has appeared increasingly concerned.
Finally, in a desperate attempt to add further substance, The Guardian draws on a report published last month by the UK Energy Research Centre, highlighting the sentence that “worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could ‘peak’ and go into terminal decline before 2020.” Well anything could happen. But note the report’s phrase “conventionally extracted oil.” What about the great potential for less-than-conventional deepwater oil and gas? Or for unconventional oil and gas shale extraction? True these require Big Oil to make big profits to develop the new technology. And the climate of political irrationality on the run up to Copenhagen is hardly conducive to a pro-Big Oil push on those fronts.
To steal shamelessly from a fellow countryman, the whistle-blowing angle amounts to nothing more than “a tale told by an [anonymous] idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And here are just a few actual facts that suggest why.
As Michael Lynch of the free-market energy blog Master Resource has reported, September 2009 “was a bad one for peak oil enthusiasts.” Lynch highlights the announcement (in a single week) of three separate major new oil finds. Around 3 billion barrels found by BP in the Gulf of Mexico, Petrobras suggest 1 billion at Guara and a new zone at Bakken Shale has been pegged at around another billion barrels or so. More importantly, all three developments showed real progress in new geological areas. In other words, as Lynch points out, such finds “typically represent only 10% or so of the play’s resources.” Yet oil alarmists constantly telling us there are no new plays left. A few extra billion barrels of oil reserves may not sound like much in the overall scheme of oil consumption, but that is to overlook another fact: that such a rate of oil reserve accumulation has been the norm for many years.
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...Halfway through the article, we perceive the glimmer of the real agenda. To get some substance to the story and to get somebody to go on record, The Guardian spoke to John Hemmings a Member of Parliament, and chair of the UK all-party parliamentary group on peak oil and gas. (You can tell from the group’s title how alarmist Peak Oil theory is already a mainstay of British political thinking.) Mr Hemmings weighs in that, “this” – by which he means the IEA whistleblowers’ personal opinions – “all gives an importance to the Copenhagen [climate change] talks and an urgent need for the UK to move faster towards a more sustainable [lower carbon] economy.”
