The Defining Moment?

“The more you begin to investigate what we think we understand, where we came from, what we think we’re doing, the more you begin to see we’ve been lied to, we’ve been lied to by every institution…”
— Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Zeitgeist

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
— Hunter S. Thompson

The entire global economy depends not just on politicians and economists and crooked financial industry executives who make decisions for the world, but on transportation; planes, trains, trucks, and automobiles.

Nothing gets delivered. Nothing gets anywhere. Not food, Not goods. Nothing. Anywhere. Without transportation.

And all of our transportation systems depend on oil and cannot function without oil.

Transportation is the heart that pumps the blood to drive the economy. Energy, oil, is the nourishment that enables the heart to keep on pumping.



What happens when the heart stops pumping? The body, the economy, dies.

Fatih Birol is the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA), and each year publishes the World Energy Outlook, the forecasting report that governments all over the world use to know what energy supplies will be available when planning development of transportation strategies and systems to keep the economy humming along.

Systems that will use the energy Birol’s report tells them will be available to power that development.

George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books Heat: how to stop the planet burning; The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain; as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. He lives in mid-Wales with his daughter Hanna.

Britain’s leading green commentator, George Monbiot, talks to Fatih Birol at the IEA in the Real News video below, who reveals for the first time a startling and worrying prediction for the date of peak oil.

And finds that the rate of decline of oil production that Birol and The International Energy Agency have been giving to governments around the world for the past few years has been simply an assumption – a guess – based on no research at all.

A guess. Based on no research at all. Until this year. This years World Energy Outlook 2008 is finally based on real research, and on real numbers.

And the numbers are not at all good. Not nearly as good as the projections that Birol and the IEA have been supplying to world governments for their transportation systems planning and strategy development for the past few years.

Which means, of course, that all of that planning and strategizing has been fantasyland planning and strategizing, based on assumptions, guesses, that energy supplies will be much higher that they will be.

Real News: December 18, 2008

George Monbiot questions Fatih Birol on peak oil

Guardian: International Energy Authority chief economist reveals startling prediction for peak oil date