Well, it’s official, reality and the mainstream media have finally begun to have something to do with each other. Once the New York Times admits that the peak is here, everyone else should follow, even the lunatic right if you give them some extra time to digest this new reality, and to find a way to blame this on the Clintons.

To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century.

“This is the market signaling there is a problem,” said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, “that there is a growing difficulty to meet demand with new supplies.”

Today’s tensions are only likely to get worse in coming years. Consider a few numbers: The planet’s population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years— to more than two billion — as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

All of that will require a lot more oil — enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United States and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year.

And that’s only 22 years away, a heartbeat for the petroleum industry, where the pace of finding and tapping new supplies is measured in decades.
[…]
“The country has been living beyond its means,” said Vaclav Smil, a prominent energy expert at the University of Manitoba. “The situation is dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. But people don’t realize how dire the situation is.”

And here’s another hint, from the IEA (the International Energy Agency)

The International Energy Agency has hinted that a 1 per cent drop in Russian output in the first quarter of 2008 is contributing to record oil prices. This is the first time in ten years that Russian production will have fallen.

Analysts say the fall may be anomalous, due simply to high taxes and inadequate reinvestment. Russia is the world’s second-biggest producer of crude oil and one of its main exporters, with reserves of about 40 billion tons, of which 25 billion are on its continental shelf.
[…]
The inability of Russian oil companies to keep up with global demands is also due to the harsh Russian climate and the remote locations of oilfields. Much of Russia’s oil is drilled around the Ural Mountains.
The Post.ie

Note how the system is squirming. It was this week afterall the Russians admitted that their output had peaked and would now probably go into decline. But the media has a hard time letting itself say the words…

It’s downright comical, the fact of peaking production in almost every major country globally is always put down to some ‘other’ factors, not the simple truth that oil discoveries peaked 40 years ago globally, there have been no substantial new ones to replace what we are currently pumping, and the aging fields are rapidly running out.

The fact that the discoveries of oil peaked in the 60:s is today an accepted knowledge, but the fact that the natural gas discoveries peaked in the 70:s is for the majority a well hidden secret. Many believe the exploration for natural gas is non existing, but the industry is searching and they just finds less. We are now in a face when we are consuming more than we are finding. This is at this very moment devastating for US and it will within a future also effect Europe.
Jean Laherre, ASPO

I can see, of course, why people are having a bit of difficulty letting themselves talk about it, since the 1970s, pretty much all human growth has been based around oil consumption, whether it be agribusiness + petrochemicals producing the green revolution crops that currently feed the planet’s essentially surplus overshoot population, the so called ‘global economy’, which just means manufactoring and shipping using, again, carbon based energy almost exclusively, down to the very asphalt/tar of the roads you drive on.

There is no plan b currently. The longer it takes to fully commit to a plan b, the worse the collapse will be.

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