end of big oil + the mendacity of the US govt

Jean Laherrere's paper delivered today at the energyresources2000 on-line
conference underscores something which has been obvious to anyone who has
attempted to make sense of reports on oil/energy put out by various US
government agencies in recent years (principally the annual reports of the
Dept of Energy, the Energy Information Agency and US Geological Service
(USGS)).

This is that the US government is basing its energy strategy on a gigantic
fraud. This is why the hard science never quite matches the soft policy
conclusions, and why the figures for reserves, production and consumption do
not match up, to the extent now where it's not just their stats that are
lousy: the USGS seems no longer capable even of simple arithmetic, as
Laherrere points out.

According to Ft.com, oil spot prices today reached another post-Gulf war
high. The 'price spike' is turning out to be something more, and the
systematic mendacity of government is no longer sufficient to hide the
reasons why. The plain fact is that even if it wants to, Opec is probably no
longer capable of supplying the world's hunger for oil, at a time when Asia
is on the rebound and while Nopec production in the North Sea, Mexico,
Canada and of course the US itself, is declining as reserves diminish and
the Hubbert peak arrives.

The fraud perpetrated by US government has two main and several subsidiary
targets: complacency about reserves and about the capacity of the global
energy system to meet demand (it's not just oil, it's electricity, too) is
encouraged (a) to stop American consumers and motorists from panicking and
(b) to discourage Opec from asserting its market clout (forlorn hope,
obviously).

The Hubbert Peak in world oil may come this year or several years down the
line; it really doesn't matter, because the consequences are already being
felt. As the CEO of Arco said recently, ‘We've embarked on the beginning of
the Last Days of the Age of Oil’. Emerging geopolitical crises in the
Persian Gulf and Caspian basin will be one clear manifestation; others will
be queues at filling stations, price-shocks and a radical reordering of the
world's monetary and financial flows. The longer term consequences will be
still more profound.

Laherrere's paper is archived at the Crashlist site:

http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList

Mark Jones