Recently many stories, though few in the U.S. media, have revealed a serious new development on the issue of peak oil. The world seems to be running out of oil, and many people say we have already reached peak oil.   Allegedly, the United States government doesn’t want people to know this.  According to  “whistleblowers”,  governments are worried about a panic situation on the world energy markets.  (See the FN podcast on this here).

Two International Energy Agency whistleblowers have come forward with “startling claims” about the world’s supply of crude oil, according to a report published Tuesday in the Guardian.  Colin Campbell, a former executive with Total of France recently told a conference: “If the real [oil reserve] figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets … in the end that would suit no one.”  This is the case every year this report comes out. No one wants to report how bad the actual shortages might be, or speculate on what might happen when we run out of oil, except writers online.

IEA press conf. Nov. 10 2009

The response by the IEA was to deny the Guardian story. During the many times I have seen this story repeated, people neglect to say that the IEA has denied the claims. During a press conference announcing the WEO book, (you can see the whole video here) they were asked by a report from Africa Confidential about the Guardian report. The reponse from IEA’s Tanaka was, “I think that article is just groundless. We are a very neutral organization and we are very much proud of our analysis and independence. And this World Energy outlook is certainly publicized by my authority and we have been always saying that investment is necessary. Without huge investment we cannot really achieve the necessary balance of demand and supply.” Fossil fuel energy investments have been falling lately (and that’s good.)  But he blames much of the shortages on that. Whether that is true or not remains to be seen. The bottom line is that we can’t use all of the fossil fuels we know about already and keep our temperature rise to 2C, where it has to stop.

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