Time to grow some backbone: Oil reserves grossly misreported

A few weeks ago, I argued that it doesn’t matter whether climate change is manmade or not.

This article in the Guardian only reinforced that view.

A whistleblower employee of the International Energy Agency (IEA) is saying that his employer is knowingly exaggerating the size of the world’s total oil reserves, to avoid “angering the Americans” (ie. the US administration) and to prevent panic in the energy market.

In reality, he says (and many of his colleagues agree), the remaining reserves won’t be anywhere near big enough to satisfy the projected future demand.

If the actual, probable future production capacity were announced, apparently everybody and their grandma would go haywire and buy oil like crazy, driving the prices up. So they shut up about it, and oh, I don’t know, hope the whole problem will magically go away, I guess.

Well. Excuse the heck out of me, but that sounds like a crappy strategy to me.

If you’re outside, in sub-zero temperatures and you’re really cold, what do you do? Do you pee your pants and enjoy the short and sweet warmth this produces? Or do you put on extra clothes or perhaps even get out of the cold?

You go for the latter set of options, of course. It requires a bit more effort then and there, and you might have to endure the cold a little longer, but you won’t have to deal with the much worse, long-term consequences of the former choice.

No time like the present

Now, I’m pretty sure the IEA is right that there will be some form of panic if it publicly admits that oil reserves are way lower than previously assumed.

Investors and governments will race to stock up on oil while there’s still some of it left. Oil prices will soar. Poor, oil dependent countries will suffer. People will have to drive less due to increased gas prices. And so on.

This would, of course, mostly suck. But guess what? The problem isn’t going away by itself – magically or otherwise – and the longer we postpone dealing with it, the worse it’ll get.

The choice isn’t between “no oil crisis” and “oil crisis”. It’s between “a tough, but manageable crisis” and “a much worse crisis we might never recover from”.

It’s time for the IEA to grow some backbone and report their actual findings, instead of making up numbers that set everyone up for a bigger fall. Angered US administration be damned.

With all the dawdling, feet-shuffling and political tap-dancing that’s been happening in the run-up to the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen this December, USA and everybody else needs to know about, admit to and deal with reality, not fiction.

Not in 20 years. Not in 10 or 5 years. Not even in one year. Now.

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This post was tagged with: peak oil

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