This week in science

Domestic oil production & imports

See that graph above? It represents US oil production, which peaked around 1970 and then plummeted -- even though the price of oil skyrocketed. So much for free market fundamentalism. Fortunately, imports made up for it. But what happens if the global production peaks? One early sign would be the supply would become tight. Tight supply would not be able to keep up with even small increases in demand and the cost of oil would again rise, sharply, squashing any recovery. When oil rises, economies slow, recede, or crash. There are plenty of pundits offering plenty of reasons why the US economy may be slowing as of late. Rarely do they mention this fundamental dynamic: our entire economy, here and overseas, is utterly dependent on the price of oil. The two can act like a seesaw, oil up, growth down. As global production peaks, prices will shoot up whenever demands picks up, i.e., during recoveries. A good question that no one seems to be asking is, how close are we to that peak?

Since 2006, the international oil company TOTAL has consistently voiced warnings about the future inability of the oil industry to meet continued oil demand growth. In 2006, then CEO Thierry Desmarest stated that maximum oil production lies between 100 to 110 million b/d, reached potentially by 2020. Only a year later the new CEO Christophe de Margerie announced that it would be difficult for the industry to produce beyond 100 million b/d, a message that became and remained 95 million b/d in subsequent years ...

• Tom at BalloonJuice posted a couple of stellar astronomical pics worth checking out -- sorry for the pun, couldn't help myself.
• If you missed it midweek, we had some fun griping about how crappy PC's often perform executing what should be simple tasks on the Internet in Fix That Crap, and in How to fix that crap.
• Fake historian David Barton branches out into fake science: our Founding Fathers debunked Darwin almost a century before Origin of Species was published!
• Oh mercy, a hypothetical interview with Sarah Palin on climate change. It's true we can't seem to get through to these clowns, but we can sure point and laugh at em. And isn't attention and laughter what clowns want anyway?

 

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/4kBRbylUHzs/-This-week-in-science

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