Go to rehab Mr. President

It is time for the media to demand real change in our sources of energy. Not just changing an oily shirt for a clean one, but for real change.  The Deepwater Horizon disaster has revealed the risk that we have been taking to maintain the status quo in energy.  It is like a suburban father driving into a very dangerous area to buy a drug to which he is addicted, risking all to get his fix.  That is what we have been doing in off-shore drilling.  

As the drifting estimates on how much oil is belching into the Gulf of Mexico increase, we are witnessing a disaster of immense proportions.  Every 3.5 days this is creating another Exxon Valdez, which we are still cleaning up after more than twenty years.  Deepwater Horizon's breach has been gushing for almost 30 days already. The suburban father has been mugged, rolled and arrested; lost everything.

We have known that our oil habit was heading to a bad conclusion ever since the 1950s.  That is when it was correctly predicted that the U.S. oil production capability would peak in the early 1970s.  It did.  Oil output has been decreasing and oil is becoming increasingly hard to extract.   Those accurate predictions have been tweaked over the years and the models show that we are currently peaking worldwide, hence the need for deep water drilling that led to current crisis in the Gulf.  With all that knowledge, like the addict, we have been in serious denial. 

Already today, you can see that the reporting on the siphoning indicates that the media are too readily siding with the oil companies and reporting their statements as fact. At this point in this crisis, there should be very little trust in what is released from either the companies involved, or the government officials who were obviously negligent in their responsibility to regulate the drilling. Hard questions are necessary including asking the President about Peak Oil.

We need leadership that will create a "space race" to get us off of oil as a source of energy.  It won't be easy, but that is why we need real leadership.  After being mugged and arrested, the government can force the addict to go through rehab.  The "drill baby drill" people and the dealers, BP, Halliburton, et al, sound like entertainer Amy Winehouse on the subject of rehab, saying "no, no, no."   We need to counter them by saying, "Yes, yes, yes.” The media need to report on Peak Oil, so that the discussion can begin. Then we might be able to break the oil jones.

Media Need to Cover Peak Oil Now

As I watch the media coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I keep wondering why are we still drilling there if we have known since the 1950s that we would be at Peak Oil now? Why are we still so dependent on a product that is crashing?

We are getting 30% of our domestic oil from the Gulf. The state of the art technology for extracting that oil just ruined the eco-system for some of Americas richest coastline. The real issue is that none of this will matter in ten years when the economy has collapsed due to depletion of economically obtainable oil. Why aren't the media covering Peak Oil? Now's your chance.

Within ten years, and probably sooner rather than later, we are forecasted to reach the peak and beginning of the decline in oil production worldwide. This was forecasted as far back as the 1950s. It should not be a surprise, yet no President has had both the will and the ability to drive us to new technologies in renewable resources. It is a complicated story, which might be why no one in a news room seems to even know about it, but the bottom line is that we reached our peak here in the US in the 1970s and the availability of oil to be drilled has been falling ever since.

Oil peaks happen by fields, regions, countries and the planet. Well, the planet's available resources are about to peak, or might have in about 2005. At current rates, by 2030, oil production will be as low as 1980 and the world's population will be almost double 1980's and will be far more highly industrialized, meaning needing more energy and other petroleum products.

What will be the result? Well, since demand will far outreach supply by then, the prices will skyrocket and that has already started. The price of a barrel of oil has doubled in the last year and the trends will continue and will accelerate. Forecasts are for oil dependent economies to crumble and the number of wars to get oil will increase.

Production of oil, while the demand is still rising, will drop from 3% to 13% per year in the coming years. At the higher rate of decline, production will drop 75% in 11 years. A 5% drop in the 1970s cause fuel prices to triple. We have based so much of our economy on petroleum, from the growth of our crops to the transport, the packaging itself, etc., that we are in for a collapse of our economic system.

No the spill in the Gulf is a mere tree in this forest. The media need to start talking about Oil Peak and the President needs to show leadership on the issues of how to change the way we generate electricity, how we power transportation and then go from there. Get us off of oil Mr. President. Where are those green jobs? Set priorities, those areas that have the largest impact and which can be done quickly. Start a “space race” with target objectives for five years out then ten.

Nothing is going to change though until the media talk about it. We'll be dealing with this spill for months, from what the authorities are saying now, six months if you have to plan for worst case, which they must. In that time the media can certainly bring up the issue of Peak Oil.