Or perhaps more likely the powers that be are acutely aware of the problem, but consider the situation hopeless and are perhaps even greater doomers than the TODers of the darkest mindset and would therefore prefer to leave the coming disaster to the next administration.

I would say oil-for-combustion is very much an addiction: it's bad for us, it's bad for the environment, and it wastes a resource with many other amazing chemical qualities (plastic).

Still, it's so cheap and easy to use we can't help ourselves or even acknowledge the severity of the problem.

At least these days people DO acknowledge that something isn't quite right...

The original Limits To Growth studies were funded by senior business and government people, including Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, billionaire David Rockefeller, among others. That was 35 years ago.

If you don't know who the mark is, its you.

I’ve read many of the recently published books about energy, climate, and our environment. I have come to the conclusion that fossil fuels will be in short supply in 10 years or so and really nasty climate changes will occur in 20 to 30 years. There seems to be more likelihood that these timeframes could shorten than lengthen. Increasing world population of humans is a significant impediment to mitigating these problems. On the other hand, I see very little evidence that governments (local, state, federal) have come to any similar conclusions. Here in Wisconsin, we continue to plan for all kinds of projects that serve the needs of our car culture – we talk about the need to accommodate the increased numbers of cars that will be on our roads in 10 or 20 years. There is never any truly serious discussion about mass transit or other ways to reduce the number of automobiles.

How can it be that people who can build a spaceship cannot see these problems? If someone could convince me that I’m exaggerating the problems, I’d be happy. But, every time I hear a claim about there being plentiful oil for the next century or sun spots are the driver of climate changes, etc – I find that these claims are the exaggeration or simply a lie. I keep coming back to the same conclusion: we have a problem!

Political party and religions affiliations, for most people, are simply a function of the family in which they grew up – children of a republican catholic family are most likely (rebels aside) to vote republican and attend a catholic church as adults. People will passionately hold to beliefs about spirit worlds and after lives – when there is zero scientific proof. So, is it the case that our car culture and energy usage are so deeply embedded in our view of the world and subconscious beliefs that we just cannot imagine life being any different? We just don’t want to talk about scientific evidence that contradicts our deepest beliefs?

Some authors repeat the story of Christopher Columbus and his ships arriving in the “New World” – for some time the native people could not “see” the ships anchored a few hundred feet off shore because they had zero concept of a “ship”. Some people speculate that the native folks just assumed the ships were clouds or fog or some other familiar object. Are we as a nation just unable to grasp the nature of these impending problems? Regardless of how smart and clever we may otherwise be are we just seeing some innocent clouds that will blow away before long?

Monbiot is pretty bolshie in the interview, you'd think he was talking to someone with Dubya's attitude and Gore's carbon footprint. He does a lot of deliberate misunderstanding, a lot of rush-to-extremes, if you don't agree with him that we're doomed today then you're a dirty dog who cares nothing for the world.

That's the deliberate misunderstanding I was saying that Monbiot engages in.

The IEA report talks about a 6.8% decline in individual conventional crude reservoirs; Monbiot assumes that means all oil ever for the whole world. He's confusing the issue, since some conventional crude reservoirs decline more quickly, some more slowly, there's natural gas liquids, tarsands, coal to liquids and so on. And the different processes require different inputs of energy.

Given all that, it's quite possible to have individual conventional crude oil fields declining at an average of 6.8% while the total oil supply declines by 10%, or only 1%, or rises slightly, and so on.

For example, we could imagine Australia producing from the Timor Sea some 500,000bbl/day, which declines at 6.8% annually. After ten years we're down to 247,000bbl/day and get worried, so we build a coal-to-liquids plant. In the first year it can produce 50,000bbl/day, in the second 60,000, and so on. So in
2018 we're producing 247,000bbl/day,
then in 2019 it's 230,000 from Timor + 50,000 from CTL = 280kbbl/day, wow in one year we had a 13% jump!
Then in 2020 it's 214,000 from Timor + 60,000 from CTL = 274kbbl/day, only a 2.1% decline.
In 2021 it's 199+70 = 269kbbl/day, a 1.9% decline.

So did we have a 6.8% decline in supply or a 13% rise or a 2% decline? Well, they were all different things. What it all added up to was going from 500kbbl/day in 2008 to 269kbbl/day in 2021, about a 4.5% decline.

Then along comes Monbiot and says, "but you said your oilfield was declining at 6.8%, howcome you now say it's 4.5%? Why are you lying to us! You should apologise!"

Of course, this is all speculative, what projects Australia will have a decade from now. That's the thing. It's really hard to know what will happen globally, we just look at this oilfield and that coal-to-liquids project and the other tarsands drilling, look at how they go over the years, add up all the different stuff to get an overall picture.

If it were easy to predict then we wouldn't have much to discuss on TheOilDrum. And Simmons would not have been predicting $200 oil by the end of the year, and not been so surprised by $40 oil.

6.8% is probably the average decline rate estimated by the IEA for post-peak fields, it's not the decline rate of the resource base (i.e. including fields that are not declining).