The Oil Drum –World oil production peaked in 2008 at 81.73 million barrels/day (mbd) shown in the chart below. This oil definition includes crude oil, lease condensate, oil sands and natural gas plant liquids. If natural gas plant liquids are excluded, then the production peak remains in 2008 but at 73.79 mbd. However, if oil sands are also excluded then crude oil and lease condensate production peaked in 2005 at 72.75 mbd.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) should make official statements about declining world oil production to renew the focus on oil conservation and alternative energy sources. …

As oil production declines, consumption must also decline.
Consequently, action must be taken to reduce oil consumption and switch
to alternative energy sources such as electricity from the wind and the
sun. This recent Oil Drum story
proposes many oil conservation ideas for individuals such as moving to
a walkable neighbourhood and trading in your car for one with better
mileage.

The IEA has recently published some recommendations
to improve energy efficiency which apply not just to individuals but
also to industry. For example, in the transport sector, the IEA is
encouraging the use of fuel efficient tires and introducing mandatory
fuel efficiency standards for light duty vehicles. In addition, this
IEA document, called Energy Efficiency Policy,
also encourages energy efficiency by providing links to almost 30
documents containing energy efficiency policies. One of these documents
called Saving Oil in a Hurry
suggests many conservation actions including increased use of public
transit, car-pooling, telecommuting and speed limit restrictions. For
further information, the IEA has its own energy efficiency web page. (03/17/09)
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John Nichols writes: CNBC cheerleader-in-chief Jim Cramer’s appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show”
grabbed the attention of Wall Street, where inside traders watched with
a mix of horror and fascination as host Jon Stewart revealed the
secrets of the temple.

There was a measure of amazement at the fact that someone in major
media — even if that someone was self-deprecating comedian Jon Stewart
– was acknowledging that a decade of anti-journalistic financial news
had lured unsuspecting Americans into investments that banks and
brokers had to know were unsound. (As Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper
observed: “It took a jester to point the finger.”)

Of course, Stewart was not playing the part of a comedian when he
grilled Cramer about the journalistic crimes of so-called “business
news” networks that encouraged working Americans to empty their savings
into the glorified Ponzi schemes of Wall Street insiders and the 401(k)
crooks with whom they conspired. He was doing what journalists are
supposed to do, calling out a huckster, declaring that: “Listen, you
knew what the banks were doing, and yet were touting it for months and
months – the entire network was. So now to pretend that this was some
crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that no one could have seen coming
was disingenuous at best and criminal at worst.”

The Comedy Central host hit the nail on the head when he accused the CNBC host of pitching “snake oil as vitamin tonic.”

That isn’t the sort of talk bankers and brokers are used to hearing.
It frightens them — not because it isn’t true, but because the great
mass of Americans aren’t supposed to be let in on the secret. (03/17/09)
more…

George Monbiot writes: Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere
are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two
degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the
opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories
we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting
greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature
sends our way. If we can.

This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change
conference in Copenhagen last week(1). It’s more or less what Bob
Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been
telling the British government(2). It is the obvious if unspoken
conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at
the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for example, suggests
that even global cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us
with four degrees of warming by the end of the century(3,4). At the
moment emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the
same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten
degrees? Who knows?

Faced with such figures, I can’t blame anyone for throwing up his
hands. But before you succumb to this fatalism, let me talk you through
the options.

Yes, it is true that mitigation has so far failed. Sabotaged by
Clinton(5), abandoned by Bush, attended half-heartedly by the other
rich nations, the global climate talks have so far been a total
failure. The targets they have set bear no relationship to the science
and are negated anyway by loopholes and false accounting. Nations like
the UK which are meeting their obligations under the Kyoto protocol
have succeeded only by outsourcing their pollution to other
countries(6,7). Nations like Canada, which are flouting their
obligations, face no meaningful sanctions.

Lord Stern made it too easy: he appears to have underestimated the
costs of mitigation. As the professor of energy policy Dieter Helm has
shown, Stern’s assumption that our consumption can continue to grow
while our emissions fall is implausible(8). To have any hope of making
substantial cuts we have both to reduce our consumption and transfer
resources to countries like China to pay for the switch to low-carbon
technologies. As Helm notes, “there is not much in the study of human
nature—and indeed human biology—to give support to the optimist.”

But we cannot abandon mitigation unless we have a better option. We don’t. (03/17/09)
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BBC Marine Science — A giant fossil sea monster found in the Arctic had a bite that would have been able to crush a 4×4 car, according to its discoverers.

Researchers say the marine reptile, which measured an impressive 15m (50ft) long, had a bite force of about 45 tonnes (33,000lbs) per square inch.

The creature’s partial skull was dug up last summer in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard by a Norwegian-led team.

Dubbed “Predator X”, it patrolled the oceans some 147 million years ago. Its jaws may have been more powerful than those of a Tyrannosaurus rex, though estimates of the dinosaur’s bite vary substantially.

It is thought to belong to a new species of pliosaur - a group of large, short-necked reptiles that lived at the time of the dinosaurs. But even by the standards of this group, the creature’s size has astonished scientists.

Its estimated length exceeds that of another large pliosaur, dubbed “The Monster”, which was uncovered in Svalbard a year earlier than this one.

Expedition leader Jorn Harald Hurum, from the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum, said the “The Monster” would have been big enough to chomp on a small car. He said the bite estimates for the latest fossil forced a re-think. This one, he said, might have been able to “crush a Hummer”, referring to General Motors’ large 4×4 vehicle.

Researchers say the shape and proportional size of the brain resembles that of another “apex predator”: the great white shark. (03/17/09)
more…