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Dion says Tories lack policies to prepare Canadians for 21st century
Andy Blatchford, The Canadian Press via CFTK-TV
MONTREAL - Liberal Leader Stephane Dion blasted the Conservative government on Monday night for not preparing Canadians for 21st-century issues such as rising fuel prices, pollution and poverty.

... "We need a strategy in the coming years that will make us less dependent on fossil fuels," he said.

... "The peak oil era is happening and we need to prepare our country to win in this economy. This is vital for success in the 21st century and for that we need a Liberal government with a good vision."

With gas prices hovering at close to $1.30 per litre, Dion asked what the Tories have done to brace Canadians for ballooning rates at the pump.

He said the surging global demand will only push oil costs even higher.

"It's unavoidable because of the people in China and India," he said.

"We may tell them, 'Stay on your bike, don't take a car.' But they are taking cars, they are buying more cars every year than all the cars in circulation in Canada."
(12 May 2008)
Also at CJAD Radio.

Nothing governments can do about rising oil prices: oil expert Richard Heinberg (text and video)
Tony Jones, Lateline, ABC (Australia)
TONY JONES: Now to tonight's interview with Richard Heinberg. He's one of the world's leading experts on the phenomenon of peak oil. That's the point at which the world's oil reserves go into decline. The idea is that having reached its peak it's all downhill from there and there's evidence that global rates of oil discovery have been declining since the 1960s, and that new oilfields are becoming more and more inaccessible.

So as demand increases and supply decreases the price of oil goes up and up and up, as we've painfully experienced in recent years. No one really knows when we'll reach peak oil. It may have already happened, it may take another three decades. Why has the price of oil gone up so fast and so high in recent years? How much higher could it go and can anything be done to reverse this relentless process?

Richard Heinberg has written a series of books on the oil crisis including 'The Party's over', 'Power Down' and his latest 'The Oil Depletion Protocol'. I spoke to him a short time ago in Santa Rosa, California.
(11 May 2008)
Also posted by Big Gav at The Oil Drum. Poster "Turnpike" says: "Lateline is the kind of show that business leaders, politicians or the academia would watch and that could mean a lot more awareness in our decision making circles."

Contributor LO writes:
Good questions from Tony Jones and of course good answers from Richard Heinberg. Good to see quality interviews coming into the MSM.

The Oil Nonbubble
Paul Krugman, New York Times
... So here are two questions: Are speculators mainly, or even largely, responsible for high oil prices? And if they aren’t, why have so many commentators insisted, year after year, that there’s an oil bubble?

Now, speculators do sometimes push commodity prices far above the level justified by fundamentals. But when that happens, there are telltale signs that just aren’t there in today’s oil market.

... The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then, is if it leads to physical hoarding - an increase in private inventories of black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.

But it hasn’t happened this time: all through the period of the alleged bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels. This tells us that the rise in oil prices isn’t the result of runaway speculation; it’s the result of fundamental factors, mainly the growing difficulty of finding oil and the rapid growth of emerging economies like China. The rise in oil prices these past few years had to happen to keep demand growth from exceeding supply growth.

Saying that high-priced oil isn’t a bubble doesn’t mean that oil prices will never decline. I wouldn’t be shocked if a pullback in demand, driven by delayed effects of high prices, sends the price of crude back below $100 for a while. But it does mean that speculators aren’t at the heart of the story.

... Traditionally, denunciations of speculators come from the left of the political spectrum. In the case of oil prices, however, the most vociferous proponents of the view that it’s all the speculators’ fault have been conservatives - people whom you wouldn’t normally expect to see warning about the nefarious activities of investment banks and hedge funds.
(12 May 2008)

The peak oil culture wars
Andrew Leonard, Salon
Sky-high oil prices are not primarily the fault of evil hedge fund speculators, writes Paul Krugman in his Monday New York Times column. If they were, then at some point oil stockpiles would have to rise in order to support prices that are not justified by demand. But that's not happening.

Fair enough. But then Krugman goes on to say that normally, it is critics from the left, outraged at capitalist manipulation, who inveigh against speculation. But this time around, he says, it's the right that's yelping the most. Krugman explains that this is because conservatives don't like taking the bus.

... Some conservatives may indeed look down their noses at rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi on buses and subway trains. But the antipathy expressed by the right toward the peak oil camp (which is where Krugman is positioning himself, even if he doesn't utter the magic words), goes much, much deeper than a mere distaste for energy conservation.
(12 May 2008)
Leonard and Krugman are right that there are some dogmatic conservatives who instinctively hate the idea of peak oil. But there are plenty of people who are usually labelled as conservatives who are much more receptive. For some reason, car writers GET IT, whereas liberal mainstream environmentalists have a harder time. Other groups include cultural conservatives who value prudence, thrift, and who are not enthusiastic about foreign wars. -BA

An oil bubble?
Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly
AN OIL BUBBLE?....I don't really have any good reason for posting this chart, but reader Jonathan C. sent it to me and I thought it was kind of amusing. Every month the Energy Information Agency releases a near-term energy forecast, and as oil prices have been skyrocketing it turns out that the EIA has been a model of consistency: every month they predict that oil prices have peaked and are about to start declining. In May the EIA analysts got a little frisky and predicted a plateau for the next few months instead of an immediate decline, but needless to say, the market failed to cooperate. Prices continued to rise.

So take the EIA forecasts with a grain of salt. The problem is that they, like many others, seem to believe that we're in the middle of an oil bubble that's being sustained by reckless speculators. My own hunch is that although speculation may be playing a role in the current runup, it's only a small one. Fundamentally, prices are going up because demand is growing and supply isn't.
(12 May 2008)

America @ $100/Barrel: How Long Will the Oil Last?
Brad Reagan, Popular Mechanics
These days everyone is worried about oil. The primitive black goo has been linked to climate change, economic disruption and other problems, but make no mistake: We still need oil, and lots of it. Not only is American demand rising-this year it’s expected to top 21 million barrels per day-but ascendant economies in India and China have developed huge appetites for the stuff. The stark reality is that the supply is finite. "Peak oil" theorists argue that production is already maxed out, meaning imminent shortages and sharper price spikes; more optimistic experts believe that day is 20 to 30 years away. Both camps agree that the task ahead is twofold: Develop new supplies while learning to stretch existing reserves.

... Since the oil age began in 1859, the world's producers have pumped approximately 1 trillion barrels from the earth. At current rates of production, they could pump the second trillion by 2030. A hotly debated question: When will our global exploitation of this nonrenewable resource reach the pinnacle of production, known as peak oil? The most pessimistic pundits, such as Kenneth Deffeyes, professor emeritus of geosciences at Princeton University, speculate that we've already peaked, with social and political upheavals soon to follow. "By 2025," he has written, "we're going to be back in the Stone Age." But energy market analysts such as Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Amherst, Mass., believe that pessimists overlook the law of supply and demand: As cheap supplies dwindle, prices start to rise. Higher prices reduce demand by forcing consumers to use less.
(April 2008 issue)
Original has graphics.

Where to From Here?
Time for a new direction for car modification
Julian Edgar, AutoSpeed
... Is it time to re-think the whole direction of modified cars? Is the situation with regards to oil so catastrophic that we should abandon large engines and embrace, say, electric power? Is James right to be thinking about things anew?

Let’s take a step back and have a look.

Firstly, despite gloom about discovery prospects and the concept of Peak Oil, we’re not all about to head to the local fuel station, only to find that there’s no fuel left. Although the price of oil may rise a huge amount in the next 5 or 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, oil (and so petrol and diesel) will still be available.

The current predictions regarding oil supply and usage need to be considered within a historical context.

When I was a kid in the mid Seventies, oil was going to run out before the year 2000. I can quite clearly remember wondering why an older brother was going into a job with aircraft when it was certain that well before he finished his career, no planes would be flying - how could they, without oil-based fuel?

That idea now looks like madness. Equally, those who suggest that we will be living in an oil-less world within our lifetimes are probably wrong.

So James, the fuel situation is not dire enough to prevent your modifications involving large engines - and won’t be for so long that by the time there is no fuel for it, the Lexus V8 will be a highly prized historical curiosity.

But let’s look at the situation another way.

No one - not even the biggest energy-using redneck - would suggest that oil supplies are unlimited. It would also take a pretty amazing person to suggest that the way we’re using up that finite resource is the best approach.

The profligacy with which we blithely use oil is madness, both in terms of squandering something irreplaceable and also in the generation of massive emissions, including greenhouse gases. (I include far more than just transport energy use in this sentiment.)
(13 May 2008)