Raw Story:Two International Energy Agency whistleblowers have come forward with startling claims about the world's supply of crude oil, according to a report published Tuesday.
"We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone," an unnamed former IEA official told British newspaper The Guardian. "I think that the situation is really bad."
A second whistleblower reportedly claimed that the IEA's current figures are inflated due to pressure from the United States and a pervasive fear that the announcement of falling oil output in the future could cause markets to respond with panic.
Turns out that drilling for more oil is a pretty lousy solution to rapidly dwindling oil supplies."Many inside the [IEA] believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further," one of the whistleblowers said. "And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources."
The fact of the matter is that we're going to lose that power anyway and there's nothing we can do about it. American hegemony won't be sustained if we all pretend there's plenty of oil left in the world. Global warming aside, this should be a wake-up call to quit relying on oil for everything.
There's been a lot of talk about becoming a global leader in energy alternatives, but the truth is that we're quickly falling behind. Either we quit this game of "let's pretend" or we become dinosaurs watching the little mammals snatch away all our food. Only Americans believe that we deserve to lead the world because we're Americans -- nobody's going to cut us any slack. When we stop being so damned useful, we'll stop being so damned important. If preparing for that means that we throw the oil industry on the same heap we threw the buggywhip industry and the waterwheel industry, then that's what we have to do. The nation didn't collapse when we abandoned obsolete technologies before and it won't this time. No one has the right to expect that the technology they sell will be used forever.
We need to get off oil or we're sunk. A Cadillac country in a Prius world isn't going to cut it.
