“The
most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of
the future for the present, and all the power of science has been
prostituted to this purpose.” –William James, American psychologist and
philosopher (1842-1910)
“Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than
we did in 1977—never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for
energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The
generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped
dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the
1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence
on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade—a saving of over
4-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day... To give us energy
security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds
and resources in our nation’s history to develop America’s own alternative
sources of fuel—from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for
gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun... I’m proposing a bold
conservation program to involve every state, county, and city and every
average American in our energy battle. This effort will permit you to
build conservation into your homes and your lives at a cost you can
afford...” –President Jimmy Carter, 1979
“Things that can’t go on forever don’t.” –Herbert Stein, chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers during the Nixon Administration
“Perhaps our mission now is like that of the Native Americans at the
height of the genocide in the nineteenth century. At that point there was
no question of winning the battle. What remained to be done was to keep
hold of what it means to be human.” –Stephanie Mills, Epicurean Simplicity
(2002)
“The
problem is that the world has no Plan B.” –Matthew R. Simmons, energy
investment banker
“Below the favorable surface [of the economy], there are as dangerous and
intractable circumstances as I can remember… Nothing in our experience is
comparable… But no one is willing to understand this and do anything about
it… We are consuming…about six percent more than we are producing. What
holds the world together is a massive flow of capital from abroad…it’s
what feeds our consumption bridge… The United States economy is growing on
the savings of the poor… A big adjustment will inevitably become
necessary, long before the social security surpluses disappear and the
deficit explodes… We are skating on increasingly thin ice.” –Paul Volcker,
former Chairman of the Federal Reserve
“America faces a major energy supply crisis over the next two decades. The
failure to meet this challenge will threaten our nation’s economic
prosperity, compromise our national security, and literally alter the way
we lead our lives.” – Spencer Abraham, Secretary of Energy, National
Energy Summit, March 19, 2001
“Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century. One thing is
clear; the era of easy oil is over...We can wait until a crisis forces us
to do something. Or we can commit to working together, and start by asking
the tough questions.” -David J. O’Reilly, Chairman & C.E.O., Chevron
Corporation
“My
analysis, based on geological estimates of the total world resource of
petroleum, suggests that world petroleum production will peak around the
year 2004 and thereafter will start its inevitable decline toward zero.”
–Dr. Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus, Physics Department, University
of Colorado
“The majors, they talk about
plenty of oil and that they can produce more, but if you look at
ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, BP (British Petroleum), all the production (is)
going down every year. They don’t replace and they don’t add to
production, but they say there’s plenty of oil around. Now why would they
say that?” –T. Boone Pickens, legendary Oklahoma oil magnate
“The
combination of the news that there’s no new Saudi Light coming on stream
for the next seven years plus the 27% projected decline from existing
fields means Hubbert’s Peak has arrived in Saudi Arabia… With OPEC’s
excess capacity…tapped out, oil consumers have lost their security blanket
against petro-chills. Free markets…can be messy and unpredictable, little
people can get hurt.” –Don Coxe, analyst for The Bank of Montreal
“OPEC
as an organization can only function if it does have spare capacity. Once
you have no spare capacity you have no particular lever except the rather
dramatic lever of simply turning it off, and watching the prices spike. So
OPEC’s power depends on having spare capacity and using that to move
prices in a range that they want. Now clearly OPEC has largely lost
control of price which implies they really don’t have much usable spare
capacity to work with.” –Chris Skrebowski, Editor of Petroleum Review
“At
peak, the human race will have generated a population that cannot survive
on less than the amount of oil generated at peak—and after peak, the
supply of oil will decline remorselessly. As that occurs, complex social
and market systems will be stressed to the breaking point, obviating the
possibility of a smooth ride down from the peak phenomenon.” –James Howard
Kunstler, The Long Emergency
“Wealth does not come from capital, nor does it come from labor: it comes
from the Earth.” –Charles A. Hall, ASPO Berlin Conference in 2004
“We
can say…that the world has reached the end of the First Half of the Age of
Oil, which lasted 150 years since the first wells were drilled in
Pennsylvania and on the shores of the Caspian Sea. It saw the rapid
expansion of industry, transport, trade, agriculture, and financial
capital, much made possible by the abundant supply of cheap and convenient
oil-based energy. And as ASPO has pointed out on several occasions, the
world population expanded six-fold exactly in parallel with oil. The
Second Half of the Age of Oil now dawns, and will be marked by the decline
of oil and all that depends upon it. This includes financial capital as
the decline of oil-based energy removed the essential confidence that
there will be Expansion Tomorrow to support Today’s Debt, a critical
relationship. It spells, in other words, the End of Economics, as
presently understood and practiced. That in turn calls for entirely new
political structures and policies to replace those based on out-dated
economics.” –Colin J. Campbell, ASPO founder, keynote address, Berlin ASPO
Conference 2004
“Few
people dispute the idea that the world will eventually run out of oil, and
there is a broad recognition that it will happen sometime in this
century—but there is next to zero understanding about what happens between
now and then, on the way down to ‘empty’”. –James Howard Kunstler,
The Long Emergency
“For
all the depth and power of the official presentations at ASPO this year,
some of the conference’s most stirring moments occurred in the hotel lobby
where the Post Carbon Institute and Community Solution held their informal
planning meeting. All the facts lead toward such a spot: learn enough
about Peak Oil, and you find yourself sitting in a circle of chairs among
other people who are trying to figure out how to plan for what’s coming.”
–Jeremy Hecht, report on ASPO Lisbon Conference 2005
“Market forces will undoubtedly exert strong signals, but are unlikely to
be able to prevent abrupt dislocations without powerful accompanying
strategies ruthlessly enforced in the face of vested interests. CIBC
predicts that likely supply shortfall will be some 9m barrels per day by
2010 and that the oil price needed to reduce demand will be around $100
per barrel, and of course thereafter figures steadily rise further. But
with oil prices at say $100-$150 per barrel, economies of heavily
oil-dependent countries (the great majority in the world) will be forced
into a tailspin of decline, leading to violent uprisings, revolutions and
mass migration on a scale we have never seen.” –Michael Meacher, former
British Environment Minister
“The
end of abundant, affordable oil is in sight, and the implications are
colossal. About now in our hydrocarbon phase of human history, we have
pulled out of the Earth approximately half of the available petroleum
(crude oil and natural gas). The other half still in the ground is harder
to extract and may not—as assumed—fuel the economy or even provide a
transition to another phase.” –Jan Lundbgurg, oil industry analyst
“The
economists all think that if you show up at the cashier’s cage with enough
currency, God will put more oil in the ground.” –Kenneth S. Deffeyes,
geologist, Princeton University
“Oilmen are like cats: you can’t tell from listening to them whether they
are fighting or making love.” –E. Rui Vilar, President, Fundação Calouste
Gulbenkian, Portugal
“Our
dependence on foreign oil is a direct threat to national security. People
fail to realize that our dependence on rogue states and militant nations
make us weak.” –Sen. Ted Stevens (R–Alaska)
“A
huge emphasis on drilling in the most favorable areas could reverse the
production declines only temporarily. If the nation continues to increase
its oil consumption, we are going to continue to need imported oil, and
increasing amounts of imported oil, regardless of what we do
domestically.” –Dave Houseknecht, geologist, U.S. Geological Survey
“It
does feel like we’re peddling hard and running out of options.” –Maureen
Johnson, Senior Vice President, BP (in charge of Prudhoe Bay)
“OPEC
has done all it can do. This is out of the control of OPEC.” –Qatar Oil
Minister Abdullah al-Attiyah
“Oil
is not renewable and will peak. Discovering the date is the only open
question. A rearview mirror is still the only diagnostic tool that works.
We might now be beyond the peak. Ignoring this issue is dangerous folly.
Wake-up time has arrived.” –Matthew R. Simmons, energy investment banker
“Maybe this year, but certainly in ‘06 there won’t be any excess capacity.
We haven’t been in that kind of market in our lifetime.” –Sen. Ron Wyden
(D–Oregon)
“There’s just no silver bullet here. There is no singular technology—renewables,
nuclear, what have you—that’s going to replace fossil fuels in the near
future. We’re going to be talking about weaning ourselves from fossil
fuels for many, many decades to come. There’s no way around it.” –Ryan
Wiser, scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
“…the
strategy of individualist survivalism will offer only temporary and
uncertain refuge during the energy downslope. True individual and family
security will come only with community solidarity and interdependence.
Living in a community that is weathering the downslope well will enhance
personal chances of surviving and prospering far more than will individual
efforts at stockpiling tools or growing food.” –Richard Heinberg, human
ecologist, New College of California
“Frankly, even if we had the technology right now to supplant the current
energy system with some new and sustainable that was cheap and wonderful
it would still take us several decades to do it because it’s such a big
enterprise. But we don’t even remotely have that right now. And even if we
get really intent about this we’d be lucky to get those breakthroughs with
the next 10 to 20 years.” –Richard Smalley, Nobel physicist, Rice
University in Houston
“The
world has never confronted a problem like this, and the failure to act on
a timely basis could have debilitating impacts on the world economy. Risk
minimization requires the implementation of mitigation measures well prior
to peaking. Since it is uncertain when peaking will occur, the challenge
is indeed significant.” –Dr. Robert Hirsch, Senior Energy Program Advisor
at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
“The
single biggest step that Congress could take to reduce our oil dependency
is to significantly increase the fuel economy standards of the cars and
trucks that Americans buy and drive.” –Kevin Knobloch, president of the
Union of Concerned Scientists
“Yes,
we need to make the transition away from fossil fuels, but we must do so
in the context of a concerted effort to reduce the size of our population,
the scale of our economic processes, and our impacts upon the biosphere.
Otherwise we are merely briefly forestalling the inevitable.” –Richard
Heinberg, human ecologist, New College of California
“A
couple of weeks ago, the British press reported that Her Majesty’s cabinet
is considering a plan to ration energy consumption. The immediate reason
for implementing such a system is to reduce the UK’s emission of
greenhouse gases as required by the Kyoto Treaty. The plan's authors,
however, claim that if the proposal works, it will deal equally well with
equitably allocating dwindling energy supplies caused by peak oil.” –Tom
Whipple, journalist, Falls Church News-Dispatch
“Keeping the [global economic] bubble from bursting will require an
unprecedented degree of international cooperation to stabilize population,
climate, water tables, and soils--and at wartime speed. Indeed, in both
scale and urgency the effort requires is comparable to the US mobilization
during World War II.” –Lester R. Brown, Plan B (2003)
“We
are in deep trouble, and it is essential that we understand the
nature of the trouble we are in. Once we have done so, we must examine our
options.” –Richard Heinberg, human ecologist, New College of California
“Petroleum is the Great Leveler, in the sense of ‘leveling’ or flattening
oil civilization. But petroleum will also be the Great Leveler in terms of
equalizing everyone: People will go through a final, grasping petroleum
grab with whatever funds and connections they have, before the attempt
fails for good. Then all people will have no choice but to work together
or perish. Until then, we have skewed values: for example, when a kindly
old lady drives to a shop and has her charitable concerns, the use of oil
makes her a killer of the planet and she is not pursuing a sustainable
form of transportation. Meanwhile, a mean old man who scowls at little
children who walks to the shop might be a much more valuable citizen in a
practical fashion that matters to the world.” –Jan Lundburg, oil industry
analyst
“We’ve had an illusion for the last 40 years that there was so much oil in
the Middle East that it would never run out. What I’m offering is
evidence. And all the optimists are offering is hope.” –Matthew R.
Simmons, energy investment banker
“Let
us give thanks for this extraordinary period of human history we lived
through. Let us recognize that we are moving into a new phase of history.
Let’s be brave and wise about it, and prepare to move on.” –James Howard
Kunstler, The Long Emergency
“My
father rode a camel, I drive a Rolls-Royce, my son flies a jet airplane,
and his son will ride a camel.” –modern Arabian proverb
“Peak
Oil is no longer on the way. It is here.” –Michael C. Ruppert, publisher
of FromTheWilderness.com
“Remember the end of cheap oil is not the sort of problem you can solve.
It’s like growing old. You can’t solve that. However, you can choose to
respond respectfully, wisely and imaginatively to it, so that even ageing
can become a source of unexpected riches.” –Richard Heinberg, human
ecologist, New College of California
