I just finished watching Global Players with Sabine Christiansen which was a discussion of oil. Various important oil folk were there: Edmund Maduabebe Daukoru (Nigerian minister of State for Petroleum Resources, President of the OPEC Conference), Malcolm Brinded (Group Managing director Roy Dutch/Shell), Claude Mandil (Executive Director of IEA), Kevin Rosner (Institute for Analysis of Global Security), and Kjell Aleklett (President of ASPO). I was not impressed.

As expected, most talk was to the effect that there’s plenty of oil, just not much extra capacity. Plenty there for 50+ years but acknowledgment that conservation must be taken seriously not only because oil is a limited resource but also because of climate change. Strange, that while they acknowledge oil as a limited resource they outright rejected the notion of peak oil… almost reflexively when it was brought up by Kjell Aleklett. I know very little of him or his work with the Association for the Study of Peak Oil but truthfully I was not at all impressed with him. To put it bluntly he was a pushover. Perhaps it was a language related limitation… the discussion was in English and while he certainly speaks English I’m just guessing that any slowness or hesitation in his responses might of been language related. I don’t know.

In any case, it was a chance to promote the concept of peak oil that fell flat.

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