Genetics lecturer lauds Nature rant on “peak oil”

Guess he doesn’t know David king is a first class climate crank or that Nature will publish any and everything supporting catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hysteria

Peak oil moves to the mainstream
By Michael Lardelli – posted Monday, 13 February 2012

Something quite momentous happened on 26 January 2012. While most Australians were distracted with celebrating their national day, the world’s leading scientific journal, Nature, published its first serious commentary on peak oil. That’s right, peak oil took its final step from “extremist fringe conspiracy theory” to general acceptance by the world’s scientific community. The authors of the Nature article were David King, a former chief scientific advisor to the UK government and James Murray, founding director of the University of Washington’s Program on Climate Change. In their article we learned how “there is a potentially more persuasive argument for lowering global emissions [than climate change]: the impact of dwindling oil supplies on the economy”. Indeed, writing about rising oil prices have affected Europe’s second biggest debtor nation, Italy, they said, “Italy now spends about $55 billion a year on imported oil, up from $12 billion in 1999. That difference is close to the current annual trade deficit”. King and Murray are quite blunt about the implications of peak oil for future economic growth (the same growth that the USA and Europe are counting on to drag them slowly out of their debt woes),

“Historically, there has been a tight link between oil production and global economic growth. If oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either. This is such a frightening prospect that many have simply avoided considering it.”

Despite its length, there were many topics that King and Murray’s article did not cover. For example, declining oil supplies threaten the world’s food supply. Until recently, the “green revolution” allowed us to expand food production in tack with the world’s expanding population but this was underpinned by the mechanization of agriculture and the increased use of fertilizers and pesticides. Therefore, peak oil and food security are absolutely and intimately linked. King and Murray also failed to mention how the volume of oil available on the world’s export market has been in decline since 2006 as the rate of global oil production stagnates and the expanding populations and economies of oil exporting nations consume a greater proportion of those nations’ production.

He doesn’t mention of course that “oil shortage” is as politically-created as African famine – we have ample food to feed the world and could easily bring more cropping land back into production by scrapping “conservation set asides” and clearing the regrowth on previously productive land. Australia’s northern belt could be turned into Asia’s bread basket if we were so inclined. Similarly Green political obstruction hampers oil and gas extraction, coal is widely abundant and can provide all the hydrocarbons we need for centuries and if needs must we can go after methane hydrates, so no, there is no hydrocarbon shortage and will not be in the foreseeable future.