If Nothing Else Save Farming
Its probably too late to prepare for peak oil but we can at least try to salvage food production.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 16th November 2009
I dont know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into freefall: the credibility of the body thats meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the worlds oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets(1). Three days later a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEAs forecasts must be wrong because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible(2). The agencys assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Mr Greenspans blandishments about the health of the financial markets.
If the whistleblowers are right we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise; if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistleblowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.