"Oil is the excrement of the devil, El excremento del diablo." "Oil is black blood." "Oil is the blood of the dinosaurs." "This is the bloodstream of the world economy." "Oil is the blood of the Earth." "We are moving from an era of cheap, abundant energy to an era of scarce, hard to get, expensive energy." "At the same time, we are making ourselves dependent on some extremely unstable regimes in some very nasty parts of the world." "Keeping the World dependent on oil as long as possible is important." "Not one in fifty, not one in a hundred of the people in our country have any inkling of the potential problem that we're facing." "Increased unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy, starvation, they're all of a kind of the things that happen when a society collapses." "So we enter an entirely new world of quite unbelievable dimensions, and yet it's only a few years away." "Hello, folks, I'm a carbon atom." "And since I'm an essential part in each of the hydrocarbons in crude oil," "I'm here to give you the inside dope on gasoline." "Oil is not like wheat, we are not growing it every year." "Oil is an outcome of many millions of years of geological history." "The great bulk of the World's oil was formed at just two very brief moments of extreme global warming, 90 and 150 million years ago." "Animals and plants that died in the ocean were compressed by more deposits of sand, and over the years these deposits squished and compacted more and more, and then, over time, they were cooked, which was what we call "the kitchen"." "And when the organic material was buried to a depth of about 2000 meters, chemical reactions converted it into oil." "This was formed once, briefly, over geological time." "And so, we are using this stuff up over one or two centuries." "One barrel of oil, the refined product that with 42 gallons of gasoline you can buy for a little over a hundred dollars will produce as much energy, as much work as you would get from 12 people working all year for you." "You take an average man, performing physical labor for 25000 hours, to produce the amount of energy just contained in that one barrel of oil." "That barrel of oil, if it's pulled out of the ground in Iraq, can be pulled out of the ground for one dollar." "You invest a dollar and you get back 25000 hours of human labor." "That is an energy source that is so dense, it's essentially free energy." "All non-renewable, it's all extremely capital intensive and it's probably the most invaluable raw natural resource we've ever discovered." "You are about to know the thrill of seeing that which has never been seen before." "You are about to enter a beautiful, exciting, wonderful new world." "The world if 1960." "For the first time in history, you'll see:" "A wonderful new world of Fords." "The 1960 Thunderbird!" "Oil is our God." "And ok, if somebody says they worship Jesus, Buddha, Allah, whoever, they actually worhip petroleum." "70% of the barrel of oil is refined into transportation fuels." "Which include motor gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, railroad fuel and maritime fuel." "98% of all transportation energy comes from oil." "Construction of an average car consumes somewhere between the energy equivalent of" "27 and 54 barrels of oil, depending on whose statistics you use." "Construction of an average desktop computer consumes 10 times its weight in fossil fuels." "Microchip consumes 630 times its weight in fossil fuels during its construction." "For every calorie that you eat in the United States and probably similar number in other industrialized nations, burns 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy." "There are 6.4 billion people, I think, living on the planet now, most of them are reasonably well fed and that's the consequence of what was called the Green Revolution in the second half of the 20th century." "Green Revolution consisted in very large measure of fertilizing land with petrochemicals, fertilizers that are derived from petroleum." "Farming has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous 1000." "A farmer today can work 5 times the land his father worked, and still have time for leisure that his father never knew." "The petroleum that runs these modern hired hands has not confined progress and farming to the fields," "Life is easier for the farm wife, too." "What it comes down to is that the oil industry has to please Mrs. Martin, and millions just like her." "Already today she has used some 87 petroleum products, including the plastic bacon wrapper and the wax of the milk cotton." "She'll top a 100 before the day is over." "Liquids that come out of oil as it's processed and refined, create the building block for all of our petrochemical, chemical, plastic, pharmaceutical, you know, zillions of things:" "Tires, insecticides, cosmetics, weed killers," "A whole galaxy of things to make a better life on Earth." "And you know, it isn't just oil companies that try to outdo each other competing for the customer's dollar, the same story is true of almost every successful business enterprise on the whole planet." "Well, whether you know it or not, every single preparation on this beautiful lady's dressing table, every single thing she is wearing, is influenced by oil." "Just before her, let's take away all these articles dependent upon petroleum:" "Her hand mirror, cosmetics, perfume and manicure set made of plastics." "Her synthetic silk negligee, her silk under... ooh, science can go no further." "The Caspian Sea was one of the earlies oil provinces in the world." "People were simply digging holes to produce oil in Baku and oil production really took off when western oil companies" "were granted concessions in the late 1800's." "By 1900, 95% of Russian oil was coming from Baku." "In their heyday these oilfields produced up to 5000 tons of crude oil per day." "Baku then became a huge industrial centre and one of the most affluent cities in the world." "Where is daddy, mommy?" "Well, Jeff, I'll just show you." "We are here, in the United States." "And daddy is down here, in Venezuela." "Here, where the lake Maracaibo oil fields are." "That's where daddy is working, Jeff." "And when he finds a place for us to live, we're going down there too." "Venezuela discovered oil at the beginning of the 20th century." "The real first discovery was about 1914." "The real turning point was on the 16th of December, 1922 when there was a blowout in a well that was being drilled at Cabimas, and it became known as the day of the black rain." "150 thousand barrels in the air, for two or three days running." "And that put Venezuela an the world oil map, once and for all." "In that one time, Venezuela became the largest exporter in the world." "It was the US, not Saudi Arabia that was the world's leading producer of oil, and in fact much of our military and industrial might arose out of our giant oil industry." "We were, essentialy, the Saudi Arabia of the world up until about the 1950s." "McCamey was a boom town for many, many years." "Their attitude was that this was going to last from now on, and I know that those people then could not foresee you were ever going to pump all the oil out of the ground in this part of Texas." "And they couldn't picture ever running out of oil because it was everywhere and got on everything." "Off course now we realize that you're going to deplete your supply, sooner or later." "They're not making a lot of dinosaurs anymore." "Oil is a magnet for war." "Oil starts wars." "The Sudan, for example, Darfur." "What everybody is treating as an ethnic and a religious struggle is infact, in part, a struggle about major oil finds located in the south." "Which means that the government in the north, a different ethnic and religious makeup, is displacing those people and moving them out of the area so that those oil revenues belong to them." "Oil has always been associated with war." "Our very first wars, World War I, World War II, have very important elements of oil in them, as a reason for the war, as allowing the war to go on, as a way of securing supply." "During World War II, which was the war of engines, the continuous supply of oil from Baku ensured the Russian victory against the Germans." "During the 70s there were the political problems, the war between the Egyptians and the Israelis in which the oil boycott took place." "Khomeini's revolution, we have the Palestinian problems," "wars between Iraq and Iran..." "First war that was absolutely about oil was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait which was really about seizing an oil field." "Excellency, ladies and gentlemen," "Iraq oil is a giant that has been kept dormant for so many, many years" "This oil has been the least explored, the least developed, and the least produced." "There are lots of people who will tell you that oil had nothing to do with the war, if you go to Washington." "And we used to call it the O-word that nobody would say." "But in fact, all evidence points to the fact that the United States which did not secure areas of weapons of mass destruction, but did in fact secure the oil fields." "The United States had plans to bring in US companies in Iraq where they have previously not been allowed to operate." "That there were maps of the oil fields involved in the planning of the war, that in 1998, long before the war people were arguing for this as the way of securing energy supplies in the United States." "I can't get inside their heads to know all of the rationale for going to war in Iraq but there are many people who believe at least a part of the reasons for being there is the geopolitical position of Iraq and the fact" "that it's right in the middle of world's oil patch." "The Iraqis wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein." "And they were happy that the Americans helped, but look at what happened." "After Saddam Hussein, there is no institutions, there's no state, there's no army, there's no real police force, people are kidnapped, killed, decapitated..." "There is no law, they made the country stateless, without a state." "Instead of creating conditions for peace, they are making conditions for conflict." "More and more oil is going to come from less and less stable places." "Less and less secure places, places that actually challenge taking of oil in the first place." "Oil fuels war, it's a catalyst for war, it is something that prolonges war, it intensifies war, this is not a pretty picture." "I suppose that the classification of reserves depends on the motivations of the person that's classified them." "Try to keep people guessing in a way, keep them off balance." "Most numbers that you will see around the world that lead to these numbers that we were talking about include proven plus probable, and sometimes even possible." "In fact, the public data is extremely misleading and misunderstood," "OPEC exaggerated how much oil it's got left, for all sorts of political reasons." "You know, this is an old story, casting doubt on the numbers of reserves in the Middle East, as published." "In 1985 Kuwait over night added 50% to its reserves, at that time the OPEC quota, that is the amount of oil that each of the OPEC countries could produce was based on the reported reserves." "So the more you reported, the more you could produce." "Two years later Venezuela doubled its reserves over night, and that caused the other countries, finally Saudi Arabia to announce enormous increases over night, simply to protect their production quota." "And these numbers have not changed since." "And it's absolutely implausible to imagine that the number should stay the same, when they're all the time producing." "I've asked them that same question." "You know, you produce 8 or 9 million barrels of oil a day, and at the end of the year the reserves are the same as they were at the beginning, as the same as they were 10 years ago," "they said "Well that's our plan."" "You know, "We produce this oil, then we prove up reserves to offset the oil that we produced during the year, so at the beginning of the next year, our reserves are exactly what they were" "the year before."" "Would you believe that or not?" "I don't know, but that's what they say." "Their plan, that's the way it works." "OPEC countries do not care about what might happen 20 years from now, or 30 years or 40 years, they care about what they get now today." "Because, these are politicians, they want more money, more money to spend." "Rationally or irationally, whatever it is, but they have budgets." "And they became prisoners of their budget." "What may happen 20 years from now, by that time they are dead." "They don't care." "I'm afraid that we're gonna run out of oil and gas a lot sooner than lots of people think." "Well it appears to me that when it peaks, that they've taken more than half of it out of the ground." "Of course, as time goes on they might find a way to extract more of that oil than they do now." "They can extract it over a period of time, but it's not necessarily economically feasible, well it might be at $50 a barrel or more." "But we're gonna come to time when we don't have oil." "This is one of the, you know, the obsession of many oil people and, they say "Well, we will reach a point in which oil production will not increase anymore and we'll be equally peaking out."" "And then it will decrease slowly." "We are here, we are near, we are not, nobody knows." "They tried to take the example of the oil production in the United States." "The real saga of petroleum continues at a greater pace than ever." "Down in Peru, in California, Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania." "Millions of workers, engineers, geologists find new reserves, build new rigs, sink new shafts." "US have been the largest oil producer on Earth for almost a hundred years." "And nobody thought we'd ever peak." "The pump does not know when midnight comes." "Days are the same to it." "Each day, every day it brings us another 24 hours of progress." "Building our nation, guarding its security, assuring the future of America." "And many, if not all, oil geologists thought that that was going forever." "Throughout this half century, Dr. Hubbert has been a continuous student of energy resources and their implications in human affairs." "As long as 20 years ago, Dr. Hubbert was pointing out to his colleagues in the petroleum industry that the United States would probably reach its peak of petroleum production within 10 to 15 years." "He was virtually laughed out of his profession for making such a ridiculous prediction." "The optimists back then were saying "This is crazy, we're finding 6 barrels of oil for every barrel that we consume."" ""We're never gonna run out or peak, or anything like that."" "He realized that oil discovery had peaked in the 1930s and was declining." "And he could extrapolate that to figure out how much oil there would be altogether." "The amount that you discover initially starts out rising very rapidly but after a while it slows down because there's less of it to discover." "And eventually it will turn over and come back down again like that." "Now the rate of production of oil, extraction and use of oil will be a second bell-shaped curve and it comes necessarily later that this, because you have to discover it before you can produce it." "So it will be a second curve like this, for production." "And it too will eventually go to zero, and this peak here, the peak in the production curve, is what's referred to as Hubbert's peak." "If we have only produced about 50 billion barrels in 100 years, and if we have 100 billion barrels still to go..." "I wonder how long will it be before there's an oil shortage?" "The US will hit the peak of oil production in about 10 or 15 years from that date." "When 1970 came along, sure enough, it happened just as he said it would." "It turns out that in December 1970 the US peaked at 10.2 million barrels a day, and then oil prices went through the roof, we went on a drilling boom of epic proportion." "10 years later we were drilling and completing 4.5 times more oil wells than we were doing back when we peaked, and our domestic oil production from the lower 48 and the shallow waters of the intercontinetal shelf had already declined" "from 10.2 million barrels a day to 6.9 million barrels a day." "It doesn't sound terribly illogical for the living on more oil consumed every year than we found for 30 years." "I guess it's inevitable sooner or later we were gonna reach that." "The last great frontiers of new oil discoveries turned out to be Alaska North Slope oil," "Siberian oil and the North Sea." "And those discoveries happened in 1967, 68 and 69." "Finding oil in the North Sea was a big surprise, noone could reasonably have expected that." "Our famous Lady Thatcher came to power, she said we want initiative and enterprise and enthusiasm and competition and all these things." "And, sure enough, everybody went to produce oil as fast as they knew how." "But there's a strange irony relating to this subject, that the better you do the job of exploiting oil and gas the sooner it is gone." "The British government now admits that it becomes a net importer next year, I think." "And that it's gone in 2020." "This is a huge change." "So to imagine that there's any well missed as big as North Sea is just implausible." "As we look around the world into other countries, we see this same pattern being repeated in one country after another." "Today there's about 58 countries that are physically producing less today than they have in the past." "The world has now been sufficiently explored for the oil industry to know now all the promising areas." "All the big promising areas have been identified." "We're always a drill bat away, from some fabulous new territory, that's the great thing about exploration." "But, realistically it's been a long, long period of time, since we've actually discovered a significant new basin." "I am hopeful and optimistic about the way inovation, scientific technology and oil engineers can continue findind more oil." "I love hearing all these economists say, well," ""Technology and ingenuity will bring out all these changes."" "And I say "Give me a break." I do know oil field technology backwards and forwards and the blackboard is dry." "And it took 30 to 35 years to develop all of these great tools." "We already have fantastic technology to find oil, we have seismic surveys which are of unbeliveable resolution, you can see the smallest formations in the Earth's crust." "We have very advanced engineering to produce oil." "And all of these great tools that ended up being great enhanched production techniques, were basically super-straws just sucking the last easy oil out of the ground at faster rates, and to no extent significantly increasing the amount of oil" "that was gonna be produced from a significant oil field." "That was all myth." "Some oil is cheap, easy, fast to produce, others is the exact opposite." "There's a big difference between producing oil from free flowing well in the Middle East that just comes roaring out, and digging up a tar sand in Canada, which is more or less a mining operation." "They are using more energy from natural gas to produce the oil than they're getting from oil shales and tar sands." "So that even the fact that people are saying "Well, we're gonna tap the oil sands."" "that right there tells you that we're close to peaking." "Because you don't go to those areas, unless you've used up all the good stuff." "2/3 of the oil reserves are in the Middle East, which mean basically the Persian Gulf, and that's" "10 times as much as any other source." "Right now, the only region of the world that hasn't peaked is the Middle East." "Most of the serious projections for 2030 envision the Middle East producing 50-51 million barrels a day." "We know that Iran peaked at 6 million barrels a day back in 1978, struggles to stay between 3 and 3.5 million barrels a day." "Kuwait struggles to keep their 2.5 million barrels a day intact, they keep "Maybe we can add a half million barrels a day, maybe the UAE can add half a million barrels a day." So to get there" "you would have to have Saudi Arabia be producing between 20 and 25 million, or even 30 million barrels a day." "Those days are long gone." "You know, up to 15 million barrels a day is now their sort of new magic number for 50, 75 or even a 100 years." "There are other powerful voices within Saudi Arabia that are clearly sending the message out" ""12 million barrels a day?" "Yeah, that's probably ok, but we really shouldn't even think about producing any more than that, ever."" "They had an intense exploration effort for the last 35 years and with the exception of one field, the Qatif Field, that's the only significant exploration success they had from 1967 through 2005." "If Saudi Arabia has now exceeded their sustainable peak supply, then I would argue with some clarity that the World has now exceeded sustainable peak supply." "When you reach the peak, you're at the top of the mountain." "Sometimes, down the other side is very, very gradual slide, and other times down the other side is fairly stiff." "What really matters, and matters enormously, is the view that comes into sight on the other side of this peak, when we see this long relentless, remorseless decline heading off into the valley." "Point is that the whole world has got used to this growing side of the mountain range, has to face the opposite side." "We have moved now to the point in which virtually everyone accepts that there is a peak." "M. King Hubbert had predicted that worldwide it should be occuring about the turn of the century." "That slipped a little because of the Arab oil embargo and the oil price spike highs and the worldwide recession that reduced the demand for oil quite significantly." "And it's now pushed peak oil off till, many people believe, about now." "We are coming to the end of the first half of the age of oil." "During this 150 years, we have seen the growth of everything." "Of industry, transport, trade, agriculture." "We've seen an explosion of the number of people." "All of this was made possible by the cheap, abundant supply of oil based energy." "Demand is on the march, and supply is flattening out." "You will have to supply, if you want to meet the demand, from the current level of 80 million barrels a day to a 120 millions barrels a day in year 2030." "But, in order to meet that profile, you would have to add new oil in the amount of 200 millions barrels a day." "Because a lot of that new oil will have to go to compensate for depletion of existing wells." "In the early 70s over half the globe essentially didn't use any oil." "The only serious oil consumers were Europe, not an awful a lot of Japan, the United States," "Canada, and the former Soviet Union." "Africa didn't use any oil of any volume." "Middle East didn't use any oil." "None of Asia used any oil, and neither did Japan." "Today, Papua New Guinea hardly uses any oil." "There's probably a two or three islands in the South Pacific that don't use any oil." "Everybody else is hooked on trying to create a society that looks like us." "The demand for energy is rising faster than was predicted even 5 years ago." "People all around the world can see the way the developed countries live, and how good life the people have in those areas." "So they want to emulate us, they want to be able to drive cars, they wanna live in nice houses." "They wanna have air conditioning and refrigeration." "And why shouldn't they?" "Demand for energy will only increase as India's standard of living rises, its economy becomes even more diverse and dynamic, and it continues to narrow the gap with more developed nations." "China is not about to have a hard landing, they're exponentially expanding their need for energy." "And they're just getting started." "Most urban Chinese believe that they will own a car within 5 years, it is the fastest growing automobile market on Earth." "Something like a third of them already have driver's licences." "And so, the demand for oil and for gasoline in China is really going to take off." "Last year China increased their importation of oil by 25%, they're now the number 2 importer in the world." "They increased their use of oil, I read a figure of 14.7%." "But that's very consistent with an economy that's growing at 10% a year and by the way, at 10% growth rate it doubles in 7 years," "4 times bigger in 14 years and they're requiring more and more energy." "China and India are kind of getting to the party when the glass is literally half empty, at this point." "So, they're gonna have to fight with the rest of us to get what's left." "Well, the Hummer, I believe is more of a status symbol." "Where, you know, "Look at me, look at me."" ""I can afford the Hummer, I'm driving the best."" "You're going to get somewhere around 10 miles per gallon, constant on the road." "That's either highway or city driving." "6.0 liter, 325 horse power at 380 foot-pounds of torque." "Well, we are a role model whether we like it or not, we use 25% of the world's oil." "We're only 1 person in 22, we have only 2% of the known reserves of oil." "We are prohibitive users of energy." "But we'll go on doing that so long as we are rich and the energy is cheap." "We pay more for bottle of drinking water than we go for gasoline." "Gasoline is just about the cheapest liquid you can buy in the United States, and as long as that's true, Americans are not going to be concerned." "Service that is tops, and gas that's extra fine there's a smile for every mile at the Esso sun." "E - s - s - o - makes - your - car - gooo." "Happy motoring!" "In America we right now think..." "People are having their eyes gouged out paying $3.20 for a gallon of gasoline." "That's 20 cents a cup." "And 20 cents a cup sound pretty trivial but if you have a passenger car, average american passenger car, you can get 1 to 6 people in it throw a bunch of stuff in the trunk, go a mile and a half in 20 minutes, for 20 cents." "Now if you don't have gasoline, and you try to bargain with a guy with a horse driven car or someone coming by with a bicycle or maybe you're lucky enough to have a rikshaw." ""Excuse me, would any of you like to take me and my friends a mile and a half for 20 cents?" Those people would laugh at you." "So, I would think that we would need to get oil prices up to you know, $5 a cup, some number that starts to equate with what we actually spend readily on a lot of things that are nearly as" "valuable and also are non-renewable." "People in third world countries cannot understand why, for instance the Europeans try their best in conservation measures and taxation measures and the Americans are not doing it." "Not one in fifty, not one in a hundred of the people in our country have any inkling of the potential problem that we're facing." "If we wait until peak oil to start making the transition, there will be very serious economic consequences." "If we anticipated by 10 years there would be meaningful economic consequences." "To have no economic consequences, you need to anticipate it by 20 years." "I'm almost dead certain we don't have 20 years," "I don't think we have 10 years, I think we're pretty much there." "Thank you all for coming, please be seated." "Lay the facts out for everybody to see." "I don't think that people in positions to tell the public about it from an official standpoint have been totally honest with us about the problem." "The person who will win an election is somebody who can most persuasively lie to the population, which is tell them what they wanna hear." "Which is that the future's gonna be great, just follow me." "If our energy resources are properly developed, they can fulfill our energy requirement for centuries to come." "What is needed now is decisive and responsible action to increase our energy supplies." "Action which takes into account the needs of our economy, of our environment, and of our national security." "In Ancient Greece, the person who brought bad news was executed, and politicians who bring bad news frequently are not reelected." "Our political system is just controlled by major corporations." "The steps we need to take to reasonably address this, in some type of rational way require downscaling." "So if you are the CEO of a big company are you gonna contribute money to the politician who says "Hey, I wanna slow down the economy."" ""I wanna sell fewer cars."" "Obviously, more people will drive less, and that will cause people to..." "The cars won't need to be maintained as much." "That will shrink the automotive manufacturing sector, which will shrink the entire economy." "Nobody's gonna vote for that." "I don't even know if I'd vote for that." "More than any other country in the world, America is a nation on wheels." "The automobile and the power behind it have been major factors in the growth of our country." "We can drive anywhere we want to, at any time, for any reason, including fun." "We're in some ways a victim of our own success." "Suburbia is in a lot of trouble because the whole model of suburbia is you commute 30, 40, 50 miles to your job and back." "And that's only viable so long as you've got relatively cheap oil and gas." "It's not just that the country is spread out, we've evolved our cities for the use of cars." "The cities will have to be rebuilt from scratch practically to have more efficient and usable public transportation." "This is quite different from the cities in Europe which were already basically in place before the car was invented." "So, yes, it's going to be a terrible blow to the United States when we no longer have the oil that we love so much." "What we avoided so long and the three things that we need are now in very short supply." "One of them is money and in our country we don't worry about money, we just borrow it from our kids and our grandkids and accumulating a debt." "But the other two things we can't borrow from our kids and our grandkids, and that's time and energy." "In order to make energy available to invest and buy time we have to have a very vigorous conservation program." "Since the US uses the fourth of all the world's oil, we clearly need to lead there." "I believe that our American people have a great spirit of entrepeneurship and patriotism, if they really knew what the problem was, that they would be very responsive in doing what I think are the necessary things to get ourselves to the other side" "with as few bumps as possible." "If you tell the Americans "There's a brand new hydrogen powered car that you can go and buy instead of your car." They'll say "OK, great."" "And they'll go buy it." "But if you tell them they're gonna have to use a bicycle, that's the type of adaptation that they have to make." "People aren't willing to do it." "Sunday, July 20th, 1969." "Around the world, nearly a billion people watch this moment on television as the first man from Earth prepared to set foot upon the Moon." "If the president of the United States, as JFK said in the 1960" ""We will put a man on the Moon in this decade.", and we did an enormous technical challenge to do that, but we did it." "If a president of the United States said "I challenge our scientists and engineers to teach us how to kick the fossil fuel habit in a decade."," "I think it could be done." "Well the problem that we're facing is probably more like colonizing Pluto, than putting the man on the Moon." "If JFK had said "We're gonna have a 100 thousand people living in three-bedroom houses on Pluto in ten years.", well obviously we would not have been able to accomplish it." "In the last 40 years, the Bush administration is the administration that has the closest connections with oil companies themselves." "And it is the the administration that has most greatly married energy security with national security and the US foreign policy." "When you have only 2% of the known reserves of oil and use 25% of the world's oil and import 2/3 of what you use, that has to affect your foreign policy." "They believe that the way to secure oil supplies that would in fact get the support of the American people and create a more stable world is to democratize the Middle East." "They believe that this issue of promoting democracy to the Middle East is a way of actually securing oil supplies." "East and West are united in pioneering a new frontier of progress." "Serving the interest of the Saudi Arabs, serving the interest of the United States, and demonstrating the vitality of the American system of free enterprise." "A system, which from this new frontier is pumping into the trade of the world oil, one of the materials that is making a truly great contribution to our modern civilisation." "The basis of our foreign policy in the United States from 1945 to today was essentially an exchange of secure, cheap, reliable oil to the United States in return for protection for the governing rulers of Saudi Arabia." "That exchange is in fact threatened." "10, 15 years ago the per capita income in the country was about $28000, today it's $6000." "There has been a huge drop in the standard of living of the average Saudi." "Saudi Arabia has got a very young population, a lot of people coming on to the labor market, not the jobs for them and the sense they don't feel that they are the stakeholders in the society," "They feel alienated." "There are lots of tensions between the oligarchy which rules the country and the population which inhabits the country and many people think within the fundamentalist movement that the regime, the goverment of Saudi Arabia is totally corrupt, that it is basically selling the oil to the West, and the West" "is arming the regime, and the regime uses the guns against its own population." "The fundamentalist movement is strong and it's dangerous." "No doubt that some of these people who are making problems in Iraq and committing terorrist chastises are actually Saudis." "This is a formula for real conflict, this is a formula for a country that is on the way to some very very dangerous outcomes." "The stability of Saudi Arabia over the long run is in fact questionable." "If their kingdom was to fall apart, it's very unlikely that the United States, particularly, would simply stand by and let it fall apart, given its significance as an oil exporting country." "We would see certainly the US intervention, despite all the lessons and the problems that have been associated with Iraq." "One thing that many people, me included, fear is that when this happens we will simply go and take by force of arms the oil that we need." "And that will make us into a very different country and the world into a very different world." "We're looking at, essentially, a generation long, multigenerational resource wars." "Ultimately, there really are only two options." "One is to militarize the taking of oil, which means to get your population to understand that if they want to continue to drive SUV's and have the cars and consume energy in the way they are, that they will be in war after war." "The other position is to begin to prepare for what we all see coming, which is an end to the era of cheap oil, and to invest in alternative technologies for energy that are cleaner, safer, and have less detrimental effects" "on the political and social makeup of oil exporting countries themselves." "For a century we didn't spend a nanosecond actually really taxing ourselves as to could we ever actually come up with a replacement for oil and natural gas." "Natural resources can become depleted but human creativity is inextiguishable" "I believe that once oil depletes, the genious of humankind will invent alternative sources of nutrition and fuel." "The Stone Age ended not because we ran out of stones, we moved from the horse to the automobile not because we ran out of hay." "I don't dismiss the ingenuity of man." "The step that we are embarking on today is the hybrid electric automobile, which has both an internal combustion engine and an electric motor." "I drive a Prius car, it gets 45 miles per gallon, if gas were $10 a gallon" "I could still fill a tank and go 500 miles on it, and that's not too bad." "Well, even if you waved the magic wand and hybridized every car on the road right now, we'd still be consuming the same amount of gasoline that we are now, in about 5 or 7 years." "Because, again, with each passing year the economy grows, and we have to consume more and more oil." "We have very big challenges to face in this century." "This is a planet that has 6 billion people on it now, perhaps 9 billion people by the end of the century." "The problem is enormous, 14 terawatts of energy we need by 2050, we need a new source of that much energy." "That's the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil, per day." "We've got 700 million internal combustion engines running around the roads of the world." "Again, we're talking about the scale and we are thinking about what does it take to really replace fossil fuels for transportation." "The big one, of course, which is hydrogen, that's the one that's gonna do the trick and replace oil, eventually." "Well, the hydrogen economy is conceptually a good idea." "If you look in reality, it has major challenges." "The problem also for industry is sort of a chicken and an egg thing." "Industry is reluctant to really invest heavily into fuel cell technology, because there's no hydrogen infrastructure to deliver and produce cheaply hydrogen." "On the other hand this infrastructure is not in place because there's no demand for hydrogen." "So how do you get this started?" "And both again need substantial breakthroughs in technology, fuel cell technology, hydrogen production technology, transportation of hydrogen and storage of hydrogen, fundamentally unresolved issues." "The economics right now are that we use the equivalent of 3 to 6 gallons of gasoline to make enough hydrogen to drive a car the same distance that 1 gallon of gasoline would drive it." "So, the hydrogen economy at this point makes no sense." "If you talk about hydrogen, it may take at least 40 years." "Easily 30 to 50 years." "Easily." "The principal drawback to biomass is that it's generally pretty inefficient." "A couple of pretty respected scientists in our country believe that if you look at all of the energy inputs in the producing ethanol you put more fossil fuel into producing the ethanol than the energy you get out." "The quantities that could be made available from ethanol and biodiesel are very very small, and would replace only a small percentage of the fuels that we consume today." "Even if you took the biodiesel production, scaled it up to the maximum, and that scaled that up another ten times, you're still talking about a drop in the bucket compared to what we get from oil." "How much of our food acreage are we gonna convert to growing fuel?" "How much world hunger can we stand if that's the fuel of choice?" "Nuclear energy will be expensive, and the experience that we have gathered over the last 20, 30, 40 years in terms of safe storage of materials, especially in Europe where there's much more discussion about how to treat the waste and what to do with that." "This needs to be rethought." "People are nervous about the risk of an explosion or a nuclear event of some sort and then there's a danger of terrorist activity." "If you wanted to build enough to replace all the fossil fuels that we burn worldwide today, which is 10 terawatts, you would have to build 10 thousand of the biggest possible nuclear plants." "And if you did that and burn U-235 in them, the worldwide reserves of uranium would be exhausted in somewhere between one and two decades." "So, it would be a bridge, at best." "Wind energy is becoming more popular and economically viable, but because of its intermittency and low power density, it will never contribute more than a small fraction of our energy supply." "When you talk about wind or solar energy..." "these are very small." " Oh, yeah, I see it's started." " Can we turn that on a little bit more?" " There it goes." " OK." "So here, this is actually artificial light, but in sunshine it does the same thing, and so this little machine is converting light directly into electric power." "It will convert 10 or 12% of sunlight directly into electric power." "We have the technology right now, we know how to do it." "We wont build big power plants tomorrow morning, but we know how." "It takes a lot of development and so on, but we know how to do it now." "Total amount of sunlight that falls on the planet is 20000 times the amount of fossil fuel power we're using now." "So we are awash in sunlight, there's plenty of energy from sunlight, we just haven't begun to learn how to use it properly." "The real barrier to implementing solar electricity now is its cost." "To generate the same amount of power we now use in fossil fuel you'd have to cover land area roughy half the size of the state of California." "All of the solar cells made in the world up till now probably would only cover about 10 square kilometers, it's a tiny fraction of it, so not impossible, not unthinkable, but really a huge technological challenge." "We've got to look at all of these sources of energy and if you add them all together, you must be very optimistic about each of these sources to believe that we can produce anything like the quantity and quality of energy that we're getting from fossil fuels." "Our worldwide demand now is somewhere between 25 and 30 billion barrels a year and it's increasing at an alarming rate." "And that's really where the problem is, the demand is so huge, there is nothing that we can imagine to replace oil in those quantities." "There are lots of ideas around, and the ideas are just vapour until somebody actually tries them and shows that they either work and have side effects or don't have side effects or don't work or whatever." "That's called research and that's exactly what we're not doing." "You can't undo where you are, so..." "Evolution is always forwards, we're never going backwards, so we will never be back to the farm because evolution just went into different way, so we basically just have to adapt to the new conditions." "It's very unlikely that once we've run down the other side of Hubbert's peak that we're going to be able to maintain the kind of lifestyles that we're now maintaining." "This oil is so cheap, it's so readily available, there was just such an enormous temptation to exploit this and to set up a quality of lifestyle that will be impossible to maintain." "There is something about the horse that has an appeal that the automobile doesn't." "The horse is a living thing and it's..." "Often times between an owner and a horse a certain amount of affection develops." "We're going about 9 miles an hour right now." "We had a kind of a trial run for what would happen when oil peaks." "No gas." " No gasoline?" " No." "There was a temporary peak in 1973." "Middle East and OPEC countries were angry about the 1973 war in Israel and they embargoed the oil." "And we immediately had panicked toward the future of our way of life and made mile long lines at gas stations." "In the future, things like driving cars and air travel period will be not something that the average person can afford but something that's only available to the super-elite, the 1/10 of 1%." "About the graduate student that came to see me and he said "Tell me, will my grandchildren ever ride in an airplane?"" "It was a ripping question because the answer might very well be "No."" "And the air travel will essentially stop." "Many people tend to think that it was money that made the world go round, when in reality it was the underlying supply of cheap energy, much of it coming from oil." "You end up with asking "What is more real, is it the financial market, or is it the oil supply in the ground?"" "And everybody will come to the conclusion what is more real, is the oil supply in the ground." "The financial system is a system full of petrodollars and if you take them out it's bound to shrink." "There isn't a company quoted on the stock exchange that doesn't tacitly assume a business as usual supply of cheap oil." "Well, that isn't there anymore, that means that virtually every company is overvalued on the stock exchange." "And as the financial community recognizes this, well that might trigger some kind of overreaction and stock market collapse." "I think it's very likely." "I wouldn't be surprised, personally, if it doesn't trigger another" "Great Depression comparable to the one of the 1930s if not worse, because this one is imposed by nature rather than being a speculative bubble." "I've taken this timespan here from 5000 years ago to 5000 years in the future." "What we call recorded history began about 5000 years ago." "So, what this shows is that this spike here is the episode of the fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, and every other kind of fossil fuel in human history." "It's the most disturbing thing that's ever happened to human species." "It's responsible for our technological society and and in terms of human history is a very brief epoch." "At the time of Christ there were about 300 million people on the planet." "Which had about doubled by the end of 18th century, when coal came on, then came good old oil and suddenly the population went up 6 times." "I don't think that we could sustain the present population of the globe, much less what it will be in 20 or 30 years, without the use of petrochemicals." "Does it mean we have got to go back to a population not much different than what it was before oil?" "In the absence of fossil fuels, how many people can the world support?" "Many people believe maybe 1.5, 2 billion people." "You don't often hope you're wrong, I really hope I'm wrong, everybody I know who's concerned about peak oil hopes they're wrong." "I don't think I'm wrong, I don't think they're wrong." "We are facing some sort of unprecedented, unparallaled situation, and that explains why it is so difficult for one to really accept it, one thinks there's got to be a solution." "It's somehow contrary to our mindset to think about these things, we just don't like to do it, we've gotten used to the filling station that has been there for as long as we can remember, and" "normal people say "Well it's gonna be there into the future."" "It's very hard." "And it's doubly hard because it really has never happened before." "It's a strange issue of mindset and attitude and experience and behaviour that somehow leaves us so unprepared for this situation." "We identify as species called hydrocarbon mammal who lives on the strength of all of this oil, well his days are definitely numbered." "Whether modern kind of homo sapiens as a species altogether will carry on living some different, simple way, that's another question." "Right now we don't have the kind of political leadership, not only we in US, the whole world doesn't have the kind of political leadership that would make us aware of this problem and do something about it." "There's little hope for the politicians taking the lead in this 'couse it's difficult in government for people to..." "It's much easier for a politician to react to a crisis when it's happened, than to take steps to prepare for it." "It's only about the public that calls their representatives and Congress and says" ""You must do something and we are prepared to support you in whatever you'll take." You don't have those telephone calls being made today."