It’s clear that since peak oil was reached the amount of energy available to consume from oil has been in decline even with the continuing rise of the rate of consumption. This is because each barrel of petroleum produced in the past (say in the 1960’s) took much less energy to produce than a barrel of petroleum produced today. Also the grade of crude oil produced today is much lower than that of the 60’s, and that was lower than of the 1920’s. In other words, the grade and the net energy produced per barrel has been declining since the start of the petroleum era. Meanwhile the population and demand has been increasing exponentially. We are now slightly past the point were the net energy produced is insufficient to sustain present populations. We are now at the ‘shoulder’ where net energy per barrel of petroluem (including natural gas) falls off very rapidly.

For several reasons it suits the petro monarchies to lie about their actual reserves and pretend that they have more left than they really do. However they will scale up their internal alternative (solar) energy infrastructure just like China has done while attempting to keep the oil flowing to the global market to pay for the transition to Solar infrastructure.

That doesn’t help the US of A because America’s leaders have already failed to make the necessary move to the solar economy on a scale that will allow it’s citizens to keep living the energy intensive life they are used to. Over the next 5 years that is going to be plainly obvious and for many people it already is because they can’t get work or put food on the table due to the cost of living.

The oil cliff is definitely approaching and the erroneous insistence that oil will last for the next 30+ years is based on biased myth manufactured by the military industrial media machine rather than solid fact grounded in geophysical science.

What you’ll find there is a more realistic appraisal of worldwide oil and perhaps start to understand that there is no oil cliff in our near future.

Perhaps they can convince you to douse your hair fire….

Overall oil usage peaked in 2005 (long before the recession) and is now down 10% from that level.

World oil use has not been growing at an exponential rate. Actually at a very small single digit percentage rate. 1.3% per year from 2000 to 2010.
http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx

The math is incontrovertible. Even your own President has acknowledged that you face an energy shortage. Just that no one in American politics wants to admit that peak oil is a serious problem.

Climate change has become the official publicly acceptable mantra.

BTW, the only good thing about reaching the oil cliff is that we run out of oil to burn for fuel which will have an immediate negative impact on CO2 emmissions. So when we do hit the oil cliff we will also mitigate climate change.

Just not looking forward to the nuclear wars that Israel and America will have with each other over the remaining reserves so they can keep the military machine fuelled up, so that the military machine can do more war, so that people can keep working for the military machine, so that the military machine can do more war… Doh!

Didn’t you get the memo from the Mayans?

But at this time of the year it also often peaks just above 1 GW…