There will be oil, or not

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Endless Oil - Technology, politics, and lower demand will yield a bumper crop of crude
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_03/b4163046952385.htm

As Leonardo Maugeri, a senior executive at Italian oil major ENI (E), puts it: "There will be enough oil for at least 100 years." Many analysts and industry executives have little doubt that there's plenty of oil in the ground. "Only about 32% of the oil [in reserves] is produced," says Val Brock, Shell's head of business development for enhanced oil recovery. Shell estimates 300 billion barrels and maybe more might be squeezed out of existing fields, much of it once thought beyond retrieval. Peter Jackson, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates' London-based senior director for oil industry activity, has reviewed data from the world's biggest fields. His conclusion: 60% of their reserves remain available. [...] The price spike of 2008 may lead to similar results. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, an environmental group, notes that the U.S. car fleet shrank by 4 million in 2009, thanks to scrapping and reduced sales. He expects that shrinkage to continue, reducing the U.S. fleet by 25 million cars by 2020. He also sees a cultural change occurring in which more people, especially the young, don't see owning a car as a necessity. "We are now looking at something new, a shift in the way people think about automobiles," he says. "That means less oil use."

U.S. oil consumption dropped by 9% over the last two years. The recession certainly hurt demand, but many analysts think oil use in the West has peaked and will not rebound to previous levels. The Energy Dept. sees the consumption of oil-based fuel in the U.S. flattening out in the coming decades. "Are people going to use energy differently in the next [growth] phase?" asks Goran Trapp, head of global oil trading at Morgan Stanley in London. "If so, the people forecasting [strong] demand increases are going to be surprised."

// Contrast this with a report by Terry Macalister, from 9 November 2009:

Oilproduction

Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/peak-oil-international-energy-agency

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. [...] But as far back as 2004 there have been people making similar warnings. Colin Campbell, a former executive with Total of France told a conference: "If the real [oil reserve] figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets … in the end that would suit no one."

Selections from The Guardian Weekly 20-26 November 2009

From the 20-26 November issue of The Guardian Weekly:

UN meets homeless victims of American property dream | Chris McGreal
"Deanne Weakly was among the first to the microphone. The 51-year-old estate agent told how a couple of years ago she was pulling in $80,000 (£48,000) a year from commissions selling homes in LA's booming property market. When the bottom fell out of the business with the foreclosure crisis, she lost her own house and ended up living on the streets in a city with more homeless than any other in America. She was sexually assaulted, harassed by the police and in despair. She turned to the city and California state governments for help. "No one wanted to listen. They blame you for being homeless in the first place," she said. [...] Rolnik had waited more than a year to tour cities across the US to prepare a report for the UN's human rights council on America's deepening housing crisis following the subprime mortgage debacle. UN special rapporteurs are more often found investigating human rights in Sudan and Burundi or abuses of the Israeli occupation than exposing the underbelly of the American dream. George Bush's administration blocked her visit, finding itself in the company of Cuba, Burma and North Korea in blocking a special rapporteur.  [emp. mine] "I was asking for almost a year before I  as allowed in," Rolnik said. When Barack Obama came to power she was welcomed to range across America talking to those who have lived on the streets for years and the newly homeless forced out by the foreclosure crisis. Rolnik, a Brazilian urban planner and architect, said administration officials were genuinely interested in what she might find, if not embracing of her raison d'etre that everyone is entitled to a decent home. [...] A Spanish-speaking veteran of the Korean war steps up. He is the angriest of the lot. He is not a communist, he says, but in Cuba nobody goes homeless. He fought for America and now he is left to live on the streets.

Furore over Prix Goncourt winner shows French could use more egalite | Lizzy Davies
[Marie Ndiaye moved to Berlin in 2007 "largely because of Sarkozy"...] "...she said that France under the current president was languishing in a 'hateful' atmosphere of tough security and 'vulgarity'. 'I find this France monstrous,' she told culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles. [...] Is the president, who was elected after a campaign in which he urged people to 'love or leave' the country, guilty of pursuing an agenda that is “monstrous” to perceived “outsiders”? Or is Ndiaye merely, as Sarkozy’s supporters claim, conforming to a “Pavlovian” form of opposition that has become the norm among leftwing French intellectuals? Ever since his days as interior minister, Sarkozy has made his name through an uncompromising stance on immigration and integration. He provoked uproar in 2005 by referring to youths in the neglected, multiracial suburbs as “scum”, and has zealously imposed a strategy of expulsion quotas.  It is this side of present day France – its sans papiers, or undocumented workers, its forced returns to war-torn Afghanistan, its reluctance to tackle the discrimination endemic in society – that is the basis of many people’s dislike of Sarkozy.

Can Niner generation do the right thing now? | Matthew Ryder
"Those impressionable twentysomethings are today's influential fortysomethings and they carry the legacy with them. No Logo author Naomi Klein credits those years as the period that turned her student interests towards global issues. Current UK politicians, such as David Miliband and David Cameron, fresh out of university, opted not for the yuppie jobs that the 80s had offered, preferring to enter the loftier world of political research. Across the Atlantic, Sergey Brin claims that it was a trip to the dissolving Soviet Union that "awakened his childhood fear of authority" and influenced the culture of the famously informal company he started eight years later – Google. And it was at this time that a half-Kenyan African-American made history by becoming an editor of Harvard Law Reviewand decided to write a book. That summer, he took Michelle Robinson on their first date to see a quintessentially Niner movie – Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Last year, Jeff Gordinier published X Saves the World. According to him, the great achievement of the post baby-boomer generation was that it "stopped the world from sucking". Maybe so. But if Niners are really going to make the difference that they believed they would, they will have to do more. And they will be challenged on the very things that once made them different. This is already happening with regard to violence and conflict. At the key moment of their development, Niners witnessed dramatic political change occurring without bloodshed. Television pictures had become a more effective revolutionary tool than an AK-47. That influenced the Niner outlook in a way that was a genuine break from the past. Previously, baby-boomers from George Bush to Osama bin Laden seemed to believe that you had to fight for what you wanted – and kill or be killed if necessary. But Niners questioned the need to pay that price."