Last week the National Petroleum Council joined a growing list of government and policy advisory groups—including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Government Accountability Office, and most recently, the International Energy Agency—to warn about coming difficulties in supplying the world’s oil demand in its long-awaited report entitled "Facing the Hard Truths about Energy".
Like the IEA, the NPC is loathe to give too much credibility to the idea of peak oil, preferring instead to speak of “accumulating risks” and “significant challenges to meeting projected energy demand.” Given that the council is largely composed of oil industry executives, we should perhaps not be surprised at this. As Steve Andrews of ASPO USA writes, “Charging the NPC with analyzing oil and gas is akin to asking the tobacco industry to forecast lung cancer.” Nonetheless, while the picture the NPC paints is in some ways vaguer than the IEA’s recent report, by simply acknowledging that supply will not be able to meet projected demand in next twenty years, it is implicitly admitting that we are facing an unprecedented problem, whether or not oil production actually goes into decline.
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