U.S. takes the ostrich approach to peak oil
September 11th, 2009 by Jim JustThere’s a terrific interview of Robert L. Hirsch by ASOP-USA’s Steve Andrews published at The Energy Bulletin. Hirsch was the lead author of the seminal 2005 report Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management. He says although the report was written for the US Dept. of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE, NETL), says the report was suppressed.
When the report was done, management at NETL really didn’t know what to do with it because it was so shocking and the implications were so significant. Finally, the director decided that she would sign off on it because she was retiring and couldn’t be hurt, or so I was told. The report didn’t get widely publicized. It somehow was picked up by a high school someplace in California; eventually NETL put it on their website. The problem for people at NETL-and these are really good people-was that they were under a good deal of pressure to not be the bearers of bad news.
Question: Under pressure from whom?
Hirsch: From people in the hierarchy of the DOE. This was true in both Republican and Democrat administrations. There is, I think, ample evidence, and some people in DOE have gone so far as to say it specifically, that people in the hierarchy of DOE, under both administrations, understood that there was a problem and suppressed work in the area. Under President Bush, we were not only able to do the first study but also a follow-on study that looked at mitigation economics. After that, visibility apparently got so high that NETL was told to stop any further work on peak oil.
Yes, that was terrible. And it was strictly politics and political appointees-I have no idea how far up in either administration (the current one and previous one) these issues went or now go.
Hirsch explains the tragic consequences of hushing up any talk of peak oil:
Basically, the best we found was that starting a worldwide crash program 20 years before the problem hits avoid serious problems. If you started 10 years before-hand, you are in a lot of trouble; and if you wait to the last minute until the problem is obvious, then you’re in deep trouble for much longer than a decade. As it turns out, we no longer have the 10 or 20 years that were two of our scenarios.
Nothing like the ostrich approach to governing.