While an overwhelming amount of media attention has been focused (rightfully so) on the past week’s financial meltdown on Wall Street and beyond, another looming crisis is getting center-stage focus this week in Sacramento, California: peak oil.
A slew of speakers and experts in everything from geology and energy to finance and business is meeting through tomorrow to address what could one day make the Lehman Brothers collapse look like a picnic in the park: declining oil production coupled with rising demand and prices on a global scale. The 2008 Sacramento Peak Oil Conference kicked off yesterday.
So who’s talking and what are they talking about? How about subjects like “Triple Digit Oil Prices Will Reverse Globalization” (Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets), “Fuel Substitutes: Reality Check On The Prime Candidates” (Steve Andrews, co-founder, Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas-USA) and “Renewable Energy: From a Nation of Consumers to a Nation of Producers” (now there’s a concept: let’s start producing things again!) led by Paul Gipe of Wind-Works.org.
Peak oil is, as Wall Street Journal writer Neil King (he covers oil, OPEC and international energy issues) put it,
this thing that could really rock the US economy … ”
Tom Whipple, a former CIA analyst and editor of the Peak Oil Review, added, “the reason we’re here today is that the mainstream media really isn’t covering the story … this is like missing the run-up to the Civil War or World War II.”
(Note: quotes are courtesy of the Sept. 22 Peak Oil Review, from a commentary by Steve Andrews.)
Any good news in all of this? Well, at least conference-goers have been able to take advantage of a travel-match program to share cars, taxis and hotel rooms to minimize their environmental impact while they tackle the future of civilization as we know it.
I’ll try to update this post with more news from the conference as it becomes available. Meanwhile, as Bette Davis put it in “All About Eve,” ““Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!” (or decade).
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