by Zoe Pollock
Ariel Schwartz reports on the latest leaks:
WikiLeaks has released cables revealing that Saudi Arabia's oil reserves have been exaggerated by as much as 40%, or 300 billion barrels. Saudi Arabia is the world's largest oil exporter. Peak oil, or the point when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction has been reached and is about to enter terminal decline, is no longer the fringe theory it was just 10 years ago. ...
Only time will tell whether [U.S. consul general and geologist Sadad] Al-Husseini's predictions are correct, but the possibility of imminent peak oil is enough to make Obama's goal of putting one million electric cars on the road by 2020 a little less overly ambitious.
Kevin Drum isn't surprised:
This won't come as a surprise to anyone who's been following the oil industry over the past few years. ... There's always Iraq, of course, which certainly has more production capacity if it can develop it, but Saudi Arabia increasingly looks like it's peaked already. And if that's true, it probably means that the global peak in production, which was delayed a few years by the 2008 recession, is most likely not too far away. Our future is going to be increasingly oil free whether we like it or not.