George Monbiot: Break out the bicycles: Oil is Running Out, But the West Would Rather Wage Wars than Consider Other Energy Sources

"To understand what is going to happen, we must first grasp the core fact of existence. Life is a struggle against entropy. Entropy can be roughly defined as the dispersal of energy. As soon as a system - whether an organism or an economy - runs out of energy, it starts to disintegrate. Its survival depends on seizing new sources of fuel.
Biological evolution is driven by the need to grab the energy for which other organisms are competing. One result is increasing complexity: a tree can take more energy from the sun than the mosses on the forest floor; a tuna can seek out its prey more actively than a jellyfish. But the cost of this complexity is an enhanced requirement for energy. The same goes for our economies.
They evolved in the presence of a source of energy that was both cheap to extract and cheap to use. There is, as yet, no substitute for it. Everything else is either more expensive or harder to use. Without cheap oil the economy would succumb to entropy.
But the age of cheap oil is over. If you doubt this, take a look at the BBC's online report yesterday of a conference run by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. The reporter spoke to the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. "In public, Mr Birol denied that supply would not be able to meet rising demand ... But after his speech he seemed to change his tune: 'For the time being there is no spare capacity. But we expect demand to increase by the fourth quarter by 3m barrels a day. If Saudi does not increase supply by 3m barrels a day by the end of the year we will face, how can I say this, it will be very difficult. We will have difficult times.'" The reporter asked him whether such a growth in supply was possible, or simply wishful thinking. "'You are from the press?' Birol replied. 'This is not for the press.'" So the BBC asked the other delegates what they thought of the prospects of a 30% increase in Saudi production. "The answers were unambiguous: 'absolutely out of the question'; 'completely impossible'; and '3m barrels - never, not even 300,000'. One delegate laughed so hard he had to support himself on a table." And this was before they heard that two BBC journalists had been gunned down in Riyadh.
The world's problem is as follows. We now consume six barrels of oil for every new barrel we discover. Major oil finds (of over 500m barrels) peaked in 1964. In 2000, there were 13 such discoveries, in 2001 six, in 2002 two and in 2003 none. Three major new projects will come onstream in 2007 and three in 2008. For the following years, none have yet been scheduled."