Peak Oil is Here, and Conservation is Nowhere in Sight

From Blog: How to save the world

I try to reference only news items, though this blog stands out and worthy of alerting people to.

The amount of energy needed to produce each barrel of oil has increased from the equivalent of 0.04 barrels at the start of the oil boom (when we were busy converting our economy to be oil-powered) to over half a barrel today. If this trend continues (and there is nothing to lead us to believe it won't), by 2030 we will be using more than a barrel of oil equivalent energy to produce every barrel of oil. If that sounds crazy, it is, but consider this:

• The oil consortium building the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline has acknowledged that their passion for this project isn't to deliver more natural gas to consumers, but to use the relatively clean natural gas (setting aside the potential ecological disasters the Mackenzie Valley project promises for Canada's Arctic) plus nuclear power to power the extraction machinery for Canada's eco-holocaust, the Alberta Tar Sands, which are now being counted on by oil analysts to produce ten times the volume of dirty oil (and environmental destruction) they are currently producing, and which are already consuming vast amounts of energy and water at current production levels.
  
• The Russian energy department is proposing to build underwater nuclear plants to power underwater deep-sea oil drilling platforms (reported on CBC radio news today, report not yet online).
  

So to slake our insatiable thirst for the liquid stuff, we're prepared to construct colossally expensive and dangerous nukes and vulnerable gas pipelines through fragile permafrost, to produce less energy than the projects that power them consume. Just so we can get it in a form we can dump in our gas tanks.

Read the article.