The Federal Government of the United States' back door admission of Peak Oil.

Today, August 29, 2007, was the day the Federal Government admitted that they believe peak oil is here. This was on Bloomberg News today:

Aug. 29 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S., the biggest emitter of gases blamed for global warming, said it will contribute to the next round of emissions cuts, a first step to setting limits since rejecting the Kyoto Protocol six years ago.

``We will also come through with what we believe will be our contribution'' to limits that will be set during talks through next year, Harlan Watson, the senior climate negotiator for the U.S. Department of State, said today at a media conference in Vienna. He didn't say by how much the U.S. would curb its emissions.”

You see, the U.S. would never, ever, under any circumstance accept a decrease in their carbon emissions quota – unless it was happening, or already happened, anyway. And if it is going to happen in any event, well we might as well get some political mileage out of it. After all, if Peak Oil production and Peak Oil imports are here for the world, and Peak Natural Gas happened in North America in 2001, and Peak BTU’s of coal happened in the U.S. in 1999, the U.S. has nothing to lose by agreeing to emit fewer carbon atoms into the atmosphere - since we have fewer hydrocarbons to burn, we will emit fewer carbon compounds. Simple like that.

Unless of course you believe that the Bush Administration suddenly found the environmentalist within its soul, and out of the goodness of their heart, and in a new found desire to be a better neighbor decided that they would unilaterally accept that which was an anathema at Kyoto, Japan just 6 years ago.

Why now? Why today? Indeed.

Inventories of total crude, finished motor gasoline, and distillate fuels fell to 656,110,000 barrels from 678,815,000 from 7.20.07 to 8.24.07.

When an oil importing nation as dependent as the U.S. loses 3.5% of its inventories in 5 WEEKS, and at a time of very high prices, which should have increased incentives to produce more and consume less – but did not – it is time to worry about those imports. Because there are only 3 components to the inventory equation:

Domestic production + imports – consumption = inventory change

Since domestic production was nearly unchanged in the past 5 weeks, and consumption was actually down (slightly) the only thing left are imports, which by necessity must have declined by over 22.5 million barrels, during the 35 day period.

All of the above data I found on the U.S. Department of Energy’s website. These are hard data. The conclusions that I draw from the data are this:

Something has to give, RIGHT AWAY. Inventories must stop declining RIGHT NOW, OR ELSE. There is nothing in the data that says that this trend will continue,nor that it will reverse course. That is one of those “unknown unknowns”. Unfortunately, we will know soon enough.



Mentatt (at) yahoo (dot) com