The Peakist

In the wake of Gordon Brown’s steal-from-the-poor-to-give-to-the-rich budget, it was reported that what had changed the Chancellor’s borrowing forecast was the decline in revenues from North Sea oil. “What has changed our forecast is what happened to North Sea revenues.” Mr Brown said North Sea oil revenues would be £5.5bn lower than expected for 2007/08 but argued that the reduction was due to factors outside the government’s control. “That’s no fault of the government. It’s lower production from the North Sea. We have to take that into account,” Mr Brown told the BBC’s Today programme. That the electorate might reasonably expect the government to factor in the rapid depletion in North Sea oil reserves to their financial forecasting seemed to be beyond him. “The chancellor is becoming as bad at forecasting oil and gas revenues as he is at estimating the cost of the London Olympics,” commented SNP leader Alex Salmond. Reserve depletion fed into a 9% decline in production last year. When the UK government can’t even make a realistic short term assessment of declining UK production it is perhaps unsurprisingly they appear guiless in the face of the global situation. (more…)

By: Andrew McKillop

The first full year of Peak Oil, that is structural undersupply simultaneously affecting markets in different world locations, is at minimum possible, and increasingly probable for June 2007-June 2008.
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Ivan Semeniuk reports in New Scientist on the carbon threat from the US coal mountain: “AT THE back of Ernest Moniz’s mind a clock is ticking. Moniz is director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His mental countdown marks the narrowing window of time that remains for the US to address a looming environmental disaster fuelled by the burning of mountains of cheap American coal. (more…)

China is moving rapidly on the front of bioenergy, with important targets for green energy included in the People’s Republic’s new Five-Year-Plan. The Chinese government also sees investments in the sector as a way to boost the rural economy and to ease the growing social inequalities between wealthy urbanites and poor farmers . Small farmers are already beginning to reap some of the benefits of China’s transition to biofuels. Thanks to a path-breaking effort to develop fuels and energy from woody and oil bearing crops, the country has announced it will now plant biomass and biofuel forests on a very large scale to fuel its future. By 2010, China plans to develop an area the size of England, or 13 million hectares, with Jatropha curcas trees from which both liquid and solid biofuels can be extracted as a source of clean energy, according to the State Forestry Administration (SFA). (more…)

Paul McLeary asks, ‘Are China and the United States heading for a showdown over Africa?’

In a trip that went almost totally unnoticed in the United States, Chinese President Hu Jintao took an eight-country jaunt across the African continent in early February, signing trade and investment agreements at every stop along the way, while forgiving debts and offering interest-free loans worth hundreds of millions more.Within a week’s time, President Bush announced that a new combatant command for Africa, AFRICOM, would begin operations in September 2008. (more…)