Andrew McKillop

Chancellor Angela Merkel surprised many with her May 30 announcement of a complete shut down of all Germany’s reactors by January 1st, 2022 and the shutdown of 14 of Germany’s total of 17 reactors well before that date.  The German chancellor has, in nine months, gone from touting nuclear plants as a safe “bridge” to renewable energy and easing regulatory constraints on extending reactor lifetimes, to pushing the biggest and fastest nuclear exit strategy in any country using nuclear power.

Expecting or wanting oil prices to be “low or moderate” is at best incongruous, and at worst naive in the current economic, financial and political context.

One “emerging consensus view”, even among politicians who continue rooting for economic growth if only to claw tax receipts for paying off swollen national debt, is that world oil demand will ceiling if not crater. Peak Oil has won converts, some of them even able to openly admit it is real, but mostly selling oil saving and oil substitution to consumers as part and parcel of the hunting down of the Evil Molecule called CO2.

It is probable, or at least possible Learsy himself takes seriously what he claims as facts in this “trenchant” piece. Basically he asserts the IEA or International Energy Agency has been taken over by dark forces which inject the world’s media, and politicians heads with dangerous, or at least wrongheaded propaganda to drive up oil prices.

Despite the clear evidence of rising depletion limits on Iranian oil production, Western media continues presenting Iran as having the third or fourth-largest oil reserves in the world. This implies oil export ‘underperformance’, repeating media claim’s of Iraqi oil reserves versus its pumping ‘performance’ in the run-up to invasion in 2003.

As tensions escalate between Iran and the West, Andrew McKillop presents a view on the prospects for conflict.

While Peak Oil is grudgingly accepted, at least to the extent that ‘After Oil’ is a buzzword in corporate planning and political policymaking circles; Peak Gas is an almost entirely unheard of and unwelcome spectre.