Washington, DC — Congressmen Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Tom Udall (D-NM), co-chairmen of the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus, held a Capitol Hill news conference to discuss the scheduled release today of an embargoed report by the National Petroleum Council (NPC), “Facing the Hard Truths about Energy.”
The NPC met this morning and approved the report. However, at the time of the news conference, the final report was still unavailable.
Congressmen Bartlett and Udall said they were very disappointed after reviewing a widely circulated draft of the Executive Summary of the report.
The NPC report about world oil and natural gas supplies, including the prospect for global peak oil, was requested on October 5, 2005 by Department of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2005-11-24-peak-oil-usat_x.htm.
“Instead of ‘facing the hard truths about energy,’ the NPC report hides them,” said Congressman Bartlett.
“Secretary Bodman asked the right questions, but the NPC draft doesn’t directly answer any of them,” said Congressman Udall. “While they do have some ‘hard truths’ in their report, they are surrounded in a dense matrix of mumbo-jumbo and irrelevant reassurances about how large the resource endowment is.”
Congressman Bartlett added, “The issue is not the report’s touted headline that ‘the world is not running out of energy resources,’ it’s whether the ability exists to deliver supplies of oil and natural gas to meet rising world demand. They actually say this in the final paragraph of their executive summary, on page 40 or something. The draft report also downplays a finding that the U.S. will be losing influence in the world.”
“It costs some drivers $70 to buy a tankful of gasoline. Americans and policy makers deserve straight talk and honest answers. It doesn’t appear that they’ll get them from this report,” said Congressman Udall.
In contrast, a March 2007 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found the United States is particularly vulnerable and the United States federal government is unprepared to respond to severe consequences from increasing and unacceptable risks of significant disruptions to oil supplies from peak oil and other above ground political and economic factors. “CRUDE OIL – Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply Makes It Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production” is available at: www.gao.gov/new.items/d07283.pdf.
Just last week, the International Energy Administration forecast potential shortages in world oil supplies as soon as 2012. omrpublic.iea.org/mtomr.htm.
