The end is near?

The closer we get to “the end”, the less those in power appear to be doing anything about it.  They want you to believe they’re onto it, but nothing could be further from the truth.

At the last Permaculture Noosa meeting I attended, a Sunshine Coast Regional Council chap did a Peak Oil presentation, explaining what it is, what it means for the citizens of the Council, and what they are going to do about it.

The explanation of Peak Oil I thought was on the money, but then we were exposed to the usual tedium of how a large quasi government institution goes about getting the wheels in motion…. on what I believe is flawed data to boot!

Last year alone, Australia’s oil production (hate that word, we don’t “produce” oil, we extract it..) fell by a gobsmacking 26.6%.  No, not a typo, twenty six point six percent.  Go to the link, and you will find a spreadheet.  From what I read, panic is starting to set in in the UK because their depletion rate is reaching 17.5%, but no, nothing like that here, who cares?

After the meeting, I fronted this chap and asked him did he know what Australia’s depletion rate was, and with gleaming eyes proudly said “yes of course”, reaching under the table to produce a report (which Council has kindly produced on CD for me to lift charts from!) and pointed to this graph:

OK, to start with, even this graph is bad news… the orange consumption line just keeps rising as the P90 line keeps falling, while the P50 and P10 “production” magically rose last year… WHICH WE NOW KNOW NEVER HAPPENED!  In fact, the P90 line fell much faster than even my black line….

For the uninitiated, the three coloured scenarios are called P10, P50, and P90.  Which means Probability of 90%, etc…

The P10 line (the high one) is pure fantasy.  The P50 is pure Hopium, and the P90 is bullshit.  Today’s production is already well below any of those predictions, which to me look just like ABARE’s, year after year after year of totally flawed predictions that never came true, like this:

And this is the reason why I believe the end is near… complete unpreparedness.

That black trendline by the way is my prediction…

We now have a new Premier in Queensland who, to my face (and two other witnesses) told me some years back when he was still Mayor of Brisbane, we would be driving cars into the future even if we have to “burn old tyres and carpets”. Earlier this week I had the misfortune of going to Brisbane, which then Mayor of Brisbane has totally ruined with spaghetti like overpasses and freeway on/off ramps and hugely expensive tunnels I cannot make any sense of, so poor is the signage…  He obviously really believes in “burning old tyres and carpets”, and I hope as Premier Campbell Newman will hoard lots and lots of them, because it won’t be too much longer before we face $2+ a litre fuel and/or shortages…. and we sure as hell will need those “old tyres and carpets”!

Such unbelievable shortsightedness is just unfathomable.