A 67-page report released earlier this year on the subject of Peak Oil and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy drew several conclusions:
1. World Oil Peaking is Going to Happen
2. Oil Peaking Could Cost the U.S. Economy Dearly
3. Oil Peaking Presents a Unique Challenge (“it will be abrupt and revolutionary”)
4. The Problem is Liquid Fuels (growth in demand mainly from transportation sector)
5. Mitigation Efforts Will Require Substantial Time
6. Both Supply and Demand Will Require Attention
7. It Is a Matter of Risk Management (mitigating action must come before the peak)
8. Government Intervention Will be Required
9. Economic Upheaval is Not Inevitable (“given enough lead-time, the problems are soluble with existing technologies.”)
10. More Information is Needed
Unfortunately, there seems to be some, uh, confusion over the actual right of the public to access the report; the fine folks at Project Censored have therefore taken it upon themselves to archive it here.
Yet, half a year after release, discussion of the Hirsch report is conspicuously absent from the press and the halls of Congress. For months it has been archived, in PDF format, on a high school web site (www.hilltoplancers.org, Hilltop High School in Chula Vista, Calif.). It now can be found on a few other sites as well (including www.energybulletin.net and www.projectcensored.org)-but why must citizens search for an important government-sponsored report on private web sites?
If the content of the Hirsch report is to be believed-and there is every reason to think it should be-then this is a document that deserves the close attention of every leader of government and industry in the US. Newspapers and newsmagazines should be running excerpts and summaries. Instead, there is nearly total silence. In late May Robert Hirsch presented the substance of the report at the annual Workshop of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) in Lisbon, Portugal to an audience of about 300 (www.cge.uevora.pt/aspo2005/abscom/Abstract_Lisbon_Hirsch.pdf ). That event received virtually no press coverage in the US.
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