Scientists who warned us for ages about climate change were ignored and derided. Now, droughts, hotter temperatures and melting glaciers are showing the warnings should have been heeded earlier and action taken.
Other scientists have warned us about Peak Oil for years, and they have been similarly dismissed, probably just as unwisely.
- Bruce Robinson in "Peak Oil: Preparing for the petrol droughts", from the ASPO Australia web site (February 2007).

OIL TO PASS $US100 - SOMETIME
CRUDE BELOW $50 COULD BRING PRICE COLLAPSE
- Side-by-side headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald, 19 January 2006, after a temporary fall in the oil price, amply demonstrating how much journalists know about predicting the market price.

The Australian government has shown great enthusiasm for a solar "power tower", 1 km high in the outback north of Melbourne, but I suspect its interest is prompted more by the prospect of building the world's highest structure than by the project's commercial viability, which is currently not demonstrable.
- George Monbiot, in Heat

In the end, the Axis powers were no match for two things: the Russian winters, and an American hydroelectricity capacity that could turn out sixty thousand aircraft in four years. We didn't so much outmanoeuvre, outman or outfight the Axis as simply outproduce it.
- Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert

The history of energy in this land has been marked by astonishing swings from abundance to scarcity, and from scarcity to abundance. It would be rash to think that another such swing is unlikely in the next fifty years.
- Geoffrey Blainey, in "Riding Australia's big dipper" in the winter 2006 issue of The Griffith Review.

As Japan streaks ahead, the US and Australia have spent what now seems to have been the twilight years of the internal combustion engine fighting against the Kyoto Protocol. Meanwhile the world economy has changed: China and India have emerged as industrial economies, sucking up resources and driving commodity prices to unheard of levels. The Middle East tensions, terrorism and the war in Iraq have all put pressure on oil supply. As petrol prices rise, an insecurity has grown among consumers that resonates all the way to Australia's suburban service stations.
- Journalist Deborah Cameron, in 'Rising Sun Turns Green', Sydney Morning Herald, 22 Oct 2005.

In summary, the problem of the peaking of conventional world oil production is unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society. The challenges and uncertainties need to be much better understood. Technologies exist to mitigate the problem. Timely, aggressive risk management will be essential.
- Robert Hirsch, in Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, which was a report to the US Government in 2005 despite its attempts to distance itself from the report.

The basic fact is that the equilibrium price of oil has risen: analysts at Goldman Sachs expect it to fetch an average of $68 a barrel next year and $60 a barrel for the next five years. In the long run, such high prices will encourage exploration and bring forth increased supply that will eventually dampen prices, but this will take time.
- "Counting the Cost", in The Economist, 27 August 2005

So referring to the recent climb in oil prices as a "shock" is misleading. The market is simply responding to stronger oil demand on the back of a stronger world economy. From ths point of view [of constraining the world economy away from higher interest rates - DK] a high oil price is quite healthy, a way of preventing the global economy from overheating.
- "The Oiloholics", in The Economist, 27 August 2005

To the extent that it is possible to draw any single conclusion, it is that given the need to gain public acceptance, pass the necessary enabling legislation, select a suitable location, and secure all planning and other approvals, short of some unforeseeable emergency it will take so long for a nuclear power station to be commissioned in Australia (2025 or thereabouts) that it is largely irrelevant to our short- and medium-term energy requirements.
- R J Hunwick, summarising the findings of the symposium Nuclear Energy for Australia: Irrelevant or Inevitable? held by the Sydney Branch of the Australian Institute for Energy in June 2005.

The Second Half of the Oil Age now dawns and will be characterised by the decline of oil, followed by gas, and all that depends upon these prime energy sources. The actual decline of oil will be gradual at less than three percent a year: such that the production of all liquid hydrocarbons in 2020 will have fallen to approximately what it was in 1990. In those terms, it does not appear to be a particularly serious situation. But in reality, it is a devastating development because it implies that the oil-based economy is in permanent terminal decline, removing the confidence in perpetual growth on which the Financial System depends. Without the assumption of ever-onward growth, borrowing and lending dry up: there being little viable left to invest in. It follows that there will be a need to remove vast amounts of so-called Capital, which in fact was not Capital in the sense of being the saved proceeds of labour, but merely an expression of speculative confidence in ever onward economic growth.
- ASPO Newsletter, February 2005 (from Item No 479)

Natural resources are not running out, if you measure effective supply in relation to demand. The reason is that scarcity raises prices, which spurs innovation: new sources are found, the efficiency of extraction goes up, existing supplies are used more economically, and substitutes are invented.
- From “The Good Company: a sceptical look at corporate social responsibility”. Survey in The Economist, 22 Jan 2005.
The point was then amplified by quoting the following figures:

	Global reserves estimated 1970	Global consumption 1970 - 2000	Global reserves estimated 2000
Copper	280 m tonnes	270 m tonnes	340 m tonnes
Bauxite	5.2 bn tonnes	3 bn tonnes	25 bn tonnes
Oil	580 bn barrels	690 bn barrels	1,050 bn barrels

Why do people want energy in the first place? Customers don't want lumps of coal, raw kilowatt-hours or barrels of sticky black goo. Rather, they want the services that the energy provides: hot showers and cold beer, mobility and comfort, spinning shafts and energised microchips, baked bread and smelted aluminium.
- Amory Lovins, quoted by Paul Roberts in The End of Oil

I have no problem with a war for oil - if the US accompanies it with a real program for energy conservation. But when Americans tell the world that the US couldn't care less about climate change, that they feel entitled to drive whatever big cars they feel like, that they feel entitled to consume however much oil they like, the message they send is that a war for oil in the Gulf is not a war to protect the world's right to economic survival but their right to indulge. Now that will be seen as immoral.
- Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times January 2003

Every society has its "energy regime", the collection of arrangements whereby energy is harvested from the sun (or uranium atoms), directed, stored, bought, sold, used for work or wasted, and ultimately dissipated.
- John McNeill, in Something New Under the Sun

In war, each side is kept busy turning its wealth into energy which is then delivered, free gratis and for nothing, to the other side. Such energy may be muscular, thermal, kinetic or chemical. Wars are only possible because the recipients of this energy are ill prepared to receive it and convert it into a useful form for their own economy. If, by means of, say, impossibly large funnels and gigantic reservoirs, they could capture and store the energy flung at them by the other side, the recipients of this unsolicited gift would soon be so rich, and the other side so poor, that further warfare would be unnecessary for them and impossible for their opponents.
- Norman Dixon, in On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

When one compares the energy consumed in moving a certain distance as a function of body weight for a variety of animals and machines, one finds that an unaided walking man does fairly well (consuming about 0.75 calories per gram per kilometre), but he is not as efficient as a salmon, a horse or a jet transport. With the aid of a bicycle, however, the man's energy consumption for a given distance is reduced to about a fifth (roughly 0.15 calorie per gram per kilometre). Therefore, apart from increasing his unaided speed by a factor of three or four, the cyclist improves his efficiency rating to No.1 among moving creatures and machines.
- Stuart S Wilson, writing in Scientific American, March 1973. (NB if this had been written today it might have acknowledged that cyclists can sometimes be female).

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