RESOURCE CRISIS: Peak Oil: the elephant in the room.
In 2003, I invited Colin Campbell, the founder of the association for the study of peak oil (ASPO), to give a talk in Florence. After the talk, a small group of conspirators (1) collected in my office. We drank together something curiously looking like petroleum in color (not in taste, fortunately); a strong liquor that came from Ukraine and was named “Balzam.” After a few glasses of that dark stuff, we decided to start the Italian chapter of ASPO; “ASPO-Italy”. One of the conspirators of that fateful day, Luca Pardi, now president of ASPO-Italy, recently published a book on oil and gas with a curious title “Elephant country.” It is a word play on some silly remarks on oil by one of our leading politicians, Mr. Romano Prodi, who said that Italy “floats on a sea of oil“. But you can take the title of the book also as hinting to the old say about “the elephant in the room”. Peak oil is the true elephant in the room of our times; it is there, it is large, you can’t miss it, and yet it goes unperceived, unseen, invisible.
The invisibility of peak oil is all the more impressive if compared to how much more we know about it today than we did at the beginning. You can see that, clearly, in Pardi’s book, which is an excellent summary of the work done up to now on the subject. Compare it with my first book on peak oil, published in 2003, and you’ll see that, surely, we came a long way from then. Today, we have better models, better data, and generally a much better understanding of the concepts we summarize under the name of “peak oil.” And all these new data and models confirm our initial interpretation: peak oil is here. Yet, the problem of the elephant in the room remains.
