Conventional production of oil has been on a plateau since 2005, said James Murray, a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, who chaired the panel.....

In reality, governments tend to overestimate their coal reserves, and much of these reserves will never be accessed, Rutledge said.

"There is little relationship between the RCPs and the actual historical experience of oil, gas and coal production," Rutledge said......

He said it is likely that the Bakken Shale oil play will peak in 2015 or 2016 and that the Eagle Ford Shale play, another significant U.S. oil production area, will peak soon after.

Global oil reserve discoveries peaked in the 1960's.
• New oil discoveries have been declining since then, and the new discoveries have been smaller and in harder to access areas (e.g., smaller deepwater reserves).
• The volume of oil discovered has dropped far below the volume produced in the last two
decades.
• In total, 507 fields are classified as ‘giant’, and account for 60% of conventional oil production.
• The top 110 producing oilfields produce over 50% of the global oil supply.
• The top 20 producing oilfields contribute 27%.
• The most productive 10 fields contribute 20%.
• Production from 16 of the top 20 producing fields was in terminal decline in 2007.

"renewable energies such as wind and solar power play a "trivial" part in lowering carbon emissions."

"Over the last 20 years, the world has basically tackled climate change really, really badly."

"in the next couple of decades, solar and wind is going to make an almost trivial cut to CO2 (carbon dioxide)."

The resemblance between this coalescing group (GG: Kingsnorth calls them "neo-environmentalists&quot and the Friedmanite ‘neo-liberals’ of the early 1970s is intriguing. Like the neo-liberals, the neo-environmentalists are attempting to break through the lines of an old orthodoxy which is visibly exhausted and confused. Like the neo-liberals, they are mostly American and mostly male and they emphasise scientific measurement and economic analysis over other ways of seeing and measuring. Like the neo-liberals, they cluster around a few key think tanks: then, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Cato Institute and the Adam Smith Institute; now, the Breakthrough Institute, the Long Now Foundation and the Copenhagen Consensus. Like the neo-liberals, they are beginning to grow in numbers at a time of global collapse and uncertainty. And like the neo-liberals, they think they have radical solutions.

Kareiva’s ideas are a good place to start in understanding them. He is an outspoken former conservationist who now believes that most of what the greens think they know is wrong. Nature, he says, is more resilient than fragile; science proves it. ‘Humans degrade and destroy and crucify the natural environment,’ he says, ‘and 80 per cent of the time it recovers pretty well.’ Wilderness does not exist; all of it has been influenced by humans at some time. Trying to protect large functioning ecosystems from human development is mostly futile; humans like development, and you can’t stop them having it. Nature is tough and will adapt to this: ‘today, coyotes roam downtown Chicago and peregrines astonish San Franciscans as they sweep down skyscraper canyons … as we destroy habitats, we create new ones.’ Now that ‘science’ has shown us that nothing is ‘pristine’ and nature ‘adapts’, there’s no reason to worry about many traditional greens goals such as, for example, protecting rainforest habitats. ‘Is halting deforestation in the Amazon … feasible?’ he asks. ‘Is it even necessary?’ Somehow, you know what the answer is going to be before he gives it to you.

If this sounds like the kind of thing that a US Republican Presidential Candidate might come out with, that’s because it is. But Kareiva is not alone. Variations on this line have recently been pushed by the US thinker Stewart Brand, the British writer and Brand protégé Mark Lynas, the Danish anti-green poster boy Bjorn Lomborg and the American writers Emma Marris, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger. They in turn are building on work done in the past by other self-declared green ‘heretics’ like Richard D. North, Brian Clegg and Wilfred Beckerman.

Beyond the field of conservation, the neo-environmentalists are distinguished by their attitude to new technologies, which they almost uniformly see as positive. Civilisation, nature and people can only be ‘saved’ by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geo-engineering and anything else with the prefix ‘new’ that annoys Greenpeace. The traditional green focus on ‘limits’ is dismissed as naive. We are now, in Brand’s words, ‘as Gods’, and we have to step up and accept our responsibility to manage the planet rationally through the use of new technology guided by enlightened science.