Matt Savinar warns that global oil production has peaked or passed, with demand at 82.5 million barrels/day and a 2–3% annual decline, threatening civilization’s collapse due to unsustainable energy dependence—90% of food calories rely on fossil fuels, and alternatives like wind/solar lack scalability. Savinar dismisses tech fixes (e.g., oil sands, shale) as temporary delays, citing $182/barrel price risks and a 3–6% annual supply shortfall, while callers debate efficiency gains and nuclear energy. He urges self-sufficiency over reliance on government or speculative solutions, arguing that 50 years of inaction leave no time for gradual adaptation—economic breakdown is inevitable unless individuals prepare now. [Automatically generated summary]
Hi, Desert, and the brave Americans of what's happening all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's Olympic time zones.
Each and every one of them covered like a blanket by this program, Coast Code AM I'm Ardel.
And it is my honor and privilege to be with you throughout the weekend.
And we've got a nice fat hour before our guest, and our guest is going to be a good one.
President Bush and Senator Kerry stayed on the offensive in Swing State Sunday as the presidential race roared into its final full week.
In a television interview, our president said, well, it's up in the air.
Whether the nation can ever be fully safe from another terror attack, up in the air.
He suggested terrorists may still be contemplating ways to disrupt the election.
Kerry ridiculed Bush's statement, suggesting it echoed an earlier assertion, later withdrawn, by the way, by the president that the war on terror could not be won.
Now it's up in the air.
Well, the election, though not very satisfactory in terms of only offering us two possibilities, in my opinion, has come down to, well, it's here.
It's time for you to vote.
Nobody out there, and I mean nobody, should not vote.
You all should vote.
There are substantial differences between the two candidates, even if not all the differences you would like to see in a candidate of your dreams.
There are substantial differences between these two men, and you need to make up your mind and go down and vote, exercise your franchise and all that.
Here in Nevada, we are a swing state.
So our paltry electoral votes, well, you never know.
We could determine the outcome of the election here in Nevada.
Probably not, but, you know, by a hanging chat or something, all right?
Get out there and vote.
The carnage continues unabated in Iraq, if not, well, it's the boldest, deadliest ambush yet.
Insurgents waylaid three minibuses that were carrying U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers heading home on leave and massacred 50 of them.
So it's not, you know, no matter what you hear, it is not good in Iraq.
There's no way to paint a good face on this, and I guess they've stopped trying.
The U.S. Army has agreed to a Pentagon investigation into claims by a top contracting official that a Halliburton subsidiary unfairly won a no-bid contract worth billions of dollars for work in Iraq and the Balkans, according to U.S. Army documents.
The complaint alleging that the award of contracts to KBR, which is a Halliburton subsidiary without any competition to restore Iraq's oil industry and to supply and feed U.S. troops in the Balkans, puts at risk the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor.
Which means it throws the whole thing up in the air.
Well, Boston, are you watching the World Series?
The second game is in their pocket now of the series.
I mean, as unlikely as all of this is, it is so unlikely.
You all know about the curse right on Boston from when they sold the babe.
There's a pretty interesting story about a kid who lives in the house that Babe Ruth lived in.
He was at one of the playoff games.
There was a foul ball hit.
And believe it or not, this kid reaches up to catch it, and he doesn't, and it slams him in the lip, and he bleeds.
And they're saying, maybe, maybe, because this is a kid who actually, I mean, what are the odds, lives in Babe Ruth's former house, actually lives in it.
He goes to the playoff game, right?
He's a Sox fan.
He tries to catch a ball.
It misses his hands, smacks him in the lip, and he bleeds.
They are suggesting ending forever now the curse.
I mean, the odds of that happening are pretty slim to none, I'd say, wouldn't you?
This particular kid who actually lives in the same house Babe Ruth did, being at that game, worried about the curse, misses the ball and bleeds, breaking the curse.
Maybe.
All right, now this is going to suggest what we're going to be talking about tonight a little bit when we get in with our guest.
And boy, is this important.
Crude oil prices stayed within a range of their all-time high amid concerns among traders of the oversupply perhaps coming this winter.
But, I mean, where are we with oil right now?
Let's see.
The price for crude futures for December would be $55.18 a barrel.
Now, check me if I'm wrong, but not very long ago, it was $16, $17, $18 a barrel, right?
$55 plus a barrel now.
Oh, my God.
Prices are going up already out of control.
I mean, it's just amazing what's going on with prices, but it ain't nothing compared to what's coming.
And that is what we're going to be talking about tonight with my gay.
It's High time we did talk about this, in my opinion.
Our nation goes or does not go based on whether it has oil or not.
If the answer is not, then we go, but we go toward a recession and a depression is where we go.
We have to have oil.
We have to have oil right now until the magic bullet comes along and it ain't here yet.
I'll get a million emails on that, but provably it's not here yet as far as I am concerned.
No magic bullet.
Lots of speculation and lots of interesting inventions, but something to replace oil?
Not yet.
So we have to have oil.
And we don't know how much is left.
Tonight's expert may.
I've taken to driving our little cars just about all the time now.
We have a couple of really nice, larger, gas-consuming cars where you can feel power every now and then, but we don't use them.
We use our little bitty geometros because the price of fuel is just going up and out of sight, and people have to commute.
I don't know how much longer they're going to be able to do it.
It's going to get to the point where gas prices are going to go to the point where people are not going to be able to go to work.
And when that happens, well, then you definitely have a depression on your hands.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
Music Just a few other items I thought we should touch on.
Group warns consumption is outstripping resources.
And they have a graph here.
And beginning actually before the 1990s, the Earth began using more than can ever be replenished.
That began in the early 90s, actually prior to the early 90s.
Here's the story.
People are plundering the world's resources at a pace that outstrips the planet's capacity to sustain life, according to the environmental group WWF.
In its regular living planet report, the Worldwide Fund for Nature said, humans currently consume 20% more natural resources than the Earth can possibly produce.
Consumption of fossil fuels like coal, gas, oil increased by 700% between 1961 and 2001.
Can you imagine that?
The world is using 700% more coal, gas, and oil.
700%.
The planet is unable to move as fast to absorb the resulting carbon dioxide emissions that degrade the Earth's protective ozone layer.
According to Claude Martin, he said, quote, we are spending nature's capital faster than it can regenerate.
And that kind of also goes along with what we're going to be talking about with our guests tonight.
If you're wondering where it's going to go, what it's going to mean to you and to everybody else when the gas begins to dry up, when the oil begins to be unpumpable economically, tonight you'll find out.
Well, look at this.
Pualip, Washington, a school district in Pualip, Washington, has decided it is going to cancel Halloween.
Quote, Silas Macon, let them have their 30 minutes of dressing goofy and having candy.
He just learned the grade school tradition of a party and parade and costume during the last half hour of class before Halloween night.
Won't happen this year in the Puala School District for two of his daughters.
The superintendent, it seems, has canceled Halloween.
Now, why are they doing that?
Well, let's see.
He says, quote, we want to make sure we're using all of our time in the best interests of our students.
Well, you don't believe that one, do you?
I mean, it's golden and all that, but I don't think that's a reason, do you?
It is the third reason that some parents are struggling with.
The district says Halloween celebrations and children dressed in Halloween costumes might be offensive to real witches.
i guess re real which is arguing there no it knows is out of joint uh...
witches here that they're talking about, I wonder.
There are the Wiccans, and they're real, but not...
Well, I'll tell you, this political correctness stuff.
Anyway, there shall be no such ban here at Coast to Coast AM.
We will celebrate Halloween as normal.
In fact, next weekend, I believe the lineup is the GIS people, the Ghost Investigators Society, and EVPs on Saturday.
And that's electronic proof, in my opinion, of voices from, well, either beyond the grave or beyond this dimension.
I really don't know, but beyond for sure.
And then Sunday, we will do the traditional ghost-to-ghost AM program occurring as it should on Halloween.
Now, British police sprang into operation after getting an emergency 999 call.
Now, I guess in Britain, you don't just dial 911, you dial 999.
Easier, I guess.
Anyway, here came this alert from a woman, seemingly in great distress.
They could hear it over the phone.
They could hear her screaming and moaning and such.
You know, It sounded, oh my god, like she was being possibly murdered or something, but actually, it was only a couple having sex.
You see, officers at Durham in northern England became alarmed when this call comes through to their headquarters in the middle of the night.
Only thing they could hear was what sounded like a woman crying with a man's voice in the background.
She was crying, moaning, making noise.
Police traced the number, of course, and rushed to the scene where they found the embarrassed and somewhat disheveled couple who explained they were messing around.
It happened while we were having sex.
The woman had depressed, apparently, the nine button three times in ecstasy on that telephone.
Anyway, the police, you know, they went away smiling, maybe even snickering.
And, you know, I don't know what the couple did.
They may have put it off for a while.
Other news, a Somerset County man missed a mouse that he was trying to shoot with a small caliber handgun and wounded instead his girlfriend.
Doug Rugg, that's R-U-G-G, Doug Rugg, 43 of Confluence, was trying to kill this little monster rodent with a .22 caliber handgun when his girlfriend, Kathy Joe Harris, 38, apparently went into the line of fire, was hit in the arm.
Boy, I bet she's very unhappy.
She was taken to Somerset Hospital where she was listed in fair condition.
Neither Rodd nor Harris would make any comment whatsoever.
So I guess the mouse lived.
An Oregon man discovered earlier this month, you probably heard this during the week.
I hope you did anyway.
It's a hell of a story.
Up in Oregon, this guy had an old Toshiba, couldn't have been that old, Toshiba Corporation flat screen, year old, so not that old.
And this flat screen television apparently decided that it was going to begin broadcasting on 121.5 megahertz.
That is the distress signal used internationally when there's a signal on that frequency.
That means an airplane's down.
People are in distress.
You know, it's the way.
And anyway, this guy's TV was transmitting the distress signal.
They had to track him down, and he was told if he didn't keep his TV off, it'd be a $10,000 fine for willingly broadcasting a false distress signal.
I guess the Toshiba Corporation has decided it will reimburse this gentleman with a brand new television and take back the offending television, which perhaps ought to be licensed by the FCC at the very least, and do what with it, I don't know.
But anyway, there you have it.
Can you imagine that?
Can you, in your wildest imagination, imagine having a television that's sending out an aircraft distress call and then having the feds, you know, on the door, hey, you, getting ready to arrest you?
And finally, Einstein's warped view of space confirmed.
This one just in.
It seems Earth's spin warps space around our planet, according to a new study.
And all of this will confirm a key prediction of Einstein's.
After 11 years of watching the movements of two of our Earth-orbiting satellites, researchers found each is dragged by about six feet or two meters every year.
Get this, folks, you're going to love this.
Because the very fabric of space is twisted by our twirling, whirling world.
In other words, as the world moves through space in its orbit of the sun, it actually warps space-time.
The results announced today are much more precise than preliminary findings published by the same group in the late 1990s.
It's called frame dragging.
You may have heard of it.
It's an effect of, well, it's a modification to the simpler aspects of gravity set out by Newton working from Einstein's relativity theory.
Austrian physicists predicted time dragging in 1918.
Any object with mass, any object with mass, warps the space-time around it.
And of course, the Earth is a big mass, right?
Relatively big mass.
In much the same way it does that as a heavy object might to form a stretched elastic sheet.
If the object spins, another distortion is introduced in the same way as the elastic sheet would be twisted by a spinning heavy wheel on it, for example.
Well, is there any part of you that A, rides every now and then on a broom, B, you know, stirs a cauldron, and all the traditional Halloween kind of stuff, witchy stuff?
All right, well, look, here's the question: you know, there's children running around in pointy little hats, black and orange, and all their traditional, you know, Halloween witchy kind of stuff.
you've reached coast to coast a m and if you're just joining us i have on the line and which you've woman and she'll be a right back the the All right, back to finish up with my waiting witchy woman.
You're on the air once again.
All right, now you were starting to mention something about the Darwin Award.
Were you referring to the guy who shot at the mouse and hit his girlfriend's dead?
unidentified
No, no, I wasn't referring to that guy, but it's something along those lines.
Okay.
A friend of mine was up in Armor a couple weeks ago was playing an online video game and listening to music on the TV.
And about 9 o'clock at night, it's dark.
And all of a sudden, he loses the internet connection and the TV because they're both cable.
He's called the cable company.
While he's talking to the cable company trying to find out what's going on, he loses his power.
So for some unknown reason, he decides he's going to go to Walmart, probably because otherwise he sits there in the dark until God knows when.
Went up to get in the car.
Noticed flashing lights up the road.
Found out why he lost the cable and the power.
A flatbed driver came down the road with a load that was 18 feet high and tried to get it underneath power lines and phone lines and cable lines that were 18 feet high.
I don't know if it's in the Darwin category, nor would actually the case of the guy who fired and shot his girlfriend instead of the mouse.
To qualify for a Darwin Award, you pretty much have to be a self-help thing.
You have to do it for yourself.
But it certainly has caught people's attention since they've been keeping track of people who find ways to do themselves in.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello?
unidentified
Yes, sir.
Yes.
There's been a discussion about them doing something that would interfere with our election, and all they'd have to do is tell everybody to do whatever they can to raise the price of oil right before our election.
If gasoline goes up into the $5 a gallon range, what do you think it would do to this country?
unidentified
It would cause us to do what we've needed to do for 30 years.
In fact, you ought to put all of the factories in the United States on a 24-7 schedule, which should save a lot of energy, and put every house on fiber optics and the equivalent of cogenerating rules.
So in other words, you'd be able to turn off everybody's power is what it comes down to.
I'm not sure that I like that solution.
Thank you very much.
I understand that it's good to save energy, certainly, but rolling blackouts by computer design, no, there has got to be a better way.
You know, oil determines our quality of life in this country.
That's not an arguable point.
It determines our economic livelihood.
Oil greases the skids for everything that happens in America.
So if the oil dries up, so do we.
And if the price of gasoline goes to $5 or wherever it's headed from there, we also dry up, as in an immediate recession and a very quick depression, I would think.
I mean, it's a very serious matter, and it's getting very serious right now.
okay well i know that which is are offensive to some people but but the question is ma'am in the story why is the way is who are getting offended by I'm going to explain.
unidentified
Why?
When you see the typical Halloween witch with a conical hat and deformed hands and the wart on the nose and stuff.
And it was originally a festival that celebrated its harvest time.
So the seeds that grew into the fruit are now being harvested.
It's like when you're born, you sprout up, and in your life, you bear fruit, and then the fruit is given to the world, and then you die from your body, Art.
i appreciate it that gives me a lot of history of several things but i'm not certain even though that's a terrible history why modern which is and actually i guess we concerned Are you offended?
I don't think so.
I know Ramona is not.
Now, she, we took a picture during this last break, which I'll try and process very quickly during the next break.
And I'll show you.
First time caller line, you're on here.
unidentified
Hello.
Hi, yes.
My name is John.
I'm from Pittsburgh, North Carolina.
Yes, sir.
I'm really glad to hear that you're here at the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
Just the other night, I heard a story about the children in South Africa, the 62 children, and recalled a short documentary about a documentary that the late, great Dr. Mac was putting together and was wondering if he ever completed it, if it's available on video.
I don't know the answer to that, but I'm with you.
I think that that incident in South Africa is a real hands-on, try and talk your way around this one kind of proof of contact and maybe even proof of message.
There's just no way you can have 62 children who have a close encounter.
For some reason, they all wander off into the woods.
Unaccountably, they just, all right, maybe Children occasionally do that.
But then they come back with identical stories of what happened to them while they were in the woods.
They saw a craft, they drew the craft, the similarities were there.
They told the investigators and the people who interviewed them, the late, great John Mack.
I guess last night, that was quite a bonus of having the guest on last night.
He was one of the people who interviewed these children, and they told the same story.
And there's a message to Earth that we're moving quickly towards some sort of self-help extinction.
And we had better get on the ball.
I mean, that's a very loose interpretation of it all, but that's roughly it.
The reason I'm calling, I've been listening for a long time.
I recently retired from law enforcement, and you kept me awake many nights.
I had an incident happen to me a couple years ago you might be interested in.
I was behind the high school checking doors, as we routinely do on third shift, and I was walking back to my patrol car.
Off to the southwest, I noticed three amber lights, I don't know, about 20 degrees above the horizon.
And I've got an aviation background that goes back to childhood.
And as it got closer, as I got to my patrol car, I noticed it didn't have any anti-collision lights on it or a red strobe light toward the rear of it.
And as it got closer, I reached in the car and grabbed my binoculars.
And it was a triangular-shaped black object.
And it passed behind the football field at about 1,000 feet, headed toward the, now it started to turn on a 90-degree angle toward the straight north, the other side of the high school.
I'm sorry, when I grabbed my binoculars, they're Timba 50s, I could see kind of an oblique, oval-shaped type of window going along the side of the aircraft.
And then as it made that 90-degree straight turn, it didn't turn at an angle like you would take your right wing and dip it up to make your turn.
It just silently made a 90-degree turn and then continued on northbound until it got out of sight.
But are you aware that there may be thousands, maybe even tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of witchy women who are cringing and crying in the corner of their homes because these little children are running around making fun of them?
unidentified
Well, I just look at the witches that got burned at the stake about 400 years ago, and they're thinking, my God, we've evolved to get away from that.
Hey, you know, Art, talking about good scares, October surprise before the election and peak oil, I sort of see them sort of blended together.
Attack of a U.S. city, canceling the elections, which is ironic because Bill O'Reilly had the president on about three weeks ago, and with all the bombs dropping in Iraq, President Bush himself said, this is the most important time for the Iraqis to vote during this kind of death and destruction.
Well, I guess, you know, but we should take heart with that, you know.
And this peak oil thing, this gentleman you're going to have on, I guess, in my opinion, our country is sort of like a prisoner in its own energy dilemma.
Well, anyway, it's a sad state of affairs when in a wonderful country like ours, we finally get so politically correct we're worried about offending witches.
unidentified
I know.
It's just terrible.
It takes away from the fun of everything.
I mean, they sell all sorts of Halloween costumes at stores.
And, I mean, guys dress up as women.
Are women going to get upset because some college guy dressed up as an ugly girl?
Anyway, oil is what we're going to talk about, and it's a hot topic.
It's a hot topic because at $55 plus dollars a barrel, we're beginning to, well, we're beginning to get pinched.
And when I say pinched, I mean seriously pinched.
The entire economy of this country runs on oil.
Duh.
The whole thing runs on oil.
And if it gets rare, I'm not even saying cut off.
If it gets rare, so will our economy.
Mike Savanar, I hope that's right, is California-based attorney.
He's an attorney.
He has a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California, Davis, a law degree from the University of California at Hastings College of the Law.
He is the author and administrator of LifeAftertheOil Crash.net.
That's a good title.
That's a good web domain, LifeAftertheoil Crash.net, which explains global peak oil.
I would like that explained.
Its ramifications, and what we can do to address it.
unidentified
all about coming up in a moment all about coming up in a moment This is one hot topic.
About a year ago, I was doing research on the drug war, which is a topic that I'd actually already knew a pretty good deal about.
And I came across a site called from the Wilderness.com.
You've had the editor, the publisher of that site, Michael Rupert, on your show before.
And I was reading through the articles about the drug war and related aspects, and I could tell right away that I was like, well, this guy clearly knows what he's talking about.
And I was actually surprised I had not come across the site before.
And everything on there is very fact-based, essentially impenetrable from a factual standpoint.
And I noticed all these articles on oil and the economy.
And at that time, I didn't really know too much about oil.
I mean, I knew that it was important.
I knew that the war in Iraq probably had something to do with oil.
And the articles were quite terrifying, to say the least.
Now, once the energy production peaks, even if we're pulling, right now we pull out 82.5 million barrels a day from the ground.
Now, once production peaks, and the peak of production coincides with the point at which the oil reserve is 50% depleted, once it peaks, we have less and less with each passing year.
And it declines at about a rate of, conservatively, at a rate of about 2% to 3% per year.
That's if we're lucky.
It will only decline that much.
The problem, though, is after a couple years, the financial system no longer has that excess of energy that it needs to keep on going.
So even if we're pulling out 50, 60, 70 million barrels a day, that's a tremendous amount of oil, an incredible amount, as much as we were using 70 million barrels a day back in 1990.
But it's not enough to keep the financial system from collapsing.
So once the production begins to decline, the fractional reserve banking system collapses.
There aren't really any alternatives.
We've got a lot of technologically viable alternatives, but we don't have any that are scalable.
And we don't have a combination of any that are scalable and that can provide an excess of energy with each passing year.
Now, depending on, there's different estimates of how much oil we have on the ground.
If you believe the folks who said there's one camp that says we have two, there were originally two trillion barrels in the ground, we've pulled out a trillion.
So right there, we know we're right around the peak.
Now, even if it turns out that we have three or four trillion total, because of the fast, the exponential fashion in which demand increases, even if we had three times as much in the ground, three trillion instead of one trillion, it would only buy us an extra 25 years.
Well, we can divide up, for simplicity's sake, oil into conventional oil, such as that's what we pull out of the ground in West Texas or Saudi Arabia.
It's very easy to extract.
It's very inexpensive, both financially and energetically.
Then you've got unconventional oil.
That's like the oil, the oil stands up in Canada, for instance.
Now, a lot of people feel that the oil stands up in Canada will replace conventional oil.
Unfortunately, even in the best case scenario, because it's so energetically and financially expensive to pull out of the ground, we're never going to be able to pull out maybe more than 4 or 5 million barrels a day from both the oil stands up in Canada and the oil stands down in Benefits.
Have you, since you've looked at banking and you've looked at the state of oil, and you can see where prices are currently, scaring people a lot at $55 a barrel and headed, we don't even know where, do you?
I doubt that it's going to continue to go straight up.
You may take three steps forward and two steps back and four steps forward and three steps back and so on and so forth.
But the sky is essentially the limit.
And if you talk to folks who are the true experts in this, you get people such as Matt Simmons, who is the head of one of the most reputable and reliable energy investment banks in the world, who has said it's going to go to $182 a barrel.
Just to give you your listeners an idea of how devastating 180-plus oil would be to the U.S. economy, one of Osama bin Laden's goals was to have oil at $200 a barrel.
So that's how devastating, that's how much it's going to hurt us.
Actually, I'd be interested in your estimate of when the U.S. economy, based on, I don't know, some sort of curve, will virtually collapse, not be able to handle it.
At what price per gallon do we begin to collapse, Matt?
For the average person who owns a car and commutes maybe an hour to work or 45 minutes to work, like down in the L.A. area, I'm trying to think myself, but at some $3, $4, $5, $6, $7 a gallon, somewhere in that range, there's a breakpoint for them where they virtually can't afford to go to work.
Well, also what people have to understand there, you'll get a lot of folks who will just in their mind, they'll calculate, okay, well, if oil goes to $3 or $4 a gallon, how much more will I have to spend per month or per week, and can I afford that?
And that's really only doing, the actual situation is far worse because the higher the price of oil goes, it puts a drag on the entire economy.
So if oil goes to $3 or $4 a gallon, it's not just a matter of the individual driver having to spend more.
They may not have a job because whatever job they are driving to is probably in some way dependent on oil.
And just to give your listeners an idea of how personally I take this, I want to be at an eco-village or sustainable living community inside of six or nine months.
I mean, I'm under no illusion because we're, again, this is not the only iceberg that's hitting the ship, so to speak.
We've got multiple icebergs.
We've got global climate change, which you, of course, have authored a book about, and your listeners are well aware of that.
We've got debt that is completely unsustainable, and we need economic growth to pay and just even pay the interest on our debts, both as a nation, as corporations, and as individuals.
So we've got multiple crisis, any one of which could do us in.
But altogether, it's not a pretty situation, to say the least.
Well, I mean, we're looking at just a complete meltdown of the modern economy because energy is everything that we do, every resource that we use in modern society, we need energy to extract these resources.
We're looking at, you know, folks who are leaving college today, by the time they're middle aged, we're going to be in a rapidly deindustrializing society.
Because the thing with the horse and buggy, what people forget is that, for instance, all the resources that we used to create horse and buggies and all the things that we had in the 1700 and 1800s, those resources, whether they came from copper or silver or whatever the resource was, they were only available because you didn't need heavy-duty, oil-powered, energy-intensive machinery to pull out copper 300, 400 years ago.
Copper used to come out of the mine at 30 to 50% purity.
So you could do it, you could pull out the copper and manipulate it and build something without a lot of energy.
Now the best copper mines say out at about 0.8%.
So we can't get copper, we can't get silver, we can't get steel, we can't get any of these things that we used in the 1700 and 1800s.
Oh, well, it does, but this is what happens when for seven or eight generations, nobody bothered to plan what we're going to do when the oil began to run out.
Yeah, but yes, I mean, we are going back to, if you look at, let me put this, when you look at oil production curve, or energy production curve, start at, say, the year, you know, at the years, you know, one year AD.
And then it's going to shoot straight up, hits a peak, and it shoots straight down around the year 20, by the year 2050, 2100, it's back to what it was a couple thousand years ago.
So it's almost as though the fossil fuel age is just a blip in the history of the planet.
But, Matt, couldn't the there could conceivably be a miracle a few steps under the virgin birth that would allow us to continue consuming and using energy?
I mean, we could have some sort of miracle energy source come online that, you know, but we're talking about retrofitting a $40 trillion infrastructure to run on a source of energy that we don't even really have yet.
And it's like asking the captain of an aircraft carrier to turn the aircraft carrier around on a dime.
If we had, let's say we had some energy source that's, you know, some group or scientists came out today and they said, okay, look, I can plug this into a car and the car runs on this new source of energy.
Great.
We need 25 to 50 years of peace and prosperity to retrofit our entire infrastructure to run on this new source of energy.
And even if we got a new source of energy, it would just allow us to continue to deplete all of these other key resources.
Because it's not just oil that we're quote-unquote running out of.
What a new source of energy would allow us to do is to continue to deplete all these other resources.
So we would ultimately, if we gained access to some sort of, like say, for instance, free energy, a lot of people, I get emails from all the time, people saying, well, you know, new energy or free energy is about to come online.
I say, great, we're going to completely lay the planet bare if we gain access to that stuff.
Said an eco-village or some type of sustainable living community.
You can go online, just Google Eco-Village or intentional community or sustainable living community, and you can start doing research on it.
And that's something that previously I had planned, and I thought to myself, well, maybe I can open up a bicycle shop or just do my own organic gardening here in the little plot that I have in front of my apartment.
Those would be viable solutions if I thought that we were just going into the second Great Depression and that eventually we're going to come out of it.
The thing is, like I said in the first segment, we're looking at a total collapse of industrial civilization.
So I want it myself and anybody who is aware and awake of what's going on, want to get into a situation where at least my food and water and energy are as off the grid and are at least dependent on an abundant supply of fossil fuel as possible.
Well, if you get into your sustainable community and the rest of the world collapses around you, then it's going to be a mad max kind of world at the very least.
I'm under, no, I tell people, but look, there is no safe place.
And I'm not under any illusion that there is a living situation that is truly secure.
But living in the cities or the suburbs where you're entirely dependent on the government maintaining services on the water pumping and on the energy coming, on the gasoline pumping, that is probably about the worst situation that I think that you could be in.
Because imagine the blackout in New York.
Imagine that had lasted for two or three weeks.
Now, we're not heading into that type of situation immediately, but what you will see is we slide down this oil production, energy production downslope, and as the economy begins to fall apart, you will see blackouts become more and more frequent, and they'll get longer and longer, and you'll start to see things like the price of water go up.
Right, because if you look at what every species does, whether it's bacteria, whether it's reindeer, pretty much every species, when they're given access to abundant resources, their population grows in an exponential fashion.
And it follows what's called a J-curve.
And the last generation will have half, have 50% of the resources left.
And that last generation will consume every last bit of the resources, and then the population will crash by 95 to 99%.
Now, if you look at the human population, it's followed about a J curve.
If you look at if we follow the path of every other species that is given access to abundant resources and just allowed to consume them at will, they all follow a J curve.
They go, They start off flat, it shoots straight up, and then it drops straight down.
And if you look at the human population, since gaining access to abundant food, which came from basically abundant fossil fuels, it's followed a J curve also.
And right now, we will probably, if all the experts are correct, we've got enough fossil fuels to last basically one generation.
And if the last four or five years are any indicator of what the rest of this generation is going to experience, we're going to end up fighting for every last drop.
Yeah, we've got about one generation of economically feasible oil.
Somebody on the planet will probably still be using oil in some capacity even 100 or 150 years from now, but it won't, you know, that will be a very, a relatively small number of people who will have access to what we would consider modern energy.
Well, all of these alternatives are technologically viable.
There's a big difference between something being technologically viable and it being scalable to the degree that we need as quickly as we need.
If we had 25 to 50 years of peace and prosperity, of political will, international cooperation, massive amount of investment capital, and a couple technological miracles, I'm an optimist in saying that maybe if we could get the energy equivalent of three or four or five billion barrels of oil per year from these alternative sources.
Now, the thing is, though, now this is an optimistic scenario, I'm thinking, here.
If we were able to get the energy equivalent of 4 or 5 billion barrels of oil from these energy alternatives, that would be an accomplishment that would make going to the moon look like walking across the street.
The thing with wind is it's actually becoming competitive with fossil fuel-derived energy.
The problem is you can't really get more than 20%, electrical grid.
You can't really get more than 20% of the energy from wind or solar, which is solar is not quite as good as wind.
It can't deliver the consistent level of energy that industrial society needs.
If you go into Afghanistan and you hook up a primitive village with solar panels and windmills, their level of living is going to shoot through the ceiling.
But you can't run our modern industrial economy on solar and wind.
And if you want to just use as an example, look at an airport.
You can't run an airport on a source of energy that's intermittent.
An airport needs energy, a massive amount of energy, 24-7.
And these are things that solar and wind, can you as an individual get solar panels or windmills hooked up to your home?
Yes, absolutely.
And we should be investing and putting money and time and energy into these things.
But you can't run a world economy that requires 30 billion barrels of oil on these alternatives.
But somewhere here, we can put a scale together, and as the price of the barrel of oil goes up from $55 to $100 to $150, somewhere in that range, solar and wind begin to look very economically attractive.
That doesn't mean at that point, or with fossil fuels, once we get to $150 to $200 a barrel, but our economy will be completely devastated with $150 or $200 per barrel oil.
And we would still, so we won't, the market won't give the signal to begin investing in these alternatives until it's too late.
So we're in a catch-22.
We're waiting for the market to give us a signal, but it's like a tidal wave.
Once you see it and once you realize how dangerous it is, you're already dead.
Exactly.
And even if we began switching, we would probably, if we wait until the market gives us that signal, we would probably experience about a 75% reduction in the availability of energy to the non-energy aspects of the economy.
And there's a book on this that you can get called Beyond Oil, Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades.
This is where I got that from.
The thing is, there's really no way out of this without a massive economic collapse.
Because, like I said before, it's not enough that we can scale these alternatives up to give us the energy equivalent of 5 or 15 or 20 or even 25 billion barrels of oil.
We need a constantly, our economy, our monetary system requires a constantly increasing supply of energy.
first hour the show matt made an interesting observation you know the american people are have always been kind of convinced that our government uh...
controls the price of gas at the pump for example and you know they curse them and the oil companies all the rest of it when the price goes up.
But the fact of the matter is, we're on the cusp of an election.
We're just about to have an election.
And if George Bush, in any way in this world that I could see, were able to control the price of oil and the price of gas at the pump, he would have already done so.
Because to have it spiraling up the way it is right now just before the election is as bad as you can get.
That should tell your listeners who are sort of in the denial camp how out of control the situation is and that typically something like this would be manipulated for political purposes.
But it's so out of control that it's now getting difficult for even our politicians and oil companies and whoever else you want to artificially blame to control it for their own, you know, for political purposes.
You blame the previous, all the, all of, you know who you blame, you look in the mirror.
Because for generations now, every time somebody stood up and said, look, guys, we need to figure out what we're going to do when we begin to run out of oil.
Now, again, running out is not the problem.
It's when you begin, when you pass the 50% mark is when you begin to run into problems.
But every time somebody stood up and said that, what would happen?
Oh, you're a pessimist.
You're a pessimist.
Don't you're, oh, wow, you're anti-American because you're suggesting we not drive big cars or because of whatever.
And so we don't really have, you know, people want to blame our leaders.
And, you know, they're certainly share a large portion of the blame, but you really get the leadership that you deserve.
And, you know, so it's really nobody's fault but our own.
And, you know, all the previous generations, nobody whom decided, gee, maybe we should figure out what we're going to do when we start to run out of this stuff.
And now we're dealing with, now the generations that are alive today get to deal with the ramifications.
Well, American companies rarely think past the next quarter, and politicians aren't all that different from American companies.
They just don't think ahead.
Even though you could make the case that, you know, a person we elect as president of the U.S. is charged with thinking ahead and doing what's best for the country.
But I guess even they, like the companies, can't think long-term anymore.
So this is inevitable.
This cataclysm you're talking about, it's inevitable.
Because if you look at the life of an oil field, if you look at the life of anything, whether it's a human cell, a human life, a civilization, an oil field, they all follow a bell curve.
They start off kind of flat and they reach a peak of productivity, generally about the 50% mark of their life.
This is true whether we're talking about a human being, you know, generally reaches their peak of productivity, about 50% mark in their life, or an oil field, which reaches its peak of productivity at about the 50% mark in its life.
No, Caspian, we thought it had over 200 billion barrels.
Turns out it's only got 20 to 40.
We used 30 billion per year.
Once we realized that the Caspian Sea was the oil bust of the century, not the oil find of the century, not coincidentally, all of a sudden we turned to Iraq.
And away from Afghanistan, we turned to Iraq because one of the reasons we were in Afghanistan was to drill pipeline.
Now, Anwar, according to the Department of Energy, if we drill Anwar, it'll lower oil prices by whopping 50%.
There's only enough oil in Anwar to satisfy U.S. demand for about six months.
Now, it'll make a lot of money for the companies that get to do the drilling, which is why you hear all of the controversy about it.
But for the average person, it won't make much of a difference.
Now, like I said in the first segment, we think we've got a trillion barrels left.
Even if it turns out we have 3 trillion, and all 3 trillion are of that sweet West Texas or Saudi Arabia crude that's very easy to pull out of the ground, it still only puts the crisis off by 25 or 30 years.
See, we've waited so long to deal with this that finding a large amount of oil, or what we used to consider a large amount of oil, it would make almost no difference.
Iraq has got proven reserves of 115, I think it's 115 billion barrels.
That's second only to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia's got, they say that they've got 260 billion.
Now, I say that with qualification because what happened back in the mid to late 80s, they changed, the OPEC changed their rules so that the amount of oil that an OPEC nation could export was based on how much they reported in reserve.
And then all of a sudden, they all reported massive reserve growth without any corresponding findings and discovery.
So we really don't know.
When people say, well, how much oil is left?
I say, well, depending on who you talk to, between $1 trillion and $3 trillion, A, even if it's $3 trillion, we're still looking at a massive crisis within 25 years.
And B, we are much more likely to have less than we think we have than we have more.
And yes, we had the thing with 9-11 and all the rest of it.
And now we've learned that Iraq didn't have much to do with 9-11.
Iraq didn't have much to do with weapons, mass destruction.
So if your advisors had come to you and said, look, we face a horrendous oil crisis.
We have, let me use this word, I'm using it, an opportunity in Iraq to go and control the second largest oil reserves in the world.
If we go to war and if we take and occupy Iraq, Mr. President, we're going to have to say something else to the public, but, well, Mr. President, you and I both know it's about oil, and we must have oil.
And my guest, Matt Savonar, who says that we're not going back to the horse and buggy.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
We're going back to the Stone Age.
And it's all because we're running out of oil.
And we are running out of oil.
We're at peak or past peak oil now, and the prices are going up.
And while you may see little valleys, you're going to see mountains of prices ahead.
So that's the sad and apparently, according to Matt, absolutely unavoidable future that we face.
On a lighter note, my beautiful wife, Ramona, and a very off-put main coon cat named Yeti are sending their regards to the people of Pooleop, or is it Poohallop, Washington, who have canceled Halloween.
So in dedication of that, we have placed a picture on my webcam that you may be interested in.
Well, because the invasion's gone, well, a couple of reasons.
A, it's not as simple as we just invaded for oil.
One of the main reasons we invaded was to protect the sanctity of the petrodollar, which is essentially now the backbone of our economy because we don't manufacture anywhere near as much stuff as we used to.
Well, yeah, they said that because the average American is so energy illiterate that if the president had been honest with us, people would have said, oh, no, no, no, no, we can invent our way out of this or we can find alternatives or we can do this or that.
And people, because we don't have an understanding of how important oil is, people think that there's some way to keep life going in some semblance of what we're used to without having access to cheap energy.
He said, what Americans have to understand is that we're running out of energy in America, and we can do a better job of conserving, but we can darn well, said damn well, can do a better job of getting more supply.
That's essentially what he went out and tried to do.
There was a report released by the Cheney Commission, and it was released in April 2001.
And one of your callers in the first hour, I think he was essentially, he probably read that report because it sounded like he was quoting from it, said the Americans were a prisoner of our own energy dilemma.
The Americans are completely unwilling to do without cheap energy, and thus it requires military intervention to secure oil supply.
Our leaders are telling us that we're engaged in a war, the war on terror, which many people believe is really a cover for war on oil, because all the places that we find terrorists or the terrorists seem to occupy also seem to occupy oil.
Yeah, well, they say the war on oil, the war, excuse me, the war on quote-unquote war on terror will last the rest of our lives.
And I say to people, do you think they're joking around?
They're not.
The reason the war on terror will last 40 years is because if you look at any of the oil production curves, even the optimistic ones, 40 to 50 years from now, the only places that they're going to have oil are is Canada with their oil stands.
And there'll be some down in Venezuela.
So then at that point, the war on terror will come to an end because it'll only be Canada that's got it.
Yeah, well, you know, you already hear, you know, obviously there's, you know, we were trying to mess around with the election down there.
And a lot of it is because one of the reasons Chavez has now, I believe he, I don't know if he is or if he has simply threatened to accept Euros for oil.
He lets what he does with Cuba, he will trade services.
Cuba provides Venezuela with doctors because they've got actually a relatively advanced medical system and Venezuela gives Cuba oil.
So an awful lot of international everything, wars, diplomacy, all of it is going to be aimed at keeping a plentiful oil supply for as long as possible.
And according to you, that's not going to be very long.
You hear it echoed at the pumps and in the places where we buy gasoline.
People curse the greedy oil companies.
You know, and that's fine.
But what about their greed?
Wouldn't the very greed of the oil companies, once they see the handwriting on the wall, and it ought to be all over the wall by now, dictate to them that to stay making a profit, they're going to have to do something?
Right, and that's why they've been downsizing and emerging and cutting exploration staff like there's no tomorrow for the past five or six years.
So if you look at their actions, they're the actions of an industry that is planning a profitable decline.
Much like a human being, when you get into your older years, you begin downsizing your lifestyle because you're not going to be able to produce as much income as you used to.
You're not going to be as active.
So you start downsizing.
So in the book that I wrote, I've got a list of all the mergers and the list of just of the major companies, not even the smaller ones.
And dating back from 98 to 2003, early 2004, it practically takes up an entire page.
It's been going on for 30 years because what happens is when we start to panic, they need to trot something out to calm us down.
In 1974, Nixon trotted out Project Independence.
One of the main aspects of it was that we're going to have hydrogen-fueled cars by 1990.
And I've got all these quotes from all the congressmen saying, oh, wow, we're going to run our cars on water by 1990.
It was a charade back then, and it's a charade today because the laws of thermodynamics haven't changed.
Now, Arnold, down at my alma mater, UC Davis, he filled up a hydrogen-powered car.
And people will look at that and they'll say, see, it's an alternative.
And again, it's technically viable.
Yes, can you run a single car on hydrogen?
Yes, of course.
And if we had 50 or 60 years of tons of money and energy and prosperity and stability, maybe it would be a little more of a reality.
But these things are sort of like the, I compare these to like the French resistance of the Holocaust, in that if you were waiting for them to come save you, you're going to be waiting a long time.
Did they exist?
Yes.
And did people support them?
And are they good things?
And are they worthy of investment and time and energy?
Yes.
But for the average person who's hearing my voice today, you're going to have to save yourself.
So the American people should understand that hydrogen is not a savior, that it takes roughly 1.3 to make one and more energy to make the unit that you can use in your car.
We have hydrogen, it's the smallest element, so it'll leak out of any container.
Oh.
Hydrogen fuel cells require, right now, 20 grams of platinum per hydrogen fuel cell.
Now, if we mass produce them, we might be able to get it down to 10 grams.
The thing is, there's only 7 billion grams of platinum in the earth.
Platinum we already need that platinum for technological purposes because platinum is necessary for things like computers and cell phones, all of our technology.
We've got 700 million internal combustion engines on the road.
So in order to replace all of those with, say, hydrogen fuel cells, we would need to mine every gram of platinum in the earth.
And even then, it would only be a one-year solution because the hydrogen fuel cells tend to, they only last about one year if you're driving about an average amount.
And we'd just end up hitting peak platinum at some point.
See, this is the problem.
We have an economy that requires more and more and more of everything.
So we'd be fighting platinum wars down in South Africa because South Africa's got 80% of the world's proven platinum requirements.
People don't want to deal with this, but this is what happens when for the last 150 years we never figured out what we were going to do and the stuff began to run out.
And now we're faced with these really macabre decisions about are we going to go to war with China?
I mean, it scares me to even mention it, to even think about it.
Under such horrid conditions as a war with China or any other major world event, we would have to have a resumption of our draft, certainly, something they're denying like crazy right now.
I'm recalling that most modern presidents have said should it become necessary, we would go to a nuclear conflict to protect the Gulf, to keep the Gulf open so we could continue to get oil.
I mean, we would go to nuclear war to keep the streets open.
So we don't have 20,000 nukes floating around for no reason.
I mean, you know, people seem to think that this is an issue that somehow is no longer an issue.
You've got 20,000 nukes on hand, many of them in the hands of unstable individuals, and you have this global situation where a key resource is now becoming scarce.
And it's a resource that is necessary for life itself in the modern world.
Yeah, I don't like to give exact dates because if I give an exact date and that date comes and something hasn't quite happened the way you said it would, and people go, oh, so you don't know what you're talking about.
Yes, and when you look at the current situation, I mean, it comes out as very simple.
We need a certain resource that is becoming scarcer and scarcer.
The only way to secure that supply is through military intervention.
And we're not the only people who want it.
There's lots of other powerful nations that want it.
And they also have become somewhat emboldened by the fact that the invasion of Iraq has gone so poorly for us.
These other nations, if we had Iraq completely under control and everything was going the way we had hoped it would go, we'd be in a much better geopolitical situation.
But now you've got these other countries who are now emboldened by the difficulties that we've encountered.
Matt, for years, doing the kind of program that I do here, we attract a lot of people who are interested in alternative energy sources, free energy sources.
Gosh, everything from Tesla's work to all of these claimed, you know, they now have conventions, Matt, where everybody brings their own little black box of something that yields more output than it takes as input.
I'm actually a subscriber to Infinite Energy Magazine, and prior to his death, I had spoken extensively with Dr. Malov, who you've had on your, who I think George has had on his show.
I mean, people always refer to us as fossil fuel addicts, and that's true, but it's more accurate to say we're energy gluttons.
And a more potent source of energy, look, if you don't think we're going to use that as a weapon, you're somebody, you know, I mean, look, I respect the folks who are working on these things, and I, you know, wish them all the luck in the world, but if zero-point energy, for instance, was a reality.
I mean, and I don't just mean a reality in a laboratory or in a little box at a convention, but I mean a real, you know, reality that the government could take and turn into a weapon.
There's a difference between is it scientifically possible in the laboratory and may, you know, are there some reactions where you've gotten excess heat?
Yes.
And I would have to, in that case, I would have to defer to the folks like Dr. Malov or folks of his, you know.
Well, you can't defer to folks of his background, his educational background, say, explain to you, well, yes, we have seen reactions where we have excess heat or whatnot.
But in terms of saving us from the ramifications of peak oil, I don't think there's anything.
No way.
No.
Because we need, A, we would use it and we'd end up destroying ourselves.
We'd use it to completely lay the planet bare.
You'd have no timber.
You'd have no silver, no copper, no platinum, no nothing left.
Let me accept your sad, cataclysmic scenario as it is and simply jump to this question.
The individuals listening to us this morning, ones who live in homes and apartments and condos and, God, you know, just all kinds of living conditions out there.
Assuming that you're right and the worst is coming, Matt, what advice can you give to individuals to prepare?
Well, ideally, if you can, you know, like what I want to do is get involved in some kind of sustainable living community, I recognize that that's not a possibility for everybody.
I mean, it's not very easy to do, but I don't think staying in the cities is going to be a very good thing for your health.
What you could do to at least soften the blow in the initial years is start, if possible, learning to grow your own food.
If you've got access to some sort of organic garden or whatnot, and trying to become as independent from anything.
Well, then you might as well drill a well, get your own electricity going now with wind or solar, buy lots of guns, and get ready to defend what you've got.
I mean, if it's going to get down to every man and woman for themselves, and we're headed back towards some kind of earlier age, then these are the things, these will be the coin of the realm.
Because remember, in order to keep the financial system going, we need a constantly increasing supply of energy.
And our economy now is so big that we use 30 billion barrels of oil a year, plus about the energy equivalent of two-thirds of that in natural gas and coal.
And these are, you know, the natural gas is also set to peak.
And so it's a matter of, is this thing technologically viable?
Even if it is, it's not going to prevent the average person from suffering through this collapse.
And so I tell people, say, look, these devices are great.
I'm as fascinated by them as anybody because I'm one of those people who's always really into technology.
Yeah, I don't know, though, if the salt water, I don't know, you know, you'd have to talk to somebody who is more familiar with that process.
I don't know if it sits there or if they cycle it out, but they pump it in there, it pushes the oil up to the top, makes it easier to extract.
I think what he's getting at is a question I get a lot about, is pulling all of this oil out of the earth somehow destabilizing the earth and creating more possibility of earthquakes.
I haven't seen any what I would consider reputable reports one way or the other, but I will say if you have an inheritance that took billions of years to accumulate and you go and spend it all in a couple years, that can't possibly be good.
Because you're releasing a tremendous amount of stuff into the atmosphere, which of course is going to increase global warming.
There's a strong correlation between how much fossil fuels we use and the effects of global warming.
And which is now getting to the point where you almost can't even deny it.
And you look at the extreme, or I should say global climate change is a more accurate term.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there's some type of connection between pulling that out and creating some type of destabilization, but I can't say for sure one way or the other.
And I tell people, you know, biodiesel may be one of the best alternatives we have because you can take a diesel-powered vehicle and run it on DAPT to run on biodiesel relatively easily.
The problem though is, again, we use 82.5 million barrels of oil per day.
Even if, like, there's some folks who believe, and I don't necessarily agree with them, but I'll just give them the benefit of the doubt.
They believe that in the U.S., that with enough investment, we can replace all transportation fuels with biodiesel.
I say, okay, great.
In the U.S., we use 20 million barrels a day of oil.
About 60% of that is used for transportation.
So even if we were able to do that, and even if we were able to do it overnight, it would reduce global oil consumption by, it would reduce it from 82.5 barrels per day, million barrels per day, down to 70 million barrels per day, which is of the amount we used in 1990.
So even if these incredibly, again, we need a 2% to 4% increase per year to feed industrialization, economic growth, and to keep servicing debts.
So even if the most wildly optimistic estimates are correct, and I have a lot of doubts about that, and even if we could do it overnight, it's still too little, too late.
You see, we passed the point of no return 30, 40 years ago.
Matt, in a way, the administrations that have been in office since this would have been known in the quiet little circles, and it would have been known, they would have still every interest in keeping oil cheap for each four-year cycle or each eight-year cycle if they got lucky and got re-elected.
They would want to keep oil cheap.
They wouldn't want to let it rise so that we could meet the emergency as it came along.
Instead, it's going to be one giant shock, sort of, isn't it?
And like I was saying in the first half hour, if we wait, you know, once we wait till the market gives us this signal, then it's too late because oil will have gotten so high we won't have the energetic and financial capital to invest in these alternatives.
And even if we did, the alternatives are so modest compared to oil that we really can't.
We're going to be losing 1.5 billion barrels per year due to depletion.
How much of that can we get from synthetic oil?
I don't know.
But you see, this is the problem.
Our demand is so massive that even in the best case scenario, and I don't know how much we would be able to get from synthetic oil, it's still not going to prevent a declining supply of energy, which is then when you get a declining supply of energy, you get a collapse of the financial system.
So, I mean, it's like I'm a fan of these alternatives, and like I was saying in the first segment, in the best case, even if we could get, say, 5 billion barrels a year from these alternatives, whether it's synthetic oil, biodiesel, solar wind, the energy equivalent of 5 billion barrels, that's as much oil as we used per year during World War II.
So it's a tremendous amount of energy.
But we need 30 billion barrels a year, and we're already losing.
It was just a report that came out from Petroleum Magazine a couple weeks back.
It said, we're already losing a million barrels per day due to depletion.
And the decline hasn't even really gotten underway yet.
And once it does, we're going to be losing conservatively 3% of our supply per year.
So that's almost a billion barrels right off the bat, conservatively.
And so I'm sorry, but even in the best case scenario, we've waited.
You can imagine a scenario, Art, back in the oil shocks of the 70s, if I had said to you, imagine a scenario where we just simply waited until it was way too late.
If you can shoot any holes in what Matt's saying, then come and fire away, folks.
Because otherwise, it seems as though what he's saying is inevitable.
A Mad Max world ahead, indeed.
from the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Matt Savonar is my guest, and he's laid out a very, very bleak and rather immediate future regarding peak oil and where we are on that curve right now and where we're headed.
He says, not back to the horse and buggy days, back to the Stone Age.
There's going to be a large magnitude collapse.
I mean, it's a devastatingly bleak analysis, but it's probably true.
if you have questions comments or you can focus sticking any of this we're listening the the All right, Matt, we've dealt with what individuals can do to prepare.
Kind of small things, really.
But they can prepare.
What about the larger pictures?
At this point, and I know you're not president, but at this point, if you were, knowing what you know right now, as you have explained to us so graphically this morning, Matt, as president, what would you order right now, knowing what you know?
I mean, you could ask people to conserve, and that might buy a couple years at best.
But the problem with conservation is as long as if let's say we were to issue, you know, engage in a massive conservation effort and that somehow managed not to crash the economy, because to really conserve, we need to cut our consumption by 50, 60, 70%.
You'd have auto companies going out of business, airlines going out of business, which is already happening.
But let's say we could somehow conserve energy enough to bring the price of oil back down to, say, $40 a barrel.
Well, if oil isn't at a really high price, then we're not motivated to invest in the very modest alternatives that we have.
So the catch-22.
And every time we've increased our energy efficiency, we've simply begun to consume more.
It's called Given's paradox was first noticed back in the 1800s.
And so if the fuel efficiency of cars increased, I'm just using cars as one example, people simply either drive more or they use the money that they save on gas to purchase consumer items, which are made with petroleum and transported on vehicles powered by oil.
So I don't, this is why I don't really see a way out of it on a civilization-wide level.
I think the best you can do is as an individual or a family or a small community is begin trying to get as self-sufficient as possible.
And before I forget, the first U.S. peak oil conference is happening November 12th to the 14th in Ohio.
Having a very controversial page like that up there, coming to the conclusions, obviously, on the page that you come to hear on the air for us, it's a pretty bleak, disturbing, scary, immediate future.
It ranges from people who say, oh, my God, thank you so much for doing this.
Somebody finally had to lay it out in this way, this fashion, because I'm far from the only person who's talking about this, and there have been people who are talking about this long before I ever came on the scene.
I get email from people who say, you're nuts, you're crazy.
Although those emails are a lot less frequent than they were back in January when I first put the site up.
I get emails from, so it pretty much ranges.
Overall, I'd say it's generally been actually pretty positive.
I want to bring some attention to the false premise of your guest.
In the Sunday New York Times dated September 5th of 2004, this sentence, and I will quote it, from 1973 to 2003, after all, the amount of oil and gas needed to create a dollar of gross domestic product fell by half.
We are much less addicted to the black stuff than yesterday's industrial economy.
Your guest is just spewing out false notions from Iraq being a mess, which it is not in the bond market.
We have 40% of our energy comes from oil, 25% from natural gas, 25% from coal, and then the other 10% is made up of everything from nuclear to water to a very small amount from the solar and wind and things like that.
But that's the thing, is we've reduced it by 50%.
We're still entirely dependent on oil.
And once the production of energy begins to decline, it's a very simple concept.
If you don't have an excess amount of energy entering the economy, things begin to collapse.
Now, we may be able to still squeeze more GDP out of the same amount of oil, but there's a point of diminishing returns.
The essential truth of is there going to be a collapse or not, yeah, there still is, even if we could still squeeze out a little bit more GDP from the same amount of oil.
Oh, for your guest to imply, though, that in six months he's going to be living in some socialist utopia is just absolutely absurd.
I never said to mention your guest never brought up the fact that the major demand on oil prices right now is increased capitalism in China and India combined with some distribution and production problems in the oil fields in Venezuela.
Yeah, but all of that, with the exception of Venezuela, it's only going to get worse, sir, and you know it.
I mean, China is going to be demanding more and more and more oil, as other third world nations will, but particularly China.
That's a fact.
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Would your guest, therefore, with all his knowledge, be opposed we have not built a nuclear reactor to produce electricity and energy in this country since the early 70s.
I think it needs to be an option that's on the table.
Obviously, there's a few problems with it.
But as far as the left-wing liberal stuff, what you can do, if you go on to, you Google Matthew Simmons.
He's the CEO of one of the most of Simmons and Company International.
If you go onto their website, and if you just Google his name, the site will come up.
And I encourage you to read, he's got dozens of papers and speeches that he's given.
He's conservative.
He was on the Cheney Task Force.
And he says things that will really, that was one of the things that got me really into peak oil because I thought, well, wait a minute, this isn't eco-liberal fear-mongering.
You've got somebody like this guy who is disconcerned about it.
And you read some of the statements and some of his papers, you're like, oh, my goodness, this is not just a liberal socialist utopia like the caller claimed.
You've got very rational, conservative people who are very, very concerned about this.
And so I tell that caller and everybody else who is agreeing with him, go on to that site.
You can also go to globalpublicmedia.com and they've got dozens of hours of interviews with folks like that who are conservative.
They're not liberals.
And they'll tell you, you know, not maybe exactly the same thing that I'm telling you, but things that will scare the pants off of you given what their background is.
Earlier, you mentioned that you'd like to hear anyone who has a bright spot in this scenario.
Yes.
Matt has earlier mentioned the oil sands up in Canada, and they are currently producing about a million barrels a day, and they project to be producing up to 2 million before too long, and it doesn't seem like much.
Here in the United States, we are blessed with 2.6 trillion barrels of oil that is locked up in oil shale.
The bright spot is that technology has recently been developed that will enable us to effectively extract that from the shale and, as a byproduct, produce huge amounts of electricity.
Shale oil has been one of these things for decades now.
There's always somebody, you know, this is one of these almost magic bullet alternatives, although this one is actually from petroleum.
Hey, if it comes online and you're producing the amount of oil we need, great, I'll be thrilled.
But I'm not waiting around for that.
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Well, I don't argue with the inevitability of what you say.
All I'm saying is this could definitely stave it off and give us a chance to, number one, free ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil and also give us a chance to develop the technology that would enable us to stave off the Stone Age scenario that you unfortunately laid out.
The problem is even if this is viable, A, we're not really depending on foreign oil.
We actually get a relatively small portion of our total oil consumption from foreign oil.
It's a globally traded commodity.
So even if we got off, we have about 2 million barrels a day from Saudi Arabia, for instance.
Now, even if we got off Saudi Arabian oil and we were only getting it, we somehow managed to do an extra $2 million per day from our own soil, because it's globally traded, it wouldn't make that big of a difference in the price.
Now, if this oil comes, let's say this oil comes online, it's introduced into the market, and it puts off the collapse by five years or 10 years or whatever.
As long as oil prices remain semi-reasonable, and $55 is still semi-reasonable, we're not going to invest in alternatives.
So it's still essentially the same problem that we're in.
It's a catch-22.
If we get more oil, then the market isn't going to give the signal to switch to alternatives.
Then these are very modest alternatives that we have.
And again, I'd be thrilled if shale oil came online and was producing millions of barrels a day because hey, it would buy us a couple, you know, may buy us some extra time.
i mean that there's a gap even between the price of the barrel of of oil and the price of the pump i i forget how much of a gap but i think it's about six weeks i think six All right.
And further down the economy, the gap would be greater.
And then, of course, we do have ANWAR, and we do have some oil capability ourselves if we chose to begin to exploit it with fervor.
Now, it's said, Matt, that we have a national policy of basically keeping our oil in the ground, what we have, while using foreign oil so that when the crunch does come, we still have hours left.
Well, if you care about your future and that future and the future of your children, but most of all, how about your own future?
And if the crash is coming and it's really coming that soon, well, then I would think at the very least, after listening to Matt's seminar, you'd want to go to his website and see if you believe it's all real.
It is www.lifeafterthecrash.net.
assuming that his side hasn't crashed yet i would i'd go up there and examine this whole question All right, once again, Matt Seminar.
Matt, let me ask this.
There have been, you know, a number of pretty reasonable suggestions about the shale, for example.
And, of course, there's conservation and there's exploration.
And, you know, if we do it all, if we realize the crisis is virtually upon us and we begin doing it all, how long can we hold it off, do you think?
Well, here's the, if we see all these things, people think that we somehow still have time left.
It's kind of a comforting myth.
And like I said earlier, we're 30 years past the point of all of these type of things making that much of a difference.
Even if we reduced our globally, not just here in the U.S., but if we globally reduced our oil consumption by two-thirds, that would buy us a whole extra 25 years before we hit the peak.
Now, that's not going to happen.
So there's not much we can do on a societal-wide or on a global level to stave off the crisis.
The crisis is here.
We simply waited 40 years too long.
You've got to now focus.
But we are almost Our entire brains have been socialized to think in terms of the mass culture.
We don't think in terms of our own cells or our own communities anymore.
But that's where you've got to focus.
The focus should not be on lobbying John Kerry or George Bush or whoever to do whatever it is you think they should do or to search out for some new supply of oil for the reasons I've already explained.
The solution for you is to start trying to get self-sufficient in yourself and your neighbors and maybe your local government, you know, if people will listen, which, no offense, but a lot of your callers are just simply showing all the reactions that people show when they're in denial.
However, he seems to be, and I think a lot of the callers would agree from what I've talked to other people about, is that he's mixing a lot of fear and panic type of ideas with these facts, which he is laying out.
However, he's not mentioning the fact that in our government, be they liberal, conservative, these are highly intelligent people that are running our system.
Now, I know there's people that disagree with that, but in general, you know, we have highly intelligent people in our country.
And how could these smart guys ever let this happen?
Well, here's the thing.
They know, as do most Americans, that this oil is going to be depleted.
And the people in government are privy to a lot more information about things like cold and thermonuclear fusion.
And it's really obvious that since oil is running the economy, that as it's depleted, we will start getting the introduction of things like fusion generators.
And in fact, your radio stations have been talking about these kind of things.
But sir, Matt's argument is a pretty good one, that even if we cranked one of these miracle workers up, we couldn't get the infrastructure in place in time to avoid the crash.
They have known about this, and they do have access to information that you and I don't have.
And we look at the documents that have been declassified, such as UKI's Alpha, that was from back in the 70s.
There was a CIA report in the late 1970s that was recently declassified about the Soviet oil peak that occurred in 1987.
And there was, of course, the report that was commissioned by Dick Cheney in April 2001.
And all of them said the same thing.
And all of them offered the same solution.
And that solution was military intervention to secure oil.
And so he's right.
How smart they are, you know, that's up for debate.
But he's right.
They do have a solution.
And the solution is to secure oil through military intervention.
Now, what he's got to understand is the folks in power, whether they liberal or conservative, they want economic growth as bad as anybody.
They want cheap energy as bad as anybody.
Now, if you, people, let me just use an example, nuclear energy.
People will say, well, the environmentalists got in the way of nuclear energy.
I say, do you really think that eight years of Reagan and four years of Bush, now another four years of second Bush, we're going to let some environmentalists stop them from pursuing a source of energy that could realistically provide us with healthy economic growth?
I did, and we've covered it throughout the previous three hours of the show.
A, you can bet your bottom dollar George Bush and Big Oil would be opening those wells if they thought that it was going to bring the price of oil down from $55 down to something a little more comfortable because that would ensure that Bush gets re-elected and that Big Oil has their man in office.
And like we said before, the issue is not, you know, are there capped wells?
Yes, absolutely, there are capped wells.
And if oil gets to the point where it's $75, $100, $150 a barrel, those wells will open up.
There's also the issue of, again, if you've got it, and this is with shale oil, something I forgot to mention, it's not just the amount of money, it's the amount of, you have to think about energy.
If it takes for shale oil, one of the problems has been that it takes as much energy to get one barrel of oil as that barrel of oil contains.
Well, that's been a prevailing attitude now on this whole question of the end of oil.
You know, hey, what the hell do I care?
I'll be dead.
But Matt's saying, if you've been listening closely, sir, that an economic collapse, the likes of which will send us back to the Stone Age, is going to occur and occur pretty soon.
And what he may forget is that if he's old enough that he doesn't think he'll be here when things get bad, it means there won't be any health care.
We're not going to have any energy to take care of him in his last years.
And what will happen is people of my generation, I was born in the 70s, what they're going to do is when somebody like him needs health care, we're going to say, well, wait a minute, you never bothered.
You've used up all the energy, so you don't get the health care that we were able to provide.
At least we're finally starting to see in the mainstream media, even we're beginning to see on radio stations like this, that people are starting to actually discuss that there isn't so much oil that it'll last for a million years.
But the thing we're not yet seeing, and I've been looking and I can't find, is descriptions of how elastic the economy is going to be, how gradually is it going to get worse, or how abruptly is it going to get worse?
We see lots of pictures of where the number of barrels of oil is.
Conservatively, we'll be losing 1.5 to 3% of our supply per year.
Now, you couple that with we need conservatively 1.5 to 3 percent extra to feed economic growth.
So that's a 3 to 6 percent shortfall between what we need for economic growth and what we will pull on the ground.
Now, that's conservatively.
Like the report that just came out from Petroleum Review, a lot of countries are declining at a rate of 10, 15, 20 percent.
And the rate of decline is picking up.
Now, you throw on top of that disruptions in supply due to terrorism and war and issues like that, which we're only going to have more of those.
People say, well, the recent run-up, it's because of one of the reasons because of the pipeline attacks.
I say, well, if you look at where we're going to be getting an increasing percentage of the oil from, it's all from areas where you're going to have more and more pipeline attacks.
So the declining, you know, Pete, this is one, again, one of those comforting myths that people offer.
One is that, well, I'll be dead before it gets too bad.
And two is, oh, it's going to be a nice gradual decline.
Oil fields, say, in West Texas, when it peaks and goes into decline, there's not a need to keep pumping it like it's your only well.
But when global production peaks, we're just going to keep pumping and pumping and pumping because there's nowhere else for us to go.
Now, you throw that in with the disruptions in supply from war, weather, and terrorism, and the decline is going to happen a lot faster than people are hoping that it will.
And in terms of your own situation, you know, you should be better off erring on the side of pessimism than erring on the side of optimism, which is what we've been doing for 50 years.
And it took me roughly three years to figure all this out.
So if you've got just a second, I'll explain it, and then I'll let you go because I'm cold.
Go ahead.
Okay.
My roommate and I had saw an object in the sky that we watched come down through the layers of the upper atmosphere.
I mean, we could see this object, and this object was a bluish-silverish color.
The object stopped In position and then moved across the sky at such a high rate, I couldn't understand with conventional physics as to how, if it were manned.
Okay, so basically, that brought a lot of questions on, and I called umpteen different government agencies to ask them in regards to how they could have the energy to power such a craft.
And where it led me was to an organization called DARPA.
I had gotten sent through to DARPA, and I was only to talk to DARPA about some of the concepts that I had in regards to energy that could power this craft.
Basically, my quest for what energy could have powered something to this speed and could have basically defied all laws of inertia and current physics and propulsion as I know it were that it had to have run on something like antimatter.
Now, an average villager in Africa, if they read or they hear about some miracle cure that Magic Johnson has access to, because Magic Johnson is not only a successful basketball player, he's also a very successful business person.
He's got millions of dollars to spend on the most recent treatment for HIV.
Well, it's a little bit ridiculous for the average African villager to think they're going to have access to that treatment and that that's going to save their community from the ravages of HIV.
Likewise, even if DARPA has access to antimatter power, is that going to save the average person?
The average person needs to be thinking about how they're going to get food and water and energy and heat and medicine and things like that.
And the chances of UFO technology and antimatter or whatever coming to save them are about the chances of the AIDS treatment available to Matt Johnson saving those villagers in Africa.
But you've got to proceed as if they won't happen, as if the little green guys will not come down and hand us the free energy or that even we'll come up with it ourselves.
We have to proceed with what we know we need and will need and what that's going to do to our economy and how quickly it's going to do it to our economy.
And that's been the whole thrust, I think, of what you've been saying, no matter what else happens.
Yeah, it's like you get folks who, you know, if you're experiencing a financial collapse in your own life, hoping that they're going to win the lottery and they're going to be able to use that money to feed their kid.