Worried about "peak oil?" The International Energy Agency's annual report, "The World Energy Outlook 2008," admits for the first time that "although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil . . . is projected to level off toward the end of the projection period."
When The Guardian's environmental columnist, George Monbiot, pressed IEA chief economist Fatih Birol on that opaque phrase, the actual date turned out to be 2020.
The IEA's previous reports, which assured everyone that there was plenty of oil until 2030, were based on what Birol called "a global assumption about the world's oil fields": that the rate of decline in the output of existing oil fields was 3.7 percent a year. But this year some of the staff actually turned up for work occasionally and did a "very, very detailed" survey on the actual rate of decline. It turns out that production in the older fields is really falling at 6.7 percent a year.