IEA whistle-blower spills the beans on Peak Oil

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
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In particular they question the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its current level of 83m barrels a day to 105m barrels. External critics have frequently argued that this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and say the world has already passed its peak in oil production.

Now the "peak oil" theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. "The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.

"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources," he added.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added.

Read the full story in the Guardian

Also reported in the Telegraph...

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Where have the Peplers gone?

Well, nowhere really! We are here, just not been in the wood. Mike is working hard for the Ashden Awards and I am working on the Small Woodland Owners group stuff. Mike is doing trips to London and I am off to Wales and Chester end of next week. We are also eagerly awaiting the arrival of yet another nephew/ niece!! This will make number 8. I think we will never keep track ;-) While some are being born our oldest nephew is preparing for his wedding. Makes me feel ancient. .....

We do hope to get into the wood soon to do some more coppicing soon over the weekend sometime.
Tracy

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Update for the week...

Just a few odds and ends from last week....

The coppicing is going well, though we think that we may not get the whole strip we are working on done this winter, in which case we'll go as far as we can and cut it next winter as well. One of the big things that takes time is the fact that there's so much Hazel, which takes a lot longer to process than Chestnut. Tracy's been spending a lot of time with loppers and a billhook working on it:
Looking back up the hill, there's a nice big area opening up now:
One of the Hazel stools felled last week was leaning over Francis' farmyard next door. I felled the trees into it, and left him the logs, while he kindly disposed of the brash. You can see the trees to the right of this picture:
and here they are gone:
In other parts of the wood, Tracy's been converting old milk bottles into tree guards for oak regeneration:
and the pond is filling back up with the recent rain:
The rain has also prompted ever more fungi to fruit:
Sorry I don't know their names...

That's all for now. We're working in the wood for a couple of days this week, then I have to go back to the day job full time for a few weeks...

Mike

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Sweep Wood 16 years ago...

A neighbour gave us a photo of Sweep Wood from 16 years ago, taken in the summer after it was last coppiced. Hopefully this gives us a taste of how it will look in the near future. For comparison, here's a photo of it before we started this autum:
Here's one after a couple of weeks work:
And here's the one from 1993/4:

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Satnav and woodlands....

This has to be seen to be believed...

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20091023/tod-satnav-blunder-this-asda-be-the-wron-870a197.html

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TckTckTck: Copenhagen is coming...

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More coppicing...

Just a general update on progress over the last couple of days...

We've been felling the trees on the border with our neighbour's yard. Most of these need roping to pull them back into the wood, and some are pretty awkward. We treated this tangled bunch of five stems as a unit, roping them all together and putting felling cuts into all of them:
With them out of the way the gap has opened up, and our neighbour's geese seemed to enjoy the sunlight - they're round a pond behind the fence you can see.
On the other side is a Cherry tree which we're mostly leaving as it is, because some of it is an excellent dead-wood habitat. However, there was one branch which would create too much shade over the coppice, so it came down:
Meanwhile Tracy was busy battling with Hazel, some of it really tangled, like this stool which has mixed itself up with a Holly:
Our reliable old brash fire had been burning for 15 days continuously, but it was time to move it. Fortunately this is pretty easy - you just collect up the embers in a shovel, move them to a new site and add dry wood:
A neighbour of ours who's done some coppicing in the wood behind their house turned up yesterday with the vehicle they're using to extract the produce to the wayleave, and I couldn't resist having a quick look at it:
It's pretty neat, and he added the box on the front himself - it has an extending rack to help it carry timber. While down in the wayleave I snapped a picture of this Brown Roll-rim:
The fungi have really gone crazy in the past week, after the dry summer we had down here followed by the recent rain.

The last job up at the work site was to convert some of the chestnut we felled last week into benches. These will come in handy while we're working there, especially when there's visitors, and we plan to leave them there for walkers to enjoy the view as the coppice re-grows next summer. All you need to do is use the chainsaw to plane off one side of a log:
then turn it over and cut some wide notches:
then the top sits on a couple of shorter logs:
It does look a bit lop-sided, but that's the uneven ground I think.

We're meant to be in the woods for the next few days, but the weather's not looking great so we might be finding some jobs that need doing at home. We'll have to wait and see what it's like in the morning...

Mike

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A day (off) in the woods

On Saturday our friends Phil and Liz visited, giving us the welcome excuse to have a day in the woods without any work to do! Not that that meant nobody was working - Phil and Liz had to help chop up some fuel for the stove to cook lunch!
They also tried out Tracy's new log-splitting device that she picked up at the wood fair last month. I'll do a video at some point which will make the operation clearer, but basically you place the bottom section where you want the split:
then shove the top section down hard:
Phil tried the more traditional method of splitting logs too...
After lunch we wandered round the wood looking at stuff and collecting chestnuts
Between us we probably had a couple of kilos, some of which we roasted on a fire in the afternoon. We also saw lots of fungi over in Sweep Wood. Not sure what these first three are:
but these are the well-known Fly Agaric, of which there must have been 30 or 40!
Once back at the camp it was time to roast chestnuts and toast marshmallows.
and sit around chatting while Phil made himself a 'talking stick' he's hoping to use at work:
After a bit of persuasion Liz had a go at whittling a stick too, and found it's a very addictive activity!
All in all a good day, relaxing and fun. Sunday was back to work, but more on that later...

Mike

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Our friend Robin...

Robin came to help this week. He thought he'd try using the maul to help us split logs, but he found his feet weren't big enough to grip the handle...
So he though he'd pose for some photos instead.
He's really enjoying having us here, as we're disturbing lots of bugs that he's eating. A moth flew out of a branch Tracy moved and Robin had that within two seconds, and under one of the log racks he found a worm to eat too! He gave us a few good songs too. We like having him around :-)

Mike

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An extra pair of hands

Today we were pleased to have Keith, a friend from SWOG, visit to help out at the wood. In return he got lunch and a chance to try out some of the tools we're using prior to buying them himself - he's doing his chainsaw training in December. Thankfully he wasn't put off by my woodland dress-sense - I don't pay much attention to the colour of what I'm wearing when working in the wood, and today managed to wear red, green, blue and orange:
Tracy headed off down the hill a bit and worked on some Chestnut and Hazel, producing a good pile of logs:
meanwhile Keith and I cleared some Hazel and Holly at the edge of the wood to clear a path for felling the Sycamore that are along the boundary and leaning over our neighbour's yard. They were pretty awkward to fell, as they're growing out of the side of a steep bank, and have forks in some of the stems:
We used both pulleys to set up a 3:1 system again, as we did earlier in the week. This time though I used the land rover as the final anchor point:
After all, it does weigh about 1700kg, and this anchor point was after the 3:1 ratio, so wouldn't get pulled too hard. The land rover's well out of range of the tree though - I've seen too many YouTube videos of trees landing on cars to make that mistake...

Keith helped a lot with the ropes - it made a big difference having an extra person, as Tracy could focus on her patch while we worked on the Sycamores.
Where the stems fork you have two choices - fell them together, or fell each separately above the fork. We did both during the day, dictated mainly by the (very annoying) ivy that sometimes binds the stems together. This was one where we felled above the fork:
Keith heaved on the rope at my signal:
And Tracy managed to get an action shot of a tree falling:
As the day progressed the view through to Francis' yard became more clear:
Here's a couple of before and after shots. You can see the Sycamore getting thinner to the right of centre, and where Tracy was working to the left of centre:
We've got friends visiting tomorrow, and will work in the wood again on Sunday we think...

Mike

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