They're officially using the phrase "oil crisis" now.

All through April the media was calling it the "oil bubble."

But then for the first time in over 25 years, the words "oil crisis" (sometimes "oil shock") began to surface at some point in mid to late May. And during that stage of news coverage, the phrase was either in quotation marks or accompanied by a skeptical question mark:

May 023 It’s not an Oil Crisis it’s a Dollar Crisis
May 028 So-called oil crisis will be beneficial
June 06 US energy chief says no need to tighten oil regulations: "There is no oil crisis"
June 11 World Faces `Oil Crisis;' IEA Ready to Tap Reserves
June 11 The world faces an "oil crisis"
June 12 Third Oil Shock?
June 12 Data shows world facing '3rd oil shock': IEA chief+
June 12 Energy concerns echo oil crisis of Nixon days, Kissinger says
June 13 the contrarian - WHAT OIL CRISIS?


But now, the quotation marks have fallen away, the question marks have been discarded, and the phrase is being freely used in headlines all over the world:

June 18 Larson: President Politicizing Oil Crisis
June 19 X marks the spot in oil crisis
June 19 Oil crisis more serious than 9/11 for airlines
June 19 Oil crisis fuels blame game
June 19 Readers' Comments Oil crisis grim echo of '70s
June 20 Oil Crisis is Solvable
June 20 EU Leaders Look For Answer To Oil Crisis
June 20 Former Saudi oil minister says world reaching third oil crisis

Thus has "The Global Oil Crisis," at last been dubbed official, at least in the eyes of the Fourth Estate.





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Gynn said:

I wonder if some major new source used the term and then it caught fire with smaller sources. Is that how these terms come about?

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I spent over an hour last night in Google News going back only as far as the damned stingy search engine would allow me to. And what I saw was that non-American news agencies were more quick to use the phrase "oil crisis" than American ones. The lag time between the foriegn news entitites adopting the phrase and the Americans eventually following suit was about four weeks.

Meanwhile, I strongly urge everyone here to view THIS video from CNBC.com from yesterday morning. THE GRAPHICS GENERATOR GUYS AT CNBC DID AN INTRO OF THIS NEWS PIECE WITH THE WORDS "AMERICA'S OIL CRISIS" IN HUGE LETTERS SPLASHED ALL OVER THE SCREEN. And then for the duration of the interview, the sub-banner across the bottom of the screen had the same words (smaller, of course) unwavering for the whole report. (And there was an icon of an oil well to accompany it.)

It's a six minute interview with a senior advisor named Dr. Robert Hirsch from a privately run Washington based consulting firm called Managament Information Services. They do regular consultation to a myriad of private, and educatinal, and government entities. Most of their consultation revolves around energy issues, and he personally has been studying oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear for over 30 years now. He has written reports for the US Department of Energy. He is the author of the now-famous Hirsch Report which he published in 2005 for the Department of Energy and which warned about the soon-coming peaking in global oil supply.

During this CNBC interview, he was adamant that the current global oil situation is serious and that the all-important "spare capacity" is almost gone in every last oil field in the world. One of the things he very forcefully said in the interview about anyone who claims the price of oil will eventually come down was: "I think those people are absolutely wrong!" And he kept saying that so many people, especially economists, just don't understand that the current crisis in oil is almost entirely geologic (centering upon "below ground" issues).

He minced no words in what he had to say. He was almost but not quite orenery about it. His sense of urgency was restrained but definitely there.
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And here's an interesting graph from the Hirsh Report. All of the below people/agencies are the key players in the entire Peak Oil debate on the international level. Each has made a prediction as to exactly when they predict the planet will hit peak. The chart is sorted in date-order, so the ones who believe in a soon-peaking of global oil are at the top of the list, and those who think it's further away are toward the bottom.

Projected Date of Peak ... Source
2006-2007 ................ Ali Morteza Samsam Bakhtiari
2007-2009 ................ Matt Simmons
After 2007 ............... Chris Skrebowski
Before 2009 .............. Kenneth Deffeyes
Before 2010 .............. David Goodstein
Around 2010 .............. Colin Campbell
After 2010 ............... World Energy Council
2010-2020 ................ Jean Laherrere
2016 ..................... US Energy Information Administration
After 2020 ............... Cambridge Energy Research Associates
2025 or later ............ Shell Oil Company

Unique said:

We're all in the crisis together. Some will suffer more than others. Is this supposed to be a new idea? Where the hell have people been? Zzzz...

Not a post and run, Plot. Keep banging the drum - loudly. The deaf won't mind. They can't hear anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDF7ia23hVg

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"They," the Fourth Estate, are pretty important in getting the word out so that we don't slumber through this brief yet critical time where we can actually prepare for what's coming. I think this new develoment of the Main Stream Media making the leap and using the phrase "oil crisis" in an official (even dramatic) capacity is an important accomplishment in achieving that end.