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"OPEC, over the last 20 years, has not managed to add any additional capacity. So we're in a world today where we're going to need a vast amount of additional energy, and we're utterly dependent on countries that in the past generation have added absolutely no additional capacity."
— Steven Lee, oil analyst
"Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems."
— Richard Heinberg, Powerdown
"Saudi Arabian oil production is at or very near its peak sustainable volume (if it did not, in fact peak almost 25 years ago), and is likely to go into decline in the very foreseeable future. There is only a small probability that Saudi Arabia will ever deliver the quantities of petroleum that are assigned to it in all the major forecasts of world oil production and consumption."
— Matthew Simmons, from Twilight in the Desert
"[The report 'World Energy Outlook 2006'] reveals that the energy future we are facing today, based on projections of current trends, is dirty, insecure and expensive."
— Claude Mandil, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency
"Technology is great, but it can't find what's not there. In the last five years, we consumed 27 billion barrels of oil a year, but the oil industry discovered only three billion barrels a year. So only one barrel was replaced for every nine we used!"
— L.B. Magoon report for U.S. Geological Survey, as quoted in E Magazine
"In my humble opinion, we should now have reached peak oil. So it is high time to close this critical chapter in the history of international oil industry and bid the mighty peak farewell."
— Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, Vice President of the National Iranian Oil Company
"We've run out of good projects. This is not a money issue... If these oil companies had fantastic projects, they'd be out there [developing new fields]."
— Matthew Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert
"The idea that we industrialized humans are immune to the natural laws that have restrained growth in other species—and humans in past social regimes—is to me so self-servingly blind as to be morally reprehensible."
— Richard Heinberg, Powerdown
"Through our inattention, we have wasted the years that we might have used to prepare for lessened oil supplies. The next ten years are critical."
— Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak
"We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil."
— Mike Bowlin, Chairman, ARCO
"We are not good at recognizing distant threats even if their probability is 100%. Society ignoring [peak oil] is like the people of Pompeii ignoring the rumblings below Vesuvius."
— James Schlesinger, former US Energy Secretary
"The end-of-the-fossil-hydrocarbons scenario is not therefore a doom-and-gloom picture painted by pessimistic end-of-the-world prophets, but a view of scarcity in the coming years and decades that must be taken seriously."
— Deutsche Bank, as quoted in E Magazine
"Until you change the way money works, you change nothing."
— Michael Rupert, From the Wilderness
"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."
— Thomas Edison, 1931
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