Apparently we are screwing up the earth with global warming enough so that once inaccessible areas of the Arctic will now be accessible to be exploited for oil. Scientist are predicting that global warming will leave the Arctic region almost entirely ice-free for many months at a time. Big oil companies are taking this claim very seriously, and not because of the negative environmental impacts, but because of the vast oil deposits that geologist believe are beneath the Arctic Ocean floor. With this new discovery, made possible by global warming, it now makes perfect sense why so many anti-global warming think tanks are funded by the likes of Exxon Mobile. More global warming = more oil from currently inaccessible places.

Anyway, according to the Canada.com website, a U.S. based oil exploration company Arctic Oil & Gas Corp. has laid claims to the Arctic Ocean’s undersea oil. This alleged claim came as a bit of a surprise to the Canadian government as well as Russia considering that the Arctic’s petroleum deposits are considered the “common heritage of mankind.” The US oil company claims that this region requires a private company to act as the lead manager in the extraction of this undersea oil. Arctic Oil & Gas Corp’s claims have been dismissed by the Canadian government as having “no force in law, and experts believe that this bold move may cause some disruption in the exploitation of these vast deposits.

In a recent report by the European Union’s top foreign policy officials, it was pointed out that there could be some international struggle over this Arctic region. Also, Borgerson, from the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that “The United States should not underestimate Canadian passions on this issue,” and “Unless Washington leads the way toward a multilateral diplomatic solution, the Arctic could descend into armed conflict.”

The question is, will this 400 billion barrel oil deposit be able to stop peak oil? This is very doubtful considering that every day that goes by, the demand for oil increases and the supply simply cannot keep up. In my opinion, we should not look at this discovery as a solution to our current energy problems and instead, continue to research better and more efficient ways to power our planet.

via canada.com

In a recent post from the blog over at LiveScience.com, The International Energy Agency (IEA), who advises many industrialized nations, said “oil looks extremely tight in five years time.”

Why is this happening s fast?

Well with China and India growing at such a rapid pace, the demand for oil based fuels has drastically increased, making it very nearly impossible to keep supplying this increasing demand. Now there has been talk of peak oil for quite some time, but it is generally dismissed and met with a lot of skepticism, however, this announcement from the IEA (an economic group) has actually got the attention of the industry. The IEA also reported that the supply from many of the mature oil fields has dropped and with the rapid increase in demand, this spells disaster.

This just further strengthens the environmentalist argument that we must wean ourselves from oil. Of course we will never be an oil free nation; however with all of the new forms of alternative energies and alternative fuels, we should be able to drastically reduce our consumption rate. And with these new findings and predictions of the IEA, maybe the big oil companies won’t be pulling as many strings in congress to give alternative energy companies a hard time.