billhartree
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A most erudite reply, Nicole.
Monbiot’s essay also appears on his website, http://www.monbiot.com, which also includes references, so it’s worth looking at this to get some idea of his evidence base. It is pretty flaky. For instance he writes:
“Maugeri writes (page 47): “In 2011, Continental has estimated the Bakken OOP alone at 500 billion barrels. In terms of oil in place (not all of which is recoverable), both the Price and the Continental estimates would put the Bakken formation ahead of the largest oil basins in the world, making it the biggest one.”
Had Monbiot been seriously assessing the reliability of Maugeri’s work he would have picked up on the parenthesis “not all of which is recoverable” and looked into what actually was recoverable. For instance the USGS website claims this is about 3 or 4 billion barrels, i.e. less than 1% of Maugeri’s figure. No wonder Maugeri glossed over this, and shame on Monbiot for not bothering to investigate.
Here in the UK, where Nicole is at the moment, I notice that George Monbiot has been completely taken in by Maugeri’s report. See https://www.monbiot.com/2012/07/02/false-summit/. It’s a pity that GM has waived his usual demand that claims of the sort that Maugeri makes should be based on peer-reviewed work. In particular he happily accepts, as “compelling evidence” of the game-changing nature of shale oil, the following passage from Maugeri :
“In 2011, Continental has estimated the Bakken OOP alone at 500 billion barrels. In terms of oil in place (not all of which is recoverable), both the Price and the Continental estimates would put the Bakken formation ahead of the largest oil basins in the world”.
Of course the parenthesis is absolutely crucial here, and authoritative estimates of what is “recoverable” are available to Monbiot with a few mouse clicks’ effort: for instance the USGS estimate of 3 – 4.3 billion barrels. Too bad he didn’t expend that effort. At least Monbiot is prepared to admit past mistakes.
