> "Doug" riseup.net> wrote in message
> news:74aa2bc1-667f-4c1e-bf54-4c509f66085a@d1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

>> "A site called "LivingSpace" has been created, it attempts to
>> describe the environmental impact of the automobile.
>>
>> The address is www.CarEnvironment.net

>
> The site claims that we have only 35 years of oil left at current
> rates of consumption. What it is actually giving is the reserves to
> production ratio - a figure the oil industry uses as an indicator of how
> well
> they are doing at finding new oil reserves, but which is most
> emphatically not an indicator of when oil will run out, otherwise,
> going by historical values of the ratio, we would have run out long
> since. The oil industry figure is currently 41 years, but it was 35
> years in 1983. The only thing that tells us is that, over the past 25
> years, oil reserves have been increasing faster than the rate of
> consumption. If that is typical of the standards of research on the
> site, it is not worth the paper it is written on.
> The site also relies heavily on US figures, which has a quite
> different pattern of energy consumption from anywhere else in the
> world, making it a poor source of information about transport in the
> UK.