The news is not the news we need to hear.

Here in the UK we have been inundated by news of the scandalous expenses claims our honourable elected representatives (members of parliament) have been making. Yes it is utterly disgraceful.

But...

The sums of money involved are dwarfed into insignificance by the huge sums of tax payers money the very same government has poured into the banks and businesses whose unscrupulous lending and borrowing created the financial meltdown in the first place.

But...

While these are both serious issues, though on different scales, my point is that the stories have completely displaced all other news, leading me to consider that the news we hear and see on the media is not the real news or the news we need to hear.

In particular, the real news, which we currently do not get to hear about, relates to the two most serious challenges we humans have ever faced, namely peak energy and climate change which are intimately connected and directly or indirectly are responsible for most of the stresses now becoming really obvious in many countries throughout the world (species extinction, critical materials depletion, water depletion, fragility of the food supply, population pressures, financial instability).

With regard to peak energy (or peak everything) it is becoming clearer that the energy accounting methods used by governments and even scientists have been wholly inadequate in estimating the real worth of energy reserves on Earth (proven, probable and possible) and the possible production rates (how quickly we can get the stuff -oil, coal, gas- out of the ground). This has led to erroneous thinking and decision making that have left countries almost totally unprepared for the challenges to come.

In brief:

1. the possible rates of production have been over estimated; that is, the speed with which we can get energy reserves (oil, gas, coal) out of the ground and into a useable form. This means that even with coal, we will not be able to get it out of the ground and distributed rapidly enough to supply our current energy needs, let alone future demand.

2. the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) has been fudged or even ignored. Tapping the first big oil fields produced EROEI  ratios of up to 1:100 (that's 100 barrels of oil out of the ground for just 1 barrel expended doing the work). This has dropped to as low as 1:7 and for Biofuels from corn oil, for example, the ratio becomes pathetically small at 1:1.6.

3. the quality of the energy source has not been given sufficient consideration, if any. The coal tar shales in Canada, for example, are an extremely low quality form of energy which require considerable inputs of energy to extract and refine to a usable quality with huge environmental costs (eg greenhouse gas emissions). Yet the reserves are assessed in barrels of oil as though they were of the same quality. On the financial markets, these "barrels of oil" are considered to be assets, as with other "proven" reserves, even before they are got out of the ground.

4. All current energy sources and projected alternatives come with energy costs (embodied energy costs in infrastructure, training of skilled workforces, production of equipment, distribution etc as well as energy costs through use). These energy costs will initially be oil dependent and will feed back into increased speed of climate change.

What this means is that without an almost magical solution like cheap, efficient, cold fusion we are looking at an energy descent. This has very profound repercussions, not least of which is the fact that in a continuously shrinking (the forbidden word) economy, capitalism, with its requirement for continual growth in order to pay the compound interest on debt, will no longer work.

The level of ignorance among heads of states regarding the situation is almost unbelievable.