Jerome a Paris reports that George Bush has been pushing the "soft peak oil" line during his arms sales mission to the middle east.
This is a pretty stunning admission, during his press conference in Saudi Arabia:
I hope that OPEC, if possible, understands that if they could put more supply on the market it would be helpful. But a lot of these economies are going -- a lot of these oil-producing countries are full out.There are various definitions of peak oil - the "hard" one being actually declining production, with a "soft" version being production unable to catch up with latent demand and prices increasing instead. Then you can measure it for oil alone, or for oil plus various liquid substitutes that we are increasingly using (ethanol, processed tar sands, coal-to-liquids, etc...).
With the above quotes (repeated again below), Bush is clearly into "soft" territory, and could be argued to be in "hard" territory. There is no longer any argument in the industry that non-OPEC oil is peaking (that includes the International Energy Agency and even ExxonMobil), which means that any production increase must come from OPEC. If they are also producing "full out", you can reach your own conclusions....
And this was not just an isolated assertion by Bush - the topic was disucssed 3 separate times in the interview... VIA peakenergy