Okay, that’s not quite how he phrased it. But here’s the money shot from George Monbiot’s interview with Faith Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency:
“In terms of non-Opec [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel],” [Faith Birol] replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. In terms of the global picture, assuming that Opec will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is, of course, not good news from a global-oil-supply point of view.”
As George Monbiot explains, this is quite a change from the previous official line of “everything will be fine. Here’s American Gladiators. Here’s 58 channels of it.”
Anyhow, have a read of the whole article. As with most of Monbiot’s writings these days, it’s chilling stuff.