European Commision director says remaining oil dependent would be "fatal mistake"

The European Commission's (EC) directorate general for energy and transport, Marjeta Jager, warns that it would be a "fatal mistake" for the European Union (EU) to postpone measures that reduce oil dependency. At a recent Green Party conference in the European Parliament, Jager stated:

If action is delayed, in the not-too-distant future we may be forced to drastically reduce all our mobility and import technological solutions from other parts of the world.

Jager pointed to the EC's Transport 2050 white paper, which reads, in part:

The widely held belief that you need to cut mobility to fight climate change is simply not true... Curbing mobility is not an option; neither is business as usual. We can break the transport system's dependence on oil without sacrificing its efficiency and compromising mobility. It can be win–win.

Last week, International Energy Agency chief economist, Fatih Birol, claimed that the world's crude oil production peaked back in 2006:

The existing [oil] fields are declining so sharply that in order to stay where we are in terms of production levels in the next 25 years, we have to find and develop four new Saudi Arabias.

We just looked at a map, and couldn't find any more Saudi Arabias.

[Source: EurActiv | Image: benklocek – C.C. License 2.0]