If you’re not listening to The Bugle, a podcast brought to us by the Times of London with hosts The Daily Show’s John Oliver and comedian Andy Zaltzman, you should be. Once a week, John catches up Andy on the current news in America while Andy reports what’s happening back home.

This week’s show featured a discussion of peak oil, and as usual, Oliver got to the heart of the problem up until now.

A new report has revealed that there is a significant risk that global production of conventional oil could peak and decline by 2020. Now this has caused some panic because it turns out that 2020 is in most people’s lifetimes, and is therefore a very serious issue. If it wasn’t until a year like 2120, then that falls very much on the “not my problem” file, and becomes a surprise gift to be unwrapped by future generations, along with the issue of nuclear waste storage.

Zaltzman describes the method the world has used to solve its dependency on fossil fuels and the resulting global warming.

And you’d have thought by now that we’d of done something about it but the problem is, John, we need to all collectively get off our asses, and until now, we won’t get off our own ass until someone else is getting off their ass as well. And basically, the way the international community has dealt with the environment has been, “You first.” “No you first.” “O.K., let’s do this together. Are you off your ass? O.K., well let’s negotiate. Let’s do one buttock at a time. One, two, three – hey! You didn’t lift your buttock.” “Well I’m not doing it until you do.” “Let’s hold each other’s butts and push upwards at the same time. One, two, three…”

Painfully true, so we might as well laugh about it. Check out The Bugle.