Despite major oil finds off Brazil's coast, new fields in North Dakota and ongoing increases in the conversion of tar sands to oil in Canada , fresh supplies of petroleum are only just enough to offset the production decline from older fields. At best, the world is now living off an oil plateau--roughly 75 million barrels of oil produced each and every day--since at least 2005, according to a new comment published in Nature on January 26. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) That is a year earlier than estimated by the International Energy Agency--an energy cartel for oil consuming nations.