Interesting perspective on peak oil

[CarZin]

AySz88: I think if you went back into the peak oil archives, you'd find an entirely different subset of users. For fun, go back in 2007-=2008. I think they are trying to rewrite their own position, to look less foolish.

Twilight in The Desert was their bible. I absolutely despise Matt Simmons.

From oildrum:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2743

1. What is peak oil?

"Peak oil" is the term used to describe the situation when the amount of oil that can be extracted from the earth in a given year begins to decline because geological limitations are reached. Extracting oil becomes more and more difficult, so that costs escalate and the amount of oil produced begins to decline. The term peak oil is generally used to describe a decline in worldwide production, but a similar phenomenon exists for individual countries and other smaller areas.

Notice any problems with this statement? Read that thread. It will be eye opening on just how wrong this person was.

[Skotty]

I've read a fair amount about the concept of peak oil, and the theory seems quite plausible to me, given the data I have seen. How quickly will it occur? I don't know, but it seems pretty certain that we are using oil faster than it is being replenished.

We could just let market forces drive things, but that seems rather dangerous to me. Shouldn't we try to plan ahead, rather than just acting by reaction? There are other reasons to get off of oil, so why not get going? Remember Y2K? People said that computer systems everywhere might fail causing all kinds of chaos. It didn't happen. It didn't happen, because we saw it coming, and programmers everywhere spent time fixing all the broken code. So when the year 2000 arrived, most everything was already fixed. Now that was a known deadline. Something like peak oil is much harder to predict. Maybe the peak will come at such a lethargic pace that market forces will result in an orderly move to other energy sources. But it seems to me it's not the best course of action, especially considering there are other reasons to get away from oil.

I also think there is some value in the idea of saving easy to get oil for industries that may never have a good alternative (or at least, not for a very long time). Air travel may be one of those industries. Air travel is still around, but there are more fees, airline companies are going out of business right and left, and flights between less significant terminals are being eliminated. Is it air travel armageddon? No, but it's not good times either. So I think there is some cause for concern, even if it's not the dire situation some may have predicted.

[gieso]

Peak Oil, not peak, when will it run out, etc... The topic has been pondered for decades, it is just not really being tackled. For example:

In 1931, the same year he died, Thomas Edison told his friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

[AySz88]

AySz88: I think if you went back into the peak oil archives, you'd find an entirely different subset of users. For fun, go back in 2007-=2008. I think they are trying to rewrite their own position, to look less foolish.

I don't doubt that they're a different circle of folks - from just the tone of that recent comment thread, I can tell that having price as a feedback in their mental models of peak oil is rather novel to them. But even in '07-08, there were more sophisticated models, even among amateurs - that's why I bring up WWO (which was May '07).